Li Qiaochu, January 11, 2021 A little past midnight on February 16, 2020, two men wearing PPE gowns to protect them from COVID-19 entered prominent civil rights activist Xu Zhiyong (许志永) apartment in Beijing, forced Li Qiaochu’s (李翘楚), Xu’s 27-year-old girlfriend, into a chair, and put a mask on her. A third man who followed them in [...] Keep reading »

Attorney Zhang Keke, January 1, 2021 A website run by China’s Supreme Court (中国庭审公开网) live streams thousands of court hearings on any given work day, but almost never broadcasts trials of political prisoners — with the exception of occasional “show trials.” Zhang Zhan’s lawyers made a request for live streami [...] Keep reading »

The China Human Rights Lawyers Group, January 1, 2021 The year of 2020 has seen a coronavirus pandemic rage across the globe, infecting 78 million and causing 1.75 million deaths by year’s end. The pandemic, spawned in Wuhan, is in fact an inevitable consequence of the long-running deterioration of human rights in China. The harsher suppression o [...] Keep reading »

Ai Xiaoming, December 27, 2020 Zhang Zhan (张展), a lawyer who practiced in Shanghai, went to Wuhan in early February, determined to document the coronavirus outbreak in the city that was the epicenter of what would soon become a pandemic around the world. In the three months she stayed in the city, she made 122 posts on YouTube. It was not a coi [...] Keep reading »

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 »