Gao Zhisheng, Detained Chinese Lawyer, Visited by Family

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On Wednesday, Mr. Gao’s wife, Geng He, said her father and Mr. Gao’s brother had been allowed a half-hour visit with him at a prison in the far western region of Xinjiang.

“He was very pale, like someone who hasn’t been in the sunlight for years, but otherwise he seemed healthy,” Ms. Geng said, speaking from California, where she lives in exile with the couple’s two children. “After hearing the news from my family, I slept well for the first time in a long while.”

A widely known dissident here, Mr. Gao, 47, was a celebrated lawyer until he ran afoul of the government by taking on politically delicate cases and exposing shortcomings in the legal system. His clients included victims of medical malpractice and farmers who had lost their land to development, but also persecuted Christians and adherents of Falun Gong, the outlawed spiritual movement. In 2005, he renounced his Communist Party membership and scathingly criticized the government in letters he sent to Chinese leaders.

He was stripped of his law license and taken into custody a year later, in the first of several detentions. He was convicted of inciting subversion of state power. Released on probation, he was largely kept under house arrest, and his family was subjected to constant surveillance. During interrogations, he said, he had been pistol-whipped, prodded with electric batons and lanced with bamboo sticks.

In 2009, his wife and children made a dramatic overland escape from Beijing to Thailand with the help of a Christian organization. They were later granted asylum in the United States.

Mr. Gao’s case has drawn scrutiny from the White House, the United Nations and the European Union, which have urged the Chinese government to explain his whereabouts and release him from custody. During the past two years, Ms. Geng said she wondered whether he was alive.

Last December, the state news media issued a terse statement saying Mr. Gao had been returned to jail for three years because he had violated the terms of his probation. Human rights advocates questioned the ruling, given that Mr. Gao had been continuously in police custody. In January, his brother, Gao Zhiyi, said he had been informed that Mr. Gao was in a prison in Shaya County, in Xinjiang. But until this week, the authorities had not allowed relatives to visit him.

Ms. Geng said that the brief visit on Saturday was closely supervised by the police and that the conversation, via telephone through thick glass, was highly circumscribed. “He couldn’t speak about what had happened to him, but my father didn’t really care,” she said. “He was just thrilled to find him alive.”

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