By Teng Biao, published: August 27, 2013 (The article first appeared in Life and Death in China (a multi-volume anthology of 50+ witness accounts of Chinese government persecution and 30+ essays by experts in human rights in China). When I wrote it, Xu Zhiyong was under house arrest; when it was published, he had already moved to the Beijing Third [...] Keep reading »

By Hu Ping Published: August 16, 2013   In China, we live in a time of absurdity unparalleled in history. It is particularly so because everyone knows its absurdity and ridiculousness, but still carries on nonetheless. This is because China is still a one party dictatorship under the Communist Party. The CCP has committed many atrocities that [...] Keep reading »

Guo Yushan, August 10, 2013 That government, powerful as it was, didn’t scare me into doing anything unjust.                                                                — Ascribed to Socrates by Plato in The Apology Zhiyong, Congratulations for having been put in jail. I have been worrying that, i [...] Keep reading »

By Wu Qiang, published: August 12, 2014 A model for a contemporary police state. Urban grid system is nothing new. In ancient Rome, the grid was the standard layout of military camps. Urban grid planning, from the very beginning, bore the marks of militarized management. In Beijing, the grid-like streets and alleys (hutongs) have a lot of to do wit [...] Keep reading »

By Xiaokai Xiang Published: July 8, 2013   The fundamental irreconcilability between constitutionalism and a Leninist political party.    Recently, China’s state-owned media has issued a number of articles bombarding constitutionalism, starting a war of words. Among these, one that is rather weighty is an editorial in the Global Times [...] Keep reading »

By Zhang Dajun   The appeal of a revolution is gaining momentum.   Many in China are fighting for freedom. People with different worldviews have their own perspectives on how best to achieve this goal. These people fall into two groups. The first favors a gradual and linear transition from tyranny to freedom. The other sees no way other t [...] Keep reading »

By Xu Zhiyong China’s rights movement through the work of Gong Meng.    1 April 25, 2003, as SARS emptied out the streets in Beijing, I sat in front of my computer reading about the Sun Zhigang (孙志刚) coverage, tears quietly welling up in my eyes. Over the second half of 2002, I had started to investigate the laws concerning custody a [...] Keep reading »

By Mo Zhixu, published: June 4, 2013 By all means, the student movement in the spring of 1989, from its emergence to its development, was a surprise. It started with the sudden death of Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦), the reform-minded CCP General Secretary who had recently been taken down by Deng Xiaoping, China’s real ruler at the time. It escalated wh [...] Keep reading »

By Chang Tieh Chi A rebuttal to some Mainlanders’ tendency to romanticize Chiang Ching-kuo in the discussion of Taiwan’s transition to a democracy in late 1980s. Chang Tieh Chi (張鐵志) is a Taiwanese commentator on politics and music and authors of multiple books. He’s currently the editor-in-chief of City Magazine in Hong Kong.   P [...] Keep reading »