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 rights lawyers, probably more that I don’t know of. At the very least, there are the ones we call the Generation of 1989 — Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强), Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜), Tang Jitian (唐吉田)… and you, of course. There’s a photo I remember very clearly, that was shared widely online, of you and several classmates singing together. Sui Muqing: I don’t know when this photo was taken. When did I […]

Tang Jingling, August 28, 2016 Chinese was published on May 20, 2016   “I can’t help but sigh over how much more civilized the South African apartheid regime of 50 years ago was compared to the Chinese Communist regime of today.”  – Tang Jingling “Other people don’t know better than the Chinese people about the human rights condition in China and it is the Chinese people who are in the best situation, in the best position to have a say about China’s human rights situation.” – Wang Yi, China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, June 2, 2016.     Recalling his nearly 30 years in prison, Nelson Mandela wrote in his memoir Long Walk to Freedom: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until […]

By Guo Baosheng, published: November 17, 2015   China claims that it doesn’t have any political prisoners, but in a broad sense all of those who have been jailed or imprisoned for challenging the Chinese Communist Party on behalf of human rights or political justice ought to be considered China’s political prisoners. Before the policy of “reform and opening up” in 1979, counterrevolutionaries and other political prisoners were put under strict guard and treated worse than other criminals, and it was common in those days for them to suffer abuse or die from maltreatment. For a long time after “reform and opening up,” political prisoners began to be treated a bit better relative to other criminals. But in the past few years—especially since Xi Jinping […]

By Yaxue Cao, published: September 23, 2015   On March 31, when China’s youngest political criminal Huang Wenxun (黄文勋) heard that Xi Jinping was going to visit America, he wrote President Obama a letter. He had just turned 25, and had been held in a police lockup awaiting trial in Chibi, Hubei Province, for one year and ten months (as of this writing, it’s over two years and four months). In his letter, he told his own story and also tried to get Americans to “learn about a different China.” He seemed to truly believe his letter would make it in front of President Obama, and apologized for occupying the president’s precious time. But he reasoned: this could be counted as “a time for international […]