In the early morning hours of February 4, 2009, some 10 police officers dragged Gao Zhisheng from his family home in Shaanxi province and quickly disappeared into the darkness. The police gave no reason for the abduction of the prominent human rights activist, and Gao has not been seen or heard from since that day.
In September the police told his brother that Gao had gone missing while on a walk. On January 20 this year, a Western journalist quoted an unidentified security officer as saying Gao was alive and in custody. The following day, Ma Zhaoxu , a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, smugly said that judicial authorities had decided Gao's case and that he was 'where he should be'. On February 2, Ma changed his story. 'Honestly speaking, I don't know where he is. China has 1.3 billion people and I can't know all of their whereabouts.'
Then, on February 14, the Chinese embassy in Washington told a human rights group that Gao was 'working' in Urumqi , and had been in touch with his wife, Geng He - a claim she has denied. 'For a very long time I have not heard from him, and I do not know where he is now,' she said in a statement released by the New York-based group Human Rights in China.
A blogger even posted photos of someone alleged to be Gao, which some believed might have been altered, and wrote that he was working in a company in Urumqi. The report contained many factual errors.
This flurry of vague statements would be amusing were it not for the fact that the government's unwillingness to give a concrete answer may well mean that Gao, who was brutally tortured in 2007, may have been subjected to such severe psychological or physical abuse that he can't be shown in public. Some fear even worse.
A Western human rights scholar, who has been following the case closely, says that while there's no evidence, it's possible that Gao has been hurt so badly that they 'can't display him because it's too visible what they did to him'.
Jerome Cohen, co-director of New York University's US-Asia Law Institute, and a leading expert on the Chinese legal system, speculates that if this is the case, that the government may be 'playing for recovery time'.