Xu Zhiyong, translated by Leo Timm, April 2, 2024 Note From the Editor Born in 1973, Dr. Xu Zhiyong (许志永) is a legal scholar, pioneer of China’s rights defense movement, and a founder of the New Citizens Movement. On April 10, 2023, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges of “subverting state power.” Before this, he had served a separate prison term from 2013 to 2017 for his Citizens Movement activities during Xi Jinping’s first wave of crackdowns on civil society after coming to power in late 2012. Between the two prison stints from 2017 to the end of 2019, Dr. Xu wrote A Beautiful China (《美好中国》), a collection of 24 essays. It is a review of his journey and that of his generation’s […]

By Song Zhibiao, published: April 28, 2013   Recently, the standing vice-director of Shaanxi provincial propaganda department Ren Xianliang (任贤良) published an article entitled How the Party Should Manage the Media in the New Era in which he evaluated the present media circumstances (China Media Project has a roundup about Ren Xianliang’s article). Although his logic and conclusions are both questionable, it seems as though we may agree on one point:  Even if this article, issued in the Red Flag Journal (《红旗文稿》), is meant to test the waters, it reflects the anxiety of the Party’s propaganda system and the latest judgment of high level officials in the propaganda system concerning public opinion. Media professionals should not treat this article with ridicule; others should also think […]

By Mo Zhixu Mo Zhixu (莫之许), pen name of Zhao Hui (赵晖), is a Beijing-based Chinese dissident intellectual and a frequent contributor of Chinese-language publications known for his incisive views of Chinese politics and opposition. He is the co-author of “China at the Tipping Point? Authoritarianism and Contestation” in the January issue of Journal of Democracy. With permission, we edited his piece, originally published in iSunAffair Weekend on Thursday, to reflect later developments. A more detailed account of the event itself can be found in this Foreign Policy article by Annie Zhang that I translated. –Yaxue The predicament of Party-owned but commercialized media outlets in China China does not have private media. Most of China’s media groups are subordinates of CCP Committees on different levels. The […]

I assume you are a China watcher and already know the Southern Weekend (also translated as the Southern Weekly) incident that’s been raging on for the last couple of days. If you are not, you’ll find out here. Either way, I want to place the incident in the larger picture. China doesn’t have an independent press – we all know that. The Southern Weekend is a part of the  Southern Media Group (南方报业传媒集团), a Guangdong provincial-level state-owned media enterprise. Like any state-owned enterprises, whether they manufacture sewage pipes or produce newspapers, its top leader is the Party secretary (党委书记) and, in NMG’s case, the position is concurrently held by the Deputy Chief of the Propaganda Department of Guangdong province. The Group operates like a corporation, […]

While instances of violence and coercion in China are well-known overseas, they actually make up a small percentage of the total cases that are silenced in less visible ways. For every Chen Guangcheng, there are likely hundreds (thousands?) of others who never dared to speak, or shut up shortly after first opening their mouths. In a great series of papers from Kevin O’Brien and Rachel Stern, they show that China has developed a wide variety of tools for maintaining stability (the following sections are a combination of information from the papers and my own observations). Relational Repression (link) As O’Brien shows with a case study of an environmental protest in Zhejiang, people’s family members and friends are often mobilized to apply pressure to activists. In many cases […]