Li Fangping, August 21, 2025 It’s been seven decades since the promulgation of Communist China’s first Constitution in 1954. To evaluate the journey of its rule of law, the successes and failures, I’m going to divide my analysis into four periods. I. The CCP’s founding leaders never meant to honor PRC’s first Constitution The 1954 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China guaranteed protections such as the ownership of production materials by capitalists; citizens’ property rights; inheritance rights; a defendant’s right to defense; freedom of speech; personal freedom; and freedom of movement. However, even before the ink on the Constitution had dried, successive political campaigns obliterated these rights. In 1955, during the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign, the Chinese Communist Party proposed that “counterrevolutionary and other bad […]

Li Fangping, July 9, 2022 Li Fangping started practicing law in China in the mid-1990s, first in Jiangxi and then in Beijing. Over the years since the onset of the rights defense movement in the early 2000s, he has been one of the leading human rights lawyers and has defensed clients in nearly all types of human rights and public interest cases, including political prisoners, activists, rights defenders, victims of food contamination, victims of workplace discrimination, Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, and Tibetan Buddha Buramna Rimpoche. I was in a messaging group with Mr. Li a few years ago and remembered to this day what he once said there: “The police have visited my parents in Jiangxi more times than I have.” He and his family […]

By Yaqiu Wang, published: July 22, 2015   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_DvXF5C56E&feature=youtu.be   On May 19, rights activist Wu Gan (吴淦), better known for his online name “Super Vulgar Butcher” or the “Butcher” for short, set up two pull-up standees in front of the Jiangxi Province Higher People’s Court. He was there to protest the court’s denial of the defense’s access to files of the “Leping Wrongful Conviction Case” (“乐平冤案”). In May 2002, police arrested four suspects in a case of robbery, rape, and dismemberment that occurred in Leping, Jiangxi province, in 2000. The four confessed under torture and were sentenced to death with a stay of execution. In early November 2011, a suspect in another case claimed responsibility for the crime. In light of the admission, rights […]

China Change, published: July 5, 2015   Violent beatings to the head, electric shocks, forced feeding, injection with drugs, sexual violence, suffocation, denial of toilet, solitary confinement, forced smoke inhalation, and burning. These are some of the forms of torture that Chinese security forces have taken up against lawyers in China, in particular those who dare to use the law as an instrument to protect individual rights, and by corollary limit the arbitrary use of power by the Chinese Communist Party. The brutalization of these lawyers is documented in detail in a new report by the Hong Kong-based Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group (《中国律师酷刑个案概览(2006-2015)》. Despite the report’s detail — it looks at the abuse of 34 lawyers, and runs to nearly 50 pages — a version […]