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One night in July, Wang Yu, a lawyer in her mid-40s, returned to her home in Beijing

after seeing her husband and teenage son off at the airport,

unaware that they had been both detained by police before boarding their flight to Australia.

Around 3 a.m., she sent her text message to France.

Electricity and Wi-Fi were cut off suddenly. Someone is working on my

door lock. I can hear murmured whispers outside, though it's so dark, I can't see anything

through the people. Neighbors later reported, seeing thousands of police, who told them they were

arresting a drug addict. Nothing has been heard of one since the text message. Her whereabouts

are not known. More than 100 lawyers across the country sent an open letter demanding an official explanation.

In response, police read the offices of Fung Rui, the law firm where Wang worked.

Arrested its founder and director, Zhou Shish Fung, and rounded up with its associates across the country.

The official media held it as a successful crackdown by the public security ministry on a major criminal gun

that had been undermining the social order since 2012. By 22nd July,

more than 300 lawyers and civil rights activists had been detained or were being questioned.

Those who signed the letter defending Zhou were barred from Beijing.

Nothing quite like this has happened in China before.

It's true that there hasn't been a single instance since the beginning of the reform era in the early 1980s,

of the country's rulers hesitating to silence or

jail anyone regarded as a threat to the political system. And the least of those who have

been persecuted is long and steadily getting longer. Classic targets have been dissident intellectuals, rebellious workers or peasants, unruly students.

A number of recent cases have included individual lawyers, but a nationwide attack on a group within the legal profession is something new.

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