An Introduction to Dr. Xu Zhiyong
China Change, November 10, 2024
Born in 1973 in Henan province, Dr. Xu Zhiyong is a prominent political prisoner who is currently serving a 14-year prison term on bogus charges of “subversion of state power” in Lunan Prison in Shandong province. He has been on hunger strike since October 4 protesting the denial of his right to correspond with his fiancée and an array of inhumane treatments. It’s troubling that his conditions cannot be reliably confirmed as of now.
Dr. Xu pioneered China’s rights defense movement. Around the turn of the century, while still in graduate school studying law, Xu lived for a period in Beijing’s Petitioners’ Village – a slum where people from around the country seeking to redress their grievances stayed – to study the blight of ordinary Chinese. In 2003, following the death of a migrant worker named Sun Zhigang, he and two others called for the National Congress of People’s Representatives to abolish the Custody and Repatriation System that caused Sun’s death and untold misery of millions of rural migrant workers in cities, and succeeded.
After graduating from Peking University with a Ph.D. in law and becoming a lecturer at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Dr. Xu and friends founded the Open Constitution Initiative, later Gongmeng (Citizen Alliance), one of the earliest NGOs in China, that devoted to defending civil rights cases in court. It blazed the trail and set the modus operandi for the soon-to-be flourishing rights defense movement. In the following years, he and a band of lawyers and citizen activists took on a series of high-profile cases defending journalists, believers, political prisoners, private entrepreneurs, victims of poisoned milk powder, ordinary Chinese suffering egregious injustice, and more. “I like to do these things,” he said to DW in 2006, “the prosperity of this nation can’t be built on the back of these people’s suffering.”
Dr. Xu was an early practitioner of grassroots elections. In 2003 and 2006, he was twice elected the people’s representative in Haidian District of Beijing municipality as an independent candidate. At the same time, he and Gongmeng helped other independent candidates to campaign, including the campaign for direct election of Beijing Lawyers Association.
Citizens Movement. In 2009, Gongmeng came under attack by the authorities. Xu was detained for a month or so, and Gongmeng was subsequently outlawed. But the legal defense work continued as more lawyers and activists joined and expanded the rights defense movement organically. Beginning around 2010, Xu Zhiyong and his colleagues began to build what he later called the New Citizens Movement with the belief that, to change China, Chinese must take seriously their civic rights that exist only on paper by taking concrete actions to practice them. Regular citizen gatherings mushroomed in major cities where like-minded people met, got to know each other, and participated in group activities. One of the most significant achievements of the nascent movement was the campaign for equal access to education that aimed at changing regulations to allow the children of migrant residents to enroll in schools and take college entrance exams in the cities they resided and worked. The campaign mobilized over 100,000 parents in Beijing and succeeded in abolishing restrictions on students without urban residential registration, benefiting millions of families in China, except, ironically, a handful of urban centers such as Beijing. Dr. Xu’s essay “China Needs a New Citizens Movement” in 2012 was a manifesto for political and cultural transformation.
In the spring of 2013, the New Citizens Movement became the target of Xi Jinping’s first wave of crackdowns on civil society. Xu Zhiyong was among scores of activists arrested on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” He was sentenced to four years in prison and his main “crime” was promoting equal access to education. He resumed his work during the two and a half years between mid-2017, when he was released from prison through the end of 2019, despite suffocating surveillance and low morale across China’s emerging civil society.
In February 2020, Xu Zhiyong was arrested again, this time for an informal gathering of twenty or so people in the city of Xiamen. Following four months of secret detention known as residential surveillance at a designated location (RSDL) and another 24 months of lengthy detention, he was tried and sentenced to 14 years in prison for “subversion of state power.” The flimsiness of his Indictment reflects a clear pattern of repression under Xi Jinping: stamping out civil society activities as wide as possible, while locking up its leaders.
Torture and inhumane treatment. During the RSDL, the police interrogators subjected him to barbaric torture physically and psychologically in order for him to admit guilt, which he didn’t and has never done. In July this year, it was reported that Lunan Prison had restricted his movement by having three inmates “sandwich” him in close proximity 24/7, denied him his right to read, and subjected him to forced labor. His fiancée Li Qiaochu was twice imprisoned to not only silence her but also to pressure Xu to submit. In early 2020, she was detained for 120 days, and then from early 2021 to August this year. Recently, the prison severed Xu’s right to correspond with her after allowing it for a brief period following her release. Prison personnel tore up her letter in front of him, triggering him to go on hunger strike on October 4.
Dr. Xu is a thinker and a prolific writer. In A Beautiful China, a collection of 24 essays, he documents his two decades of journey as a seminal figure in the Chinese people’s struggle for a free and just political system, and lays out his vision for a constitutional democratic China. While eluding arrest at the end of 2019, he wrote an open letter to Xi Jinping calling for his resignation for the benefit of the country.
Dr. Xu Zhiyong is a man of purpose, principle, and sacrifice. He is the recipient of the 2014 Democracy Award of the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and the 2023 Human Rights Award of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE). The international community must not fail him in speaking out on his behalf, defending his rights vigorously, and calling for his freedom.
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