China Change, February 8, 2021 The high-speed rail station in Linyi (临沂), a third-tier provincial city, is gorgeous, and it speaks to the rapid economic development of China in recent decades. At normal times, it would be bustling with travelers going home for the lunar Chinese New Year. But this year, it’s deserted because of the Covid-19 pa [...] Keep reading »

China Change, February 5, 2021 On February 3, 2021, Beijing lawyer Peng Jian (彭剑) met for the second time with human rights activist and citizen movement advocate Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜) at the Linshu County Detention Center in Shandong Province (山东临沭县看守所). The meeting was conducted by video, and unlike during the first meeting, [...] Keep reading »

January 30, 2021 Chinese dissident Guo Feixiong (郭飞雄), while trying to travel to the United States to take care of his wife Zhang Qing following her cancer surgery, was intercepted by Chinese authorities at Shanghai Pudong Airport on January 28, and denied exit on the pretext of “endangering national security.” Guo Feixiong is a free [...] Keep reading »

January 15, 2021 Zhang Zhan (张展), a resident of Shanghai and a former lawyer, went to Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in February, video recorded what she saw, spoke to locals, wrote down her observations and thoughts, and posted them on social media platforms inside and outside China. She was detained in May and sentenced to f [...] Keep reading »

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 »