Concerns are growing about the health of Xu Zhiyong, China’s most prominent imprisoned human rights lawyer, who is thought to have been on hunger strike for nearly a month.
Xu, a scholar and leading figure in China’s embattled civil rights movement, started his hunger strike on 4 October, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an NGO. He is protesting against what he describes as inhumane treatment in prison, including lack of contact with his family and intensive surveillance by other prisoners, according to reports released through his relatives.
Xu has been detained since February 2020 after he attended an informal gathering of lawyers and activists who had met in December 2019 to discuss civil society and current affairs. Several of the meeting’s participants were arrested, including Ding Jiaxi, another human rights lawyer whose case was handled with Xu’s. The men were convicted of subverting state power. Last year, Xu was sentenced to 14 years and Ding to 12 years, lengthy punishments that the UN’s human rights chief criticised.
It is Xu’s second time behind bars. In 2014, he was sentenced to four years in jail for “gathering crowds to disrupt public order”.
Xu is the founding father of the New Citizens’ Movement, a loose collective of scholars, lawyers and activists who called for improved civil rights and government transparency. The movement has largely been squashed in the era of Xi Jinping, China’s leader since 2012, who has cracked down on civil society.
Since the death of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel peace prize-winning activist who died in 2017 while serving an 11-year jail sentence, Xu is considered by many to be the most significant dissident in China.
“I would say that Xu Zhiyong at this point is China’s most important living activist,” said Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of the Centre for Asian Law at Georgetown University, who worked with Xu when Xu was a visiting law professor at Yale University. “His career as a lawyer and an activist tracks the broader trend of civil society development and then the crackdown under Xi Jinping.”
Maya Wang, the associate China director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Given that this is Xu’s second imprisonment, he is certainly not someone who is new to Chinese prisons and their mistreatment and torture of prisoners. The fact that he is going on hunger strike now probably testifies to how harshly and badly he is being treated.”
On 23 October, Xu was able to speak on the phone to a relative. He said he had not been able to communicate with his partner, Li Qiaochu, an activist recently released from prison herself. “You must tell Qiaochu and my friends about my hunger strike, otherwise my hunger strike will be in vain. I will continue to insist until they guarantee the right of communication between Qiaochu and me,” Xu said, according to a statement published by his supporters.
Xu’s imprisonment and the difficulty of maintaining contact with the outside world has reduced his fame inside China, where he was once a well-known figure.
In 2009, charges against him for tax evasion were dropped, reportedly because of a public outcry. But Li Fangping, a human rights lawyer and friend of Xu’s, said the Chinese government had been effective at silencing Xu’s impact. “They want him to disappear completely, and they want no one to remember him,” Li said. “There are many young people and lawyers who haven’t heard of Xu Zhiyong today.”
Xu is being held in Lunan prison in Shandong province. The prison could not be reached for comment.
Additional research by Chi-hui Lin