China Change, July 2, 2019 Since we posted our last piece, Billionaires and Zhongnanhai Families — China’s Newest Breed of ‘Rights Defenders’, Ms. Huang Wan (黄婉), daughter-in-law of Chinese Communist Party’s former standing committee member and chairman of the powerful and much feared Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission Zho [...] Keep reading »

China Change, June 29, 2019 On June 6, Ms. Huang Wan (黄婉) received her “certificate of release from community correction” (解除社区矫正证明书) from the Justice Bureau of Chaoyang District in Beijing. From that day on, she was a free woman, and she had made plans to travel to the United States for a long-waited reunion with her agin [...] Keep reading »

Liu Xiaoyuan, June 26, 2019 After months of appealing, complaining, and calling to resume practice, on June 23, lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan received “Beijing Bureau of Justice’s Decision to Cancel Lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan’s License.” For the past four years he had not been able to practice because Fengrui Law Firm (锋锐律师事务所), of which he wa [...] Keep reading »

China Change, June 24, 2019 When Jiang Tianyong (江天勇) was released from prison on February 28 from Henan Province Second Prison in the city Xinxiang (新乡), many people breathed a sigh of relief. China first put him in secret detention, known as Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, then in prison, since Nov 2016, for rallying [...] Keep reading »

China Change, May 30, 2019     In the evening of May 16, Deng Chuanbing (邓传彬) posted a picture of a “Remember 8964” wine bottle on Twitter. Father of two school children, he lives in a town in Yibin, Sichuan province. Within half an hour, local police arrived. They ringed him from outside asking him to flash the upstairs lights [...] Keep reading »

Chen Jiangang, April 1, 2019 In the summer of 2018, I applied for the “Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program” to study law and human rights. After I was interviewed and had taken the TOEFL, I was accepted into the program. According to arrangements made by the program administrators, I was due to fly to the United States on April 1, 2019, to pa [...] Keep reading »

Members of the Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Group, March 8, 2019 Lu Tingge (卢廷阁) is a lawyer based in Shijiazhuang (石家庄), the capital of Hebei province. He is one of the newer faces in the community of human rights lawyers in China. In February he put forward a proposal to limit the legislative authorities of the Standing Committee of t [...] Keep reading »

Liao Yiwu, translated by Michael Martin Day, March 4, 2019 On December 9th, 2018, on the eve of International Human Rights Day, in my hometown of Chengdu, Sichuan, the most influential house church in China today, the Early Rain Covenant Church, was raided by the police and banned, and more than 100 believers were taken away. The chapel, semin [...] Keep reading »

Tang Jitian, January 30, 2019 On December 10, 2018, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (La Commission nationale consultative des droit [...] Keep reading »