Yaxue Cao, December 22, 2020 I saw this cartoon and can’t get out of my head. It’s the work of Polish illustrator Pawel Kuczynski but it struck me as a succinct portrait of China. In the coming days and weeks, I will write a series of stories illustrating the mowing down in action, and I will start with the story of Chang Weiping, a young [...] 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 »

Luo Shengchun, August 31, 2020 I I was in Hawaii with my daughters on Christmas break when I heard that Jiaxi (丁家喜) had been detained. I was climbing a hiking trail by the sea, my girls splashing in the water at the beach below. The sky and the sea were a brilliant blue; the white sand beach stretched endless in the afternoon sun. A friend, i [...] Keep reading »

China Change, August 28, 2020 On August 11, 2020, Hunan provincial Justice Department issued a “Notice of Administrative Penal Action” [translation included below] permanently disbarring lawyer Xie Yang (谢阳). Those who have followed the 709 crackdown on human rights lawyers will recall that the then-detained Xie Yang, one of the only two 70 [...] Keep reading »

Xie Yang, a lawyer based in Changsha, was one of the 709 lawyers detained and charged with “subversion.” From autumn 2016 to the beginning of 2017, his wife and attorneys exposed the torture he suffered, the first of such revelations that would be echoed later by other 709 detainees. To deny the torture of Xie Yang and fend off international ba [...] Keep reading »

Wang Quanzhang, Citizen of the People’s Republic of China On January 24, 2019, after more than 1,300 days of incommunicado detention, the Tianjin Second Intermediate People’s Court finally convicted me of the crime of subversion of state power; on April 24, 2019, the Tianjin Higher People’s Court quickly issued a ruling upholding the [...] Keep reading »