The ordeal of the outstanding Chinese female lawyer Zhou Junhong, who was forced to stay in the United States, confirms people’s generalization about the CCP: it is constantly creating enemies.
Zhou Junhong attended the lawyer exam in the U.S. last March, during which a post criticizing her father’s blind trust in the CCP on WeChat went viral unexpectedly. This led to online attacks, warnings from CCP authorities, her WeChat account being blocked, and ultimately being fired by the law firm she was about to work for. She had already purchased a flight ticket to return to China, but before leaving, she hesitated: was she facing imprisonment upon her return?
Last weekend, Zhou Junhong, whose lawyer’s license had been revoked by the authorities, recounted her experiences in mainland China to a reporter from The Epoch Times.
Zhou Junhong was born in 1987 in a remote village in Hunan Province. The house where she grew up had its wall torn down by CCP officials, carrying her childhood anger, unease, and fear. Two shadows from her memories have been with her to this day.
“Every time I saw that corner of the wall being demolished in my childhood, I couldn’t help but cry in secret,” Zhou Junhong said. “I was afraid to live in that house, afraid that one day it would collapse.”
In the early 1990s, her parents had their third child—a younger brother. When family planning officials found out, a group of people rushed to their home to “pull down the wall and tie the ox,” not just as a threat, but they actually did it: bricks from the wall were torn down, the sewing machine was taken, and even the piglets in the pigsty were taken away. After her father gathered and paid thousands of yuan in fines, the house was saved. At that time, thousands of yuan were a huge sum of money for rural people.
Another shadow was the life of left-behind children. Her parents went to work in another province, leaving her and her siblings at home. The three children took turns living with relatives. She said, “I saw too many acts of bullying the weak by the strong when I was young, and I experienced the helplessness and humility in the hearts of the oppressed.”
Her childhood experiences made her determined to break free from the countryside. After graduating from high school in 2006, she passed the entrance exam to Peking University Law School, graduating and working in Shenzhen. She studied for the lawyer qualification exam while working, passing it in 2012. Shortly after, she joined a local law firm and practiced as a criminal defense lawyer, receiving recognition from the firm twice.
“Why did I want to study law? At that time, I thought I could protect myself with the law,” Zhou Junhong said. “But after becoming a lawyer, I realized that China’s so-called law is just a tool for the CCP to uphold its dictatorship.”
She mentioned a case where a private entrepreneur was owed 80,000 yuan by a business partner, and the partner provided a receipt. Eight years later, due to a dispute, the party owing the money falsely accused the entrepreneur of extortion and bribed the CCP police to arrest him. After involving lawyers and finding witnesses who clearly stated in court that there was no extortion, the judges and court clerks induced the lawyers to sign blank transcripts. Eventually, the entrepreneur was sentenced to four years in prison, and the initial 80,000 yuan repayment was also returned.
She quickly checked the case records and found that the witness’s testimony was not recorded. Even after the appeal, the second trial upheld the original sentence. The second trial judge admitted to the defendant’s family that he knew the defendant was innocent. Only later did the family realize the judge was pressured by superiors and dared not make a not-guilty verdict.
Zhou Junhong encountered many cases like this. She particularly felt sorry for a young man who was sentenced to life imprisonment and had all his property confiscated. The young man met someone online who invited him to play and then asked him to carry a package from one place to another, a distance of only about 200 meters. Before he could go far, the police rushed out.
“I felt it was a trap, a fishing law enforcement scheme. It’s hard to say if that package contained drugs,” Zhou Junhong said. There were no fingerprints found on the package, and the person carrying it also did not know if there were drugs inside. She argued for innocence, but the verdict showed a plea of guilt. “The lawyer’s defense was tampered with, which is very unbelievable.”
A colleague of Zhou Junhong once defended a case of “government suing people for extortion”: a relocated household felt that the compensation was too little and went to petition. After the government reached a settlement with him and gave him more money, as soon as the money was received, the relocated person was imprisoned—the government accused him of extortion and using the petition to pressure them; the compensation money was also taken back.
“The CCP’s law does not serve the interests of the people; it serves the Party,” Zhou Junhong summarized after seeing numerous cases of officials violating the law. “When there are economic problems, it (the CCP) first uses legal tools to frame, oppress, and plunder.”
She found that in criminal cases that reach the trial stage, especially the second trial, the lawyers’ defense has little effect. “Clearly innocent people, after layers of pressure, turn from innocent to guilty, and light crimes can turn into serious crimes; the so-called rule of law is essentially rule by man.”
After coming to the U.S., Zhou Junhong discussed different views on the CCP with her father on WeChat and posted her opinions in the “Friend Circle,” which unexpectedly went viral overnight and was widely shared in many groups. After being warned and having her WeChat account blocked, her employment contract with the law firm was terminated, forcing her to cancel her return trip to China. Her lawyer’s license was forcibly revoked by the Guangdong Provincial Judicial Department by the end of 2024.
“No one can be safe within this system,” she said. There is no judicial independence, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press in the country. Everyone is a victim. “This is not caused by individual leaders; it is the inevitable result of communist dictatorship. As long as the Communist Party exists, nothing will change.”
“My most urgent wish now is to rid myself of the CCP’s tyranny,” Zhou Junhong said. “As a law student, we must make good use of the law overseas to seek justice for those persecuted by the CCP.” ◇