Gao Zhisheng, a Beijing lawyer, has recently been sentenced guilty by a local court and driven out of Beijing secretly.

Gao is a hero today in the heart of many ordinary Chinese. He has washed off the shame on many lawyers. The shame, as professor Dworkin understood, is that Chinese lawyers “pretended that they have not seen the real situation of human rights in China; they carefully avoid sensitive issues and only talked about irrelevant big topics; they tried not to annoy the government by cautiously sensor their own speeches; they unanimously sang an optimistic prayer for China’s future; they even happily enjoy the illusion that, as long as they behave within the borders implicitly drawn by the government, they could have more freedom of speech than ordinary Chinese people. ”

When the government was persecuting a group of Chinese against religious reasons, he stood up and fought back courageously, although he was hopelessly defeated in all the cases he took. Facing a shameless government which was willing to take every illegal means for self-justification, no lawyer could possibly win.

It has been hard, therefore, for Gao or any other lawyer involved. What sustains Gao may be his faith. Gao became a Christian several months ago, when he was facing a challenging situation.