Published: July 16, 2013 According to our sources, Xu Zhiyong (许志永), one of China’s best known dissidents and activists, has been criminally detained on Tuesday, July 16. Per an earlier report by weiquanwang (维权网) and information circulated on Twitter,  Dr. Xu was taken away from his Beijing home Tuesday afternoon, and his compute [...] Keep reading »

Published: July 6, 2013 On May 27, Ye Haiyan (叶海燕), perhaps China’s best-known activist for women’s rights, protested that a local school principal and a government official molested or raped six school girls in a hotel in Wangning, Hainan. She stood in the sweltering heat of the subtropics holding a hand-written sign: “Ask me to have s [...] Keep reading »

By Yaxue Cao Published: July 2, 2013   “If a lawyer doesn’t interact with petitioners, he or she would not really know how sick the society is.” – Tweet from lawyer Tang Jitian (@tjitian)   Her name is Ma Yongtian (马永田), a slender, brisk-mannered middle-aged woman. She is a Chinese petitioner. That’s right, one of those poor souls [...] Keep reading »

  Published: June 23, 2013   I didn’t know who Du Bin (杜斌) was until recently when he had made, and released in Hong Kong and online, a documentary (1 hour, with subtitles) about the atrocities at Masanjia Women’s Labor Camp, following an exposé by The Lens magazine in April. Predictably, the online uproar was quickly censored, the [...] Keep reading »

  Mr. President Xi Jinping, I’m Liu Xia, citizen of the People’s Republic of China. I have been placed under house arrest in my own home since October, 2010. That deprives me of my personal freedom. However, no one has told me why I have been subjected to house arrest. Thinking about it over and over again, I conclude that, in this country [...] Keep reading »

  Huang Yonghua (黄勇华) is a young man living in Hengyang, Hunan (湖南衡阳). His Twitter (@huangyonghua) bio starts with a crisp declaration “Save China through democracy and constitutionalism!” He describes himself as a signee of Charter 08, and a lover of tea ceremony, though I cannot ascertain whether it alludes to police summon [...] Keep reading »

You would think life has moved on, and the Chinese government has gotten over Chen Guangcheng, the blind barefoot lawyer they had imprisoned and then placed under house arrest. But no, they haven’t. Exactly a year after Chen Guangcheng fled his heavily-guarded house in Dongshigu village on April 20, 2012, they are bearing down on him again by har [...] Keep reading »

By Ai Xiaoming, translated by Yaxue Cao Ai Xiaoming (艾晓明) is a professor of Chinese modern literature at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. In recent years she’s best known for her participation in social movements and documentary making. Her work includes Three Days in Wukan (乌坎三日), The Central Plains (中原纪事, about th [...] Keep reading »

In my recent blog “Lock Up and Lock Down” about crackdowns on dissidents and activists during the Two Meetings, I mentioned an incident about a ten-year-old girl whose father is a dissident in Hefei, Anhui (安徽合肥): “In a particularly egregious episode of this year’s clamping down on dissidents, on February 27 in Hefei, Anhui (安徽� [...] Keep reading »