Activists for a more democratic China yesterday protested the communist Chinese government’s crackdown on a prominent civil rights lawyer who represented practitioners of Falun Gong in Beijing. Judicial authorities in Beijing last Friday ordered a one-year suspension of the law firms of Gao Zhisheng after he refused to recant an open letter to the president of Red China, Hu Jintao, requesting his government cease its crackdown of the Falun Gong sect.

“We want and we need more daring people who can make a voice like attorney Gao,” the chairman of the activist group China Peace, Baiqiao Tang, said at the rally outside the Chinese consulate in Midtown. Mr. Tang spent several months in a communist jail after he participated in the protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. “Anyone wants to talk about Falun Gong in China, they will get arrested,” Mr.Tang said.

Yeong Ching, 32, told The New York Sun that her fiance, Charles Lee, an American citizen, was arrested at a Chinese airport in 2003 for practicing Falun Gong. Dr. Lee, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, was tortured nearly to death twice, she said, and is still being held. “You cannot find lawyer for this – they are all controlled by the communist government,” she said. “Now lawyer Gao is persecuted. He must be able to stand up against this. You can see how evil it is.” Mr. Gao is also defending an underground Christian pastor, Cai Zhuohua, whom the communist government jailed last year for printing and distributing hundreds of thousands of Bibles, and the dissident journalist Zheng Yichun, sentenced to seven years in prison last September for his writings on the Internet.

The communist government banned Falun Gong as an “evil cult” in July 1999. Since then, members of the sect have performed their spiritual exercises every day across the street from the Chinese consulate in New York. Spokesmen for the Chinese Embassy in Washington refused to comment and directed a reporter to a phone number for the New York consulate that was not working.