Teng Biao is an academic lawyer, currently the Hauser Human Rights Scholar at Hunter College and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Previously, he was a lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law in Beijing and a visiting scholar at Yale, Harvard, New York University, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Teng’s research focuses on criminal justice, human rights, social movements, and political transition in China. He defended cases involving freedom of expression, religious freedom, the death penalty, Tibetans, and Uyghurs. He co-founded two human rights NGOs in Beijing, the Open Constitution Initiative and China Against the Death Penalty, in 2003 and 2010, respectively. He is one of the earliest promoters of the Rights Defense Movement in China and the manifesto Charter 08, for which Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Teng has received various international human rights awards including the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic (2007) and the National Endowment for Democracy’s Democracy Award (2008). He is completing two books on the human rights movement in China and on transnational repression.

Last Updated: November 12, 2024

Viewpoint

11.13.24

Xi vs. Xu: Two Visions for China’s Future

Teng Biao & Jerome A. Cohen
In late October, Radio Free Asia reported that Chinese civil rights advocate and lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who is serving a 14-year sentence for state subversion, has been hunger striking to protest the conditions of his incarceration. Xu’s imprisonment...

Conversation

11.29.22

China in Protest

Guobin Yang, Taisu Zhang & more
Over the weekend, large demonstrations broke out in cities across China. The protests followed news, spread rapidly across Chinese and international social media, that a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumchi on Friday had...

Conversation

10.16.20

A New Normal for U.S. China Policy?

Teng Biao, Isabel Hilton & more
After four years of Trump’s trade wars, withdrawal from international bodies, and xenophobic immigration policies, the United States has hit an apex of isolationism. Even if a new government steps in, however, it’s not altogether clear the U.S...

Conversation

03.28.19

What Does the Punishment of a Prominent Scholar Mean for Intellectual Freedom in China?

Donald Clarke, David Yeliang Xia & more
This week, Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University who in recent months has penned a series of essays critical of policies of the Chinese Communist Party and of its leader, Xi Jinping, was banned from teaching, relieved of his...

Viewpoint

04.16.18

Has Xi Jinping Changed China? Not Really

Teng Biao
Xi Jinping has had an eventful early spring. After he abolished presidential term limits and was unanimously elected—if it can be called an election—to serve another term in that post, Xi got the world’s attention again by holding a meeting with Kim...

Conversation

05.14.15

The Future of NGOs in China

Isabel Hilton, Carl Minzner & more
Last week, China’s National People’s Congress released the second draft of a new law on “Managing Foreign NGOs.” Many foreign non-profits in China have operated in a legal gray area over the years. The law [full English translation here] establishes...

Conversation

10.01.14

Is This the End of Hong Kong As We Know It?

Nicholas Bequelin, Sebastian Veg & more
Over the past week, tens of thousands of Hong Kong people have occupied the streets of their semi-autonomous city to advocate for the democratic elections slated to launch in 2017. The pro-democracy protestors have blocked major roads in the...

Viewpoint

09.04.13

The Confessions of a Reactionary

Teng Biao
This article first appeared in Life and Death in China (a multi-volume anthology of fifty-plus witness accounts of Chinese government persecution and thirty-plus essays by experts in human rights in China). When I wrote it [on the evening of June 3...

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China Change
01.07.15

I’m afraid that those of you who excitedly applauded the Communist Party’s rehashing of the term “governing the country according to the law” have forgotten the famous words of Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Jiang Yu, who once warned sternly, “Don’t use the law as a shield.”

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