China's Moral Conscience is on Hunger Strike

On the Fate and Treatment of Xu Zhiyong

Dear Reader,

I am frankly exhausted from reading about Donald Trump and the U.S. election, so today I wanted to share a bit more about someone more worthy of your time.

Xu Zhiyong is a name most Westerners, and probably most Chinese citizens, have never heard of. In an old profile from 2009, Evan Osnos described him as China’s Thurgood Marshall, a prominent and “pesky” lawyer, dedicated to using China’s own constitutional ideas to hold its government to account. In another profile for TIME, reporter Susie Jakes described him “as probably the person most committed to public service that I’ve met in China, and possibly in my whole life.”

For me, I think of him as China’s moral conscience, someone who would always remind the CCP of what was right, even when doing so was dangerous.

Photo credit: Liau Chung-ren/Zuma Press/Rex/Shutterstock/The Guardian

In the "golden era” (some sarcasm intended) of Hu Jintao, Xu Zhiyong was still able to operate in public life. He was a lecturer in law at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, and even served as an “independent deputy” in the Haidian District People’s Congress. His activism was always couched in the language of the Chinese constitution itself, and he is credited (among others, like Teng Biao, He Weifang, Gao Zhisheng, and Chen Guangcheng) for launching the “rights protection” (weiquan) movement, which used litigation to try to improve the standing of citizens relative to the state. His legal practice took on the cases of China’s worst off— petitioners, migrant workers, victims of government abuses. His organization, the Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng), began to run afoul of the state in 2009, and he was detained for several weeks before being released on bail. His organization was fined for tax evasion— what Pan, Xu and Xu call “disguised repression”— and shut down. He was also pulled from the ballot and prevented from serving another term in the Haidian District People’s Congress.

I was fortunate to meet Xu Zhiyong as a graduate student when I was conducting fieldwork in Beijing for my dissertation. He was kind enough to meet me and chat for an hour at the All Sages Bookstore in Haidian, the district where he had once served. His wife was there as well, and at the time they were expecting their first child. We spoke mostly about his time as a people’s congress deputy in Haidian, and for me he represented someone who pushed and crossed the well-defined boundaries of that system. The Chinese government claimed to want deputies to represent the “will of the people”, but never to the degree that they would threaten the core nature of the authoritarian system. Xu Zhiyong’s ideas, though grounded in the Constitution, were threatening, if only because they exposed the emptiness of that document.

His life is symbol for China’s political system itself. His ideas grew more radical as the regime became more repressive, and he in turn became the target of that repression. He launched a successor movement to Gongmeng, the “New Citizens Movement” (xingongmin yundong), which aimed to foster a sense of citizenship and rights consciousness among ordinary Chinese. They did not call for revolution or a transition to democracy, but for equality and fairness in the system. Like their predecessor movements, they called for asset transparency and wealth disclosure of government officials. The movement got swept up with Xi Jinping’s broader crackdown on civil society, and in 2014 Xu was handed a four year sentence for “gathering crowds to disturb public order.” His daughter was born while he was detained.

As we know, things would grow darker still in China’s political system. Xu reemerged in 2018, to see a China where many of his own colleagues had suffered similar fates, and the set of nascent civil society organizations and movements on legal rights, the environment, labor rights, and feminism had been destroyed. Xi Jinping had further consolidated power, and had signaled his intentions to stay in office indefinitely.

Xu himself was never built to self-censor, nor was he built to leave China, like many others had. He became wanted by police in early 2020, and while in hiding went as far as to call for Xi Jinping to resign. His open letter is available here in Chinese and here, translated by Geremie R. Barmé. Here’s a particularly bold line that gives you a flavor of how it reads:

You’re not Putin, or Modi, and you’re certainly not Trump. You flirt with Cultural Revolution fanaticism, but you are no true-believing Leftist; you lurch towards bellicose nationalism, but you’re no hawk, either. You’re a big nothing.

The letter directly criticizes Xi, over and over again, for the emptiness of his ideological contributions, the failures of Sino-American relations, the general oppressiveness of his rule. It is by far the most radical of Xu’s writings, the result of a man who had fought for two decades to bring ideas of citizenship and rights to a place hostile to those concepts. For this essay, along with efforts to meet with other critical citizens, Xu earned a 14 year sentence for “subversion of state power.”

If you needed to understand the political winds of China at any moment over the past 25 years, you could simply look to see how Xu Zhiyong was being treated at the time, and you could have a sense. Right now, he is on hunger strike, in response to his poor treatment while in prison. His contact with family and friends is minimal, but he began his strike over a month ago now, so there is serious concern about his health. His friends and colleagues in the overseas democracy community have joined in the fast in solidarity.

It is easy to be down on democracy at the moment, especially when it produces an outcome we don’t like. But we should always remember that there are people like Xu Zhiyong in China and places like it that are literally starving for it. We honor them by protecting it.

Thanks for reading.

Rory