THE AIM OF US POLICY SHOULD BE REGIME CHANGE ASAP:

Do we have to wait 30 years for human rights in China? (Fred Hiatt, January 21, 2011, Washington Post)

When President Obama on Wednesday expressed the hope that "30 years from now, we will have seen further evolution" in China's respect for human rights, I thought about Geng He, who had come to visit me the day before.

Geng He, 43, is a soft-spoken woman who doesn't know whether her husband, Gao Zhisheng, is dead or alive. She knows that over the past five years, he has been repeatedly tortured by Chinese security agents. She knows that he was last seen nine months ago, when some of those agents spirited him away. She's pretty sure that he has not been charged with a crime, but the government will not say where he is.

Gao is not a dissident. He is something China's government apparently finds even more threatening: a lawyer who has sought, while adhering scrupulously to Chinese law, to represent dissidents, members of religious minorities and other victims of Communist Party repression.

"For him, being a lawyer is more than just a profession," Geng told me. "He's tried to educate the public about justice, about the law, and about what's right or wrong. Now, there seems to be no room for someone like that to survive in China."

Geng had hoped that Obama would speak out about her husband's case, both because such attention might help him and because Obama's words could have a big impact more broadly in China. As she wrote in a Post op-ed last year:

"I worry about the next generation of Chinese lawyers. Will disappearances like my husband's deter them from becoming rights defenders? I imagine so. But if the United States were to speak out on my husband's behalf, perhaps this would change."