The ‘709’ children

Two children below the age of six are denied the right to travel on grounds of “endangering national security.” Beginning at kindergarten, a boy keeps getting denied admission to schools that have been told to turn him away. A teenager is forcibly disappeared while overseas.

All these are the doing of Chinese authorities. But while such cases have become quite common in places like Xinjiang and Tibet, where China has long suppressed the local people, including minors, these children were far from being part of an ethnic or religious minority group. All of them just happened to have human rights lawyers for parents. 

For years, the plight of such children escaped public scrutiny even as their parents were subjected to continuous harassment or put behind bars. Supposed to be part-additional punishment, part-coercion tactics aimed at their parents, the range of official restrictions and abuses meted on the children of rights lawyers in China are clear violations of their rights that are guaranteed by an international convention Beijing signed decades ago.

In 1990, China became a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, but began enforcing it only after two years.  It has since undergone at least three full Universal Periodic Reviews (UPR) for the Convention, and should be up for another one soon. The issue regarding what some have called “punishment by proxy” of the children of rights lawyers has yet to be taken up in its UPRs, but at least two U.N. special rapporteurs have already noted it in the last few years.

As a state party to the Convention, China is supposed to adhere to its articles and respect the basic rights of children, including their right to education, freedom of movement, an adequate standard of living, and freedom from discrimination. 

The Chinese government itself has proudly stated that it has “long been committed to the promotion and protection of children’s rights.” Yet this commitment has been revealed to be selective, if not patently untrue for the children of certain families and minorities.

China has practiced collective punishment for centuries – some say even for thousands of years. In today’s China, the children of rights lawyers became the target of harassment and restrictions particularly after what is now known as the “709 crackdown” (because it began on July 9) in 2015. 

Human rights lawyers like Wang Quanzhang (seen with his family) and Chen Jiangang (with his two children) experience a form of collective punishment by authorities in China, where systematic repression extends to their children. (Photo: Sentinel Defenders Network)

Many of the 300 lawyers who were rounded up and then beaten and interrogated while in detention eventually lost their license to practice. Some received years-long jail terms as well. Those who were let go continued to be surveilled, harassed, and subjected to all kinds of restrictions – as were their family members, including young children. 

The main objective apparently has been to bring the lawyers to heel and force them to give up on handling rights cases or speaking publicly about these. Many of these actions affect the children as well and violate several articles in the U.N. Convention.

Weak enforcement

The Convention was not among those included in a 2023 study that reviewed China’s adherence to international human rights treaties. Nonetheless, the researchers’ observations are helpful in understanding why Beijing seems to have no qualms running roughshod over a convention to which it is a signatory.  

According to the researchers, “the general lack of positive influence wielded by international human rights treaties may be attributed to their relatively weak enforcement mechanisms.” They added that any “positive effect of international human rights treaties is contingent on the extent of democracy and strength of civil society groups (participation of nongovernmental organizations).

“When these two variables are absent,” they wrote, “ratification of treaties has virtually no effect and is associated with even more violations. These violations are common, as many countries that ratify these treaties regularly violate their obligations.”

“China prioritizes economic development, national sovereignty, and culture particularism over indivisibility of human rights,” the researchers said. “Whether or not China is proactive in promoting its distinct human rights norms remains to be seen. Recent attempts show that China has been focused on drafting and amending resolutions so that the international treaties align with its domestic law.

Sources: Radio Free Asia (2018 and 2023), China Aid (2018 and 2024), Human Rights Watch, HRI China

“By aligning international human rights treaties with domestic law,” said the researchers, “the party-state can legitimize its repressive practices while bypassing international criticisms of non-compliance.”

In the case of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Chinese laws actually make it legal for authorities to carry out actions that violate one of the provisions of this international agreement.  

For instance, several 709 lawyers have been unable to find a school that would accept their children. Chen Jiangang’s son, for example, was refused admission to a primary school even after it accepted his tuition payment, apparently because the Tongzhou District Education Committee had exerted pressure on the institution. 

Meanwhile, Wang Quangzhang’s 12-year-old son Quanquan has spent barely a month in total in formal schools. When Wang was arrested during the 709 crackdown, Quanquan was just two. Wang’s wife tried to find a kindergarten for the boy the next year, but to no avail. 

Three years later, a school finally accepted Quanquan. Yet after only a short while, police pressure on the school forced the boy out. 

Beijing schools continued to turn down Quanquan even after his father’s prison release in 2020. One finally accepted him in 2023, but constant surveillance by the school itself forced him to  leave it. Quanquan later passed a private international school’s entrance interview. Just when his parents had paid the tuition, the school suddenly said that Quanquan would have to withdraw his enrollment. Wang Quangzhang filed formal complaints that went nowhere. 

Yet another school – this time in Guangdong province – said it would accept Quanquan. But the boy lasted less than two weeks there. Dozens of unidentified individuals stormed the school, accusing it of “illegal operation.” The harassment stopped only after Quanquan left school.  

A strict local law

All these go against Article 28 of the Convention, which says that each child has a right to education and, as the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) put it, should be “encouraged to go to school and reach the highest level possible.” 

Yet when the Ministry of Public Security intervened in the schooling of the children of several 709 lawyers, no department at the regional level was able to counteract it. This is because denying schooling to school-age children without local household registration does not violate China’s Compulsory Education Law.  

That law’s Article 12 says that the local governments “at all levels shall ensure that the school-age children and adolescents are enrolled in the schools near (their) permanent residences.” This means local governments are bound by this provision only with children who belong to households within their jurisdiction. 

It is highly likely that the lawyers whose children were denied school admission had their household registration elsewhere. Wang Quangzhang, for example, is originally from Shandong province.

China’s household registration system (hukuo) virtually restricts people’s right to move freely within the country. Although the Compulsory Education Law also contains provisions on school-age children receiving education outside their household registration, it leaves the formulation of “concrete measures” to “the provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities under the Central Government.”

Chinese authorities may also argue that disbarring 709 lawyers and harassing their landlords so that they are constantly looking for shelter has nothing to do with the children; therefore, these acts do not violate the Convention’s Article 27 on the right of every child “to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.” 

To the human rights lawyers, however, these actions are meant to affect not only them. As Chen Jiangang pointed out in a 2020 essay for Human Rights in China (HRIC): “Once the (Chinese Communist Party) threatens their income, the majority of lawyers are immediately trapped, because behind each person is a family.”

Chen and his family managed to flee to the United States, where they now live. In his essay, he indicated that aside from schools turning away his children, what he called “great interference” in their home also contributed to his children’s inability to “attend school in a normal way.”

He described as well how he and other lawyers were exhausted and miserable after being constantly forced to find homes, “dragging along our wives and children and all our worldly possessions, all of us anxious and displaced like stray dogs.”

“In such a situation,” said Chen, “even men would cry.”

Beaten and traumatized

Li Peng and his wife attribute their young daughter’s dropping out of school in 2023 to her being traumatized by the family’s constant evictions. At one point, the water and electricity were cut off in the house they were renting, and its windows smashed by the landlord himself. Li’s wife eventually took the girl to live in a remote southern Chinese town.

Students pose during a school field trip at the Beijing zoo on May 29, 2025. China is a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, but adherence is in question especially in the harassment of human rights lawyers and their families after the July 9, 2015 crackdown. (Photo: Shutterstock / Avillfoto)

Married lawyers Wang Yu and Bao Longjun were spared the experience of eviction only because they own their home. But they have had their utilities cut off and more done to them. Wang Yu was arrested at home in 2015, while her husband and their 16-year-old son, Bao Zhuoxuan, were at the airport. Zhuoxuan was headed for school in Australia; the plan was that his father would help him settle there before returning to China. 

Father and son never made the trip. Bao Longjun was arrested at the airport; Zhuoxuan was detained for a few days. Several accounts, including that of Chen Jiangang and Wang Yu, say that the boy was beaten up and threatened before being released to his maternal aunt and grandparents.

When security officers later paid Zhuoxuan a visit in Tianjin, the teenager told them he still wanted to go abroad. Their reply was that he should forget that, and sent him to another set of grandparents in Inner Mongolia. 

Two activist friends of Zhuoxuan’s father decided to help him get out of China. But they got only as far as Myanmar where all three were forcibly disappeared. Several days passed before Zhuoxuan resurfaced in Inner Mongolia, where he was placed under round-the-clock surveillance. 

According to Wang Yu, Chinese authorities beat her son with a long stick while in their custody. Zhuoxuan was also kept handcuffed and shackled before he was returned to his grandparents. 

Zhuoxuan was eventually permitted to leave for Australia – but not before he was stopped one more time because he was supposedly a “national security threat.” Chen Jiangang’s sons were just five and one in 2015 when they, too, were considered as “endangering national security” if they were allowed to leave the country.  

In an interview published last year by HRIC, Bao Zhuoxuan said that he was diagnosed with “moderate depression.” During the year he spent in Australia, he was “often paranoid, believing someone was following me when I went to school.”  

Now 26 and living in the United States, Zhuoxuan told his HRIC interviewer that he had started to “feel happier” in California, which had “healed” him. 

His interviewer observed, however, that Zhuoxuan was reduced to tears while recounting certain experiences; he also said that there were details that he would rather not recall. ◉

Sam Wong is the in-house lawyer at the Sentinel Defenders Network (China) and Yanxi Mou is a human rights researcher at Sentinel Defenders Network. The original drafts of this report were translated by Sentinel Defenders Network Executive Director Chakra Ip.