Career
She was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2015 when China initiated a crackdown against human rights attorneys. She is charged with subversion of state power which is a serious offense in China carrying a life sentence. Wang is a lawyer with the Fengrui law firm in Beijing.
Before her conversion to a human rights lawyer, Wang Yu was a commercial lawyer until an incident at a train station in 2008.
At that time she got into an argument with rail employees because she was denied entry onto a train even though she had a ticket. In a Kafkaesque turn of events, she was charged with “intentional assault” and was imprisoned for more than 2 years.
While in prison, she learned how prisoners were mistreated and tortured. When she was released in 2011, her conversion to a human rights lawyer was complete.
Since then, she became part of China’s human rights movement.
In 2015, the government’s Xinhua News Agency published a piece designed to tarnish her reputation, saying, “This arrogant woman with a criminal record turned overnight to a lawyer, blabbering about the rule of law, human rights, and justice, and roaming around under the flag of ‘rights defense.’”.
