Yuan Fengchu, November 18, 2020 Yuan Fengchu (袁奉初) is a dissident and activist from Chibi, Hubei (湖北赤壁). Because of his activities mostly in Guangdong during 2010-2013 as part of the “Southern Street Movement,” he was jailed twice, spending seven years of the last seven and a half years in prison, free for only four months between [...] Keep reading »

Yaxue Cao, October 31, 2020 1. The Arrest The ancient city of Dali (大理), a small town in China’s southwest, boasts a history of more than 600 years. For visitors from China proper, the most eye-catching features of the Yunnan plateau may be the sapphire-blue sky and the grey tiles and elaborately carved beams of the white-walled houses. Becau [...] Keep reading »

Liao Yiwu, October 6, 2020  As of today, poet Wang Zang (王藏) has been incarcerated for 130 days and his wife (王丽芹) for 112 days. It’s unclear who is taking care of their four children. It appears that all news about them has been cut off. — The Editors In the middle of the night on May 30, 2020, more than fifty armed police s [...] Keep reading »

For the first time, China Change has made a brief promotional video to appeal for support from Chinese-Americans who have immigrated from mainland China . Of equal importance is to breach a topic from which this vast community has chosen to stay away, intentionally or otherwise. It’s about time. — The Editors [...] Keep reading »

Chen Chunyi, September 24, 2020 Due to the arrest of the 12 Hong Kong residents who were brought to Shenzhen to face charges, the phenomenon of “government-designated lawyers” (官派律师, i.e. those approved by the Chinese authorities to represent defendants in politically sensitive cases) has attracted widespread attention from the [...] Keep reading »

Terence C. Halliday and Eva Pils, July 8, 2020 In the early hours of the morning on 9 July 2015, China’s security apparatus launched the first strike of its worst ever campaign against practicing lawyers in China.  The forced disappearance of woman lawyer Wang Yu by unidentified black-garbed, masked men signaled the beginnings of a nationwid [...] Keep reading »

China Human Rights Lawyers Group, July 9, 2020 Neither remorseful nor boastful in the past, human rights lawyers will not be so today, nor in the future.   Five years ago, beginning with the seizure of Lawyer Wang Yu and her husband, the Chinese government launched a campaign to wipe out human rights defenders. Human rights lawyers bore the br [...] Keep reading »

Yaxue Cao, June 30, 2020 Foreword The Other China By accident I was pulled out of my working mother cocoon in the fall of 2011 to co-blog at the now-defunct seeingredinchina.com. The only problem was that I didn’t know much about China, having left twenty years before. I began to read about it, unaware at the time that I was taking the first step [...] Keep reading »

Sui Muqing, Yaxue Cao, June 2, 2020 This is the second interview in our How I Become a Human Rights Lawyer series. Today we present our conversation with Guangzhou lawyer Sui Muqing (隋牧青), conducted on May 19, 2020.  — The Editors 1. Tiananmen, 1989 Yaxue Cao: Let’s start from Tiananmen. There are quite a few Chinese human right [...] Keep reading »