In late October, Radio Free Asia reported that Chinese civil rights advocate and lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who is serving a fourteen-year sentence for state subversion, has been hunger striking to protest the conditions of his incarceration. In July, we received a message from Xu’s lawyer informing us that his basic human rights were being seriously violated. Prison authorities were denying him the right to read books, had placed three other inmates in his cell to monitor him, and banned him from talking to anyone while performing forced labor on an assembly line folding plastic gloves and trash bags.
Xu’s imprisonment stems from his vision for China’s future.
At a moment when his situation seems particularly dire, it’s worth tracing how his story intersects with and diverges from that of Xi Jinping, the man whose vision for China is responsible for Xu’s captivity. Xu is seen by many as China’s Nelson Mandela, a symbol of the unstoppable and arduous fight for freedom and dignity.
Xi Jinping is 20 years older than Xu. In his youth, Xi witnessed and suffered from lawlessness under Mao’s brutal rule. In 1962, Xi’s father, a high-ranking leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was persecuted as a counter-revolutionary and suffered greatly. Xi seems not to have learned from his father’s hardship. Before he became General Secretary in 2012, he worked to maintain the functioning of the one-party system and in the process his family benefited handsomely from his rise. After he became General Secretary and President, he turned the clock back, sabotaged the rule of law, dramatically worsened the human rights situation in China, and halted the progress of civil society.
Xu Zhiyong was born in 1973 in Minquan county, Henan Province. “Minquan” means “civil rights,” and Xu has long said that his birthplace foreshadowed his destiny. He spent his childhood in a poor village. “The political campaigns, the hardships of survival, the collective economy, and overbearing privilege . . . ruthlessly eliminated the traditional morality of the village and its good and upright people,” Xu would later write. When he was just 14, he realized his dream was to “build a free and just society.” During his time at law school in the 1990s, the idea of human rights and democracy was gaining traction in Chinese universities. In 2000, he and Teng Biao, an author of this article, gave a speech at a rally at Peking University to protest against the university’s obstruction of the commemoration of a murdered freshman. That was the first protest we participated in together. (Teng, Xu, and the legal scholar Yu Jiang became best friends after the demonstrations, and would have long “dinner conversations,” mostly about China’s political future, at least once a week until they graduated.) By the time Xu received his Ph.D. and started teaching at a university in 2002, he was fully engaged in the cause of promoting rule of law and freedom in China.
Around the same time, Xi’s career was taking off. He rose to lead the Party in the prosperous province of Zhejiang and became a member of the CCP’s Central Committee in 2002. China’s economy grew rapidly after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
In 2003, the death of Sun Zhigang, a young graphic designer in the southern city of Shenzhen, after police detained him for not carrying his ID card, sparked national outrage, and Yu Jiang, Xu, and Teng wrote to the National People’s Congress (NPC) calling for a constitutional review of the “custody and repatriation” system, the form of extrajudicial detention under which Sun was being held when he was beaten to death. This led to the abolition of the unconstitutional regulation and ushered in what would come to be known as China’s “Rights Defense Movement.” Human rights NGOs were founded; lawyers defended human rights cases; activists, journalists, and bloggers challenged the abuse of power; and the newly-emerged Internet and social media provided a powerful platform for the movement. In 2004, “human rights,” which had been a taboo term for decades, was enshrined in the constitution. In the first few years of Hu Jintao’s reign, people were hopeful that the country was moving toward the rule of law.
From the start, Xu was one of the movement’s most active lawyers and civil society leaders. He founded the Open Constitution Initiative (OCI) with Teng in 2003 to provide legal aid to victims of miscarriages of justice. The organization challenged the apartheid-like household registration system, pushed for the abolition of extra-judicial detentions such as Re-education Through Labor, protested the one-child policy, opposed media censorship and religious persecution, and sought justice for the victims of tainted milk powder. Teng traveled with Xu to black brick kilns to help defend the rights of modern slave laborers, organized lawyers and citizens to resist the atrocities of forced abortions by local officials, and visited extralegal detention centers (“black jails”) to free petitioners who were arbitrarily detained.
Chinese law allows citizens to run as independent candidates for congress in and below the county level, and while these elections are nearly always controlled by the Party, Xu believed it was important to take citizens’ rights seriously. He ran as a rare independent candidate in the election for the People’s Congress of Haidian district in Beijing and was elected twice. He also enthusiastically encouraged other citizens to participate in the election as independent candidates. Once the authorities sensed the threat of the movement, however, they prevented him from giving campaign speeches, barred his name from appearing on the ballot, and intimidated students who supported him. He was also suspended from his position at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, where he taught law, banned from leaving the country because of his activism, and jailed for nearly a month when the OCI was shut down in 2009.
All of this happened before Xi assumed leadership.
In 2007, at the age of 54, Xi Jinping became a member of the Politburo Standing Committee and in 2008 was elected Vice President, becoming the designated successor. The 2008 Olympics were a peak moment for the CCP. 105 state leaders attended the opening ceremony. China’s global political and economic status rose rapidly, even as its political controls grew. After the Olympics, dissident Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned and sentenced to 11 years for initiating the public call for political liberalization known as Charter 08, but Xu and rights activists did not back down. In early 2012, Xu launched what he called the “New Citizens’ Movement” to rally the country to support civil rights. In March 2013, activists gave speeches in Beijing’s Central Business District and demanded disclosure of officials’ assets. They were immediately arrested at the scene, and Xu and many other activists were rounded up later that year. A year after these anti-corruption activists were arrested, Xi Jinping launched an anti-corruption campaign, aimed not at removing the system that institutionalizes corruption but at toppling political opponents and establishing a cult of personality.
The New Citizens Movement drew enthusiastic support from all over the country, and civil society became increasingly active. Movement members called for equal access to education for millions of migrants without urban household registration. Organizing what he called “Joint Citizens Meals,” Xu Zhiyong united like-minded people to discuss public affairs in colloquia, employing Robert’s Rules of Order. On November 15, 2012, the day Xi Jinping became General Secretary, Xu published an open letter: “This system no longer has any future. It has left too many memories of horror, absurdity, and shame in our national history.” He urged Xi to reform along the lines of multi-party competition, judicial independence, freedom of the press, and local autonomy.
In complete contrast to what many people had expected, Xi did not push for reforms. Rather, as soon as he assumed power he began a brutal crackdown on the rights movement. Authorities tore crosses from the doors of “house churches” or demolished them entirely; a large number of NGOs were forced to shut down; more than 300 human rights lawyers were arrested or disappeared; and Xu was imprisoned for four years. Censorship of the Internet and media intensified. “Document 9,” a secret directive of the Party, internally circulated in 2013, warning against the dangers of civil society, judicial independence, and a free press.
In the years that followed, Xi waged a war on law. China enacted legislation that violates rights and freedoms protected by China’s own constitution. These laws included the Foreign NGO Law, the National Security Law, and the Counter-Espionage Law. The presidential term limit was removed from the constitution, and Xi turned the one-party dictatorship into his own personal dictatorship. In 2020, a new National Security Law for Hong Kong effectively ended “one country, two systems.” The freedom index for Tibet is even lower than that of North Korea. The Uyghur genocide is one of the most horrific human rights catastrophes still going on in the world today. Xi’s repression knows no national boundaries; Chinese secret police even kidnapped Swedish publisher Gui Minhai from Thailand and forced him to renounce his Swedish citizenship. Chinese authorities have also opened 102 police stations in at least 53 countries around the world, including one in Manhattan.
Xi Jinping did not let detained 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo see personal freedom. Two days after Liu’s death in custody in 2017, Xu completed his four-year sentence. Xu and Ding Jiaxi, another prominent lawyer who was imprisoned for three and a half years, continued to promote the New Citizens’ Movement. They organized meetings and explored China’s future with courageous colleagues, which the authorities accused of “subverting state power” and led to the arrests of both and many other activists. In the early days of the COVID outbreak, Xu issued an open letter urging Xi to step down, a call echoed in the Beijing Sitong Bridge protest of 2022 and the subsequent White Paper movement. “If you are determined to set yourself against history, you will surely visit disaster upon this country. What China needs above all other things is Freedom!” Xu wrote to Xi.
It was once taken for granted that China’s rapid economic growth and engagement with the international community would give rise to an increasingly influential and open-minded middle class that would drive the country toward democratization. But this proved to be wishful thinking. China moved towards a new totalitarianism that exceeded Orwell’s 1984.
Internet-based technologies do benefit civil society, and Xu and his colleagues used them to expand the space for activism. But it is clear that the Communist Party and Xi Jinping would rather use them to suppress freedom and strengthen their control.
Xu is a prisoner of Xi. Xu seeks a free and democratic China, while Xi prioritizes the perpetuation of dictatorship and seeks to reshape the international order to ensure that autocratic regimes are not threatened. It is self-evident what kind of China is better for the Chinese people, better for the world order, and whom the international community should support.