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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Liang Xiaojun, Yaxue Cao, May 15, 2020 The sudden outbreak of the novel coronavirus has culminated in a pandemic spreading across China and the rest of the world. A semi-living organism, invisible to the naked eye, has halted the activities of billions of people, forced them to take shelter in their homes and avoid contact with others. And more, th [...] Keep reading »

Tang Jitian, April 30, 2020 Tang Jitian (唐吉田) grew up in the mountains of the northeastern province of Jilin, a Korean autonomous prefecture, not too far from Vladivostok in Russia’s Far East, and North Korea. He enrolled in the Politics Department at Northeast Normal University in Changchun in 1988, just in time for the 1989 student de [...] Keep reading »

March 19, 2020 Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜) was reluctant when I asked for an interview. It was in the fall of 2017, a year after he was released from prison as a leader of the New Citizens Movement. He was visiting his wife and two daughters in Alfred, a village of 5,000 souls in Upstate New York, and would go back to China in a few days. He didn’t wa [...] Keep reading »

This interview of Hu Ping discusses the writing of "On Freedom of Speech," a pamphlet he began writing in 1975 after returning from the countryside as sent-down youth, and the 1980 student elections at Peking University that happened at a time when China was making yet another sharp and tremulous turn in history. [...] Keep reading »