Last December’s “Xiamen Gathering” (or “1226 Arrest”) shocked the world and brought an even more stern atmosphere to China’s already nearly extinct civil society. A year has passed, and nearly twenty human rights lawyers and activists have been silenced, harassed, summoned, detained, and even arrested over the course of that year. This event is considered to be the largest mass persecution of the Chinese civil movement since the “709” incident. What exactly happened at this gathering? Why did the Chinese authorities launch a massive inter-provincial arrest campaign in Fujian, Shandong, Beijing, Hebei, Sichuan and Zhejiang? Listen to the first episode of Radio Free Asia’s special report by Xue Xiaoshan: A Gathering.
“The big arrest on December 26th rippled through almost everyone who attended the party in Xiamen and were detained, summoned, questioned, and some friends fled. Their main target was Ding Jiaxi and me, because the civic movement never stopped. It won’t in the future either.” Xu Zhiyong published the article “This is My Country” before his arrest, leaving a final comment on the case.
Xiamen gathering
At the end of 2019, Xiao Zhong received an invitation to a party in a chat group calling for a trip to Xiamen, a barbecue and a sea view, with a location map, directions and photos of the villa. A special instruction was that no cell phones and other electronic devices were allowed to be brought, beware of being positioned and tracked. But the message was not effectively enforced, “Some people were using their cell phones on site and talking to friends and family on the phone.” Xiao Zhong recalled. For security reasons, Xiao Zhong does not want to disclose the full name.
On Dec. 7, new and old friends from all over the world arrived in Xiamen and flocked to the rented clubhouse, where they tasted food, sang in KTV booths, played billiards and discussed topics such as civil society cultivation, New Year’s offerings, domestic and international political events, and conflicts between the government and the people.
With the warm winter sun pouring down on him, Xiao Zhong enjoyed the wonderful reunion. He cherished this group of like-minded friends – they were so serious that they took the Constitution seriously and took the legal rights, responsibilities and duties of citizens seriously, so much so that they were bruised and battered in the collision with the system, and some of them had only been released from prison shortly after, and had lost their teaching positions, housing, freedom, health, and children’s schooling opportunities —— No matter how desperate the general situation was, Xiao Zhong preserved a simple belief in the heart – everyone is a citizen, Ben is a citizen.
“This land it will not disappear, the people who live on this land, are my relatives, close friends, colleagues, neighbors. I want them to live in the future, (to be) free of fear, with dignity, in true freedom. I want my descendants, too, to have this kind of life.”
On the 8th, everyone went on their own journey, saying goodbye and looking forward to the next reunion, the sooner the better.
No one expected that 18 days later, the iron fist of the people’s power would strike the “Xiamen Party”. They were welcomed by the police who broke into their homes, or were insulted and raided, or dragged to the tiger bench, leaving their wives separated and in a state of disarray.
On the 26th day, Ding Jiaxi, Dai Zhenya, Li Yingjun and Zhang Zhongshun were arrested by Shandong police from Beijing, Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Yantai. The outside world speculates that this is the command from the Ministry of Public Security at the central level.
“They had a plan for a long time, and this is the operation to close the net. I speculate that that (party) in Yantai in ’18, it was already targeted. The case should have been opened in ’18. (If) the case is not officially filed, the target has been locked.” Another attendee, Xiao Feng, revealed. The police have been working on this for a long time.
The actual fact is that you can find a lot of people who are not able to get a good deal on this. Some people were too late to buy tickets to leave the country and were surprised to hear that the police knocked on the door. Some tried to escape in a car, wearing hats and masks, but the cameras still pinpointed their identities. Some clenched their teeth when they were arrested, but the interrogators pulled out a pre-prepared video of the party – nothing escaped the “Eye of Sauron”, even in this temporary rented villa.
“The location has been pre-controlled, with cameras and recorders. They remember in great detail, which within an hour who spoke first, the seating order —— every detail for you to remember, he definitely mastered the scene of the video or audio recording.” Xiao Feng speculated that the first day during the day, has been monitored in place. But that night, after everyone left the villa and moved to the B&B, the situation is still under investigation.
The police criticized them as “a group of scum”, “moral turpitude”, “a group of ambitious people who want to seize power”, the nature of the case rose to “enemy conflict”, vowing to dig out every detail of the meeting, every conversation.
Now, one year later, nearly 20 people have been released after summons, detention and unscrupulous interrogation, but legal scholar Xu Zhiyong, human rights lawyer Ding Jiaxi and Chang Wei Ping are still behind bars.
Killing the chicken to make an example of the monkey, everyone is in danger
Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi were arrested on June 19 on suspicion of “inciting subversion of state power,” and their investigation period has been extended twice, and they are being held under pseudonyms in Linshu County Detention Center in Linyi, Shandong Province, where their lawyers have not been allowed to meet.
According to information received by Ding’s wife, Luo Shengchun, Ding has been subjected to torture such as interrogation in a tiger chair, noise harassment, sleep deprivation, 24-hour light exposure and fixed sitting and sleeping postures.
“The two of them, they carried this thing on their shoulders, and they are the ones who suffered.” Xiao Feng is very apologetic.
On October 22, Chang Wei Ping was again arrested by Baoji State Security for residential surveillance. “I have no way to fly like a bird and fly away from this country because I don’t have a gun ——“
He previously published a tube-video exposing his torture experience during his first detention earlier this year. he was recorded 16 times in 10 days, and police went through his social connections, online statements, and immigration records, but came up empty-handed.
“I was locked on a tiger bench in the guest house room of the Baotian Hotel for 24 hours a day for 10 days, which was an extreme form of torture. The damage done to me is that my index and ring fingers on my right hand are still numb, unconscious or have abnormal perception to this day.”
Another participant of the Xiamen gathering, Xiaolin, asked to be interviewed under a pseudonym. He said indignantly that the authorities could not find any evidence, but made a mistake: “If this is reported to the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Public Security will say, “What are you doing? So many people are being used to monitor the situation, but there is no evidence. Now this system, the nerves are tense, and when it finally finds out that it is a sandwich, and it does not want to admit fault!”
A party triggered a scattering of friends fleeing in all directions, surrounded by dense eyes, and the smell of bloody imprisonment and intimidation —— What would await him later? Xiao Zhong’s heart is soaked with panic.
“Kill the chicken to make an example of the monkey, do to us people to see. Everyone is at risk, and the day is not safe. Today is safe, the night is not sure, always let you create a fear.”
He believes that the Xiamen gathering is just a fuse to kill civil society,not yet a real explosive, because the CCP is frantically trying to survive under internal and external difficulties, and the days ahead will be even harder.
“The situation at home and abroad is very unhappy with the CCP regime, they feel fearful, they feel their days are numbered and precarious. In their words, ‘we have to nip all instability in the bud.’ Because he is afraid that you will form an organization and tighten your five fingers into a fist and take a blow against him. That’s what they fear most.”
But Chinese citizens, have they clenched their fists and formed organizations? Several pro-lifers of the Xiamen case stressed that their form of activity was de-organized and de-centralized. First, there is no name, second, no platform, third, no fixed membership, and fourth, no division of labor.
Criticized for “forming a party,” Xu Zhiyong: The road is invisible, just a community of ideas
Although China’s Constitution guarantees citizens’ right of association, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been tightly guarding social movements, using a grid-based and precise approach to maintain stability, to isolate and weaken the social roots of the citizen community.
According to informed sources, the state security guards interrogating the Xiamen case had said, “All of you who are going are the elites in the country. This gathering of yours is the equivalent of the ‘Big One,’ that meeting of the Chinese Communist Party on the boat in Jiaxing (South Lake), Zhejiang Province, back in the day, and you are going to form a party in the future.”
However, Xu Zhiyong clarified in a post before his arrest that the Xiamen gathering was an offline meeting of citizen groups to discuss current affairs and exchange experiences, “They may think we are forming a party or something like that, which is not in line with our philosophy.”
He believes that any party, faction or association with a specific name can be blocked. As long as everyone sees themselves as citizens, it is an invisible community of avenues.
Hua Ze, a human rights activist and close friend of Xu Zhiyong, told the station that the Chinese Communist Party is afraid that the fire of a star can start a prairie.
“The Communist Party they just got their start by subverting state power (.). This place in Ruijin is called ‘State China.’ (Actually) it’s not comparable at all. The Communist Party is a violent revolution, and Xu Zhiyong’s and Ding Jiaxi’s New Citizens’ Movement, or the Chinese Citizens’ Movement, all actions are under the current legal framework of the Constitution.”
(Sound: Red Guards’ crosstalk, seizure sounds)
According to our understanding, the State Security also repeatedly used the term “collusion” to refer to the interaction of the Xiamen gatherers on a regular basis. During the Cultural Revolution, the “cascade” was a powerful social mobilization initiative by Mao Zedong, and Red Guards from all over the world fought together to achieve “rebellion as a family” and “chaos in the world.
Xu Zhiyong’s friend Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer who teaches at the New School in New York, was only three years old at the end of the Cultural Revolution, but he has often heard the older generation look back on those unpleasant years, saying, “The cascade was tacitly approved by Mao Zedong and the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, and appeared to be a vigorous mass movement. In reality it was ‘one man with a gun barrel, campaigning for the masses’, including all kinds of vandalism and violence, all encouraged by the tyrant. (This) is completely different from a spontaneous, bottom-up social movement for human rights and freedom.”
New Citizens’ Movement, renamed “Citizens’ Movement”
Eight years ago, the New Citizens’ Movement raised the banner of democracy and constitutionalism and freedom, justice and love, spreading across many cities and attracting tens of thousands of participants, while struggling to find the bottom line of those in power and the potential space for group activism.
In 2016 and 2017, Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, who were jailed for the New Citizens Movement, were released one after another, and the two had unapologetically mentioned in public articles and interviews – what we do is a citizens’ movement, regardless of new and old.
According to Teng Biao’s observation, their direction and ideals have not changed, but unlike before 2013, they now make huge changes in the way they act, the size of their gatherings, and the security of their communications:.
“He is still holding on to civic activities, something that for the most part can only be done quietly and secretly. The Xiamen Gathering also shows that this private liaison has been unbroken, except that civic dinners and civil protests cannot be held with the same fanfare as in the past.”
In his article “This is My Motherland” published this year, Xu Zhiyong wrote that responsible Chinese citizens need to be prepared for three kinds of constitutional civilizational transformation: 1. conceptual consensus, including a non-violent civic movement for a better China of freedom, justice, and love; 2. public policy research; and 3. civic community building, including rooted community, charity, and offline gatherings.
Chinese Authorities Waiting for Opportunity to Arrest Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi to Close the Net with Xiamen Case?
Over the past three years, Xu Zhiyong has sought opportunities to go into the community and share his experiences with locals on community service and NPC elections. Ding Jiaxi spent more time traveling around the region to exchange ideas and make friends.
These activities were carried out under the watchful eyes of countless pairs of people and the violent intervention of the National Security.
Hua Ze describes Xu Zhiyong as never “just hovering between 100 percent unfreedom, 80 percent unfreedom and 60 percent unfreedom.” The building is often under 24-hour surveillance by state security, and his daughter is followed to school.
State security agencies have long been asking around for Ding Jiaxi’s whereabouts. Friends have repeatedly warned that the authorities have long regarded him as a “thorn in their side.
“They are all registered in Beijing, so why would the state security authorities from all over the world, such as Hubei and Sichuan, ask local people to interview them? Obviously there are people higher up who are deploying.”
Hua Ze noted that the Chinese authorities had been planning for a long time and finally closed the net after the Xiamen case. “Influential human rights activists like them, the authorities just want to put them in jail to feel more comfortable.”
On the occasion of the two sessions in March 2019, Xu Zhiyong left Beijing and traveled south to visit the He Miao village on the Xiang-Guizhou border. In his tweets, he posted that farmers’ pensions are too low, less than a quarter of the international poverty line. Tang Sisi’s family earns about 800 yuan from farming and the elderly pension is 95 yuan per month. But he couldn’t expose his whereabouts and sightings too much, or the stabilization forces would have caught wind of it.
The State Security has proudly bragged to attendees, “You people we are analyzing, your character, your weaknesses. To put it bluntly, where your killing power is. Some of you have a lot of guts, some of you have human weaknesses, and we know them all very well.”
What an irony, according to Kobayashi: “The authorities feel that the danger shows itself when he has the power to unite. This country evaluates the danger of a person, not how bad you are going to do, but how good qualities you have, including your conscience.”
By Xue Xiaoshan, Washington, D.C., Radio Free Asia
Note at end of reporter’s article.
At the request of the interviewees, Xiao Feng, Xiao Zhong and Xiao Lin are all pseudonyms.
A total of twenty-one people attended the Xiamen gathering, and in the month following the December 26th arrest, four of the six people initially detained – Beijing lawyer Ding Jiaxi, Xiamen citizen Dai Zhenya, Zhangzhou worker Li Yingjun, and Shandong citizen Zhang Zhongshun – were placed under residential surveillance for six months, while Zhejiang lawyer Huang Zhiqiang and Shaanxi lawyer Chang Weiping were released on bail two and ten days later, respectively. The four people were sent to the designated residence for six months; while Zhejiang lawyer Huang Zhiqiang and Shaanxi lawyer Chang Wei Ping were released on bail after 2 days and 10 days respectively.
Shandong lawyer Liu Shuqing, Sichuan lawyer Lu Siwei, Hangzhou lawyer Zhuang Daohe, and Hebei lawyer Lu Tingge were released after being summoned for 24-48 hours; Beijing scholar Wang Jiangsong was asked to make a statement twice; since then, many people have been summoned and harassed for a long time.
Five people, including Hubei lawyer Tang Jingling, Hunan lawyer Wen Donghai, Hubei citizen Liu Jiacai, Hebei citizen Ding Lingjie, and Beijing legal scholar Xu Zhiyong (Xu was arrested in February), went into hiding and disappeared, but some of them returned home one after another and were interviewed or placed under house arrest; four people, including Guangzhou citizen Liu Siyi, Shanghai lawyer Wu Shaoping, Shenzhen lawyer Pang Kun, and Shenzhen entrepreneur Wang Yingguo, went to the United States.
Xu Zhiyong’s girlfriend Li Qiaochu and documentary filmmaker Chen Jiaping did not attend the meeting, but were implicated and placed under residential surveillance until June 19. Li has been repeatedly threatened with immediate imprisonment if she speaks out again, and her computer and cell phone have been seized.
Since many of the detainees have not yet been tried, we cannot touch on the specific activities of the Citizens’ Movement. In January of this year, Xu Zhiyong recorded a series of videos in advance. A friend, Hua Ze, provided it to this station, and the following is his discourse.
“In a post-totalitarian society, one of the biggest problems is that fake! It brings a lot of beautiful things, democracy, rule of law, freedom, all listed in the core socialist values, but they never take them seriously. We don’t need to take new concepts, these concepts – democracy, rule of law, freedom, etc. – are supposed to be ours. The other side has soiled it, we just wash it. We don’t need to create a new concept, we just take these concepts seriously, and that is powerful. In the process of citizen advocacy, many times, we take the law seriously. There is no other way for us to —— be true, is powerful!”
“We take citizenship as our identity, a concept that encompasses all of our ideals. When we are truly citizens, that means, democracy, rule of law, freedom, all of it —— I can say with a straight face, I am a citizen, you are a citizen, he is a citizen, we are all citizens together. It can make both our individual identity and our group identity. We don’t need the existence of a tangible organization, we just need each person to take citizenship seriously. We are then in fact a group, an invisible being, a community of ideas.”
“The concept of citizenship has been rooted in China for over a hundred years and is also written in the Constitution. The autocrats don’t like it, but not so much as to take the word citizen out of the Constitution, and it’s unlikely to turn citizenship into a sensitive word on the Internet. We are meant to be citizens, real citizens. I once said to a police officer, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be a citizen?’ Every one of us should be citizens. This concept is impossible to destroy; it is our hard armor, and it keeps us invincible until we implement the ideal of democratic constitutionalism.”
“Let me explain our core values: freedom, justice, love. one day in May 2012, we discussed together how to give our movement a name, and the majority opinion at that time was called: the New Citizens Movement. It means a citizen’s movement for a new era, but later it was felt that this concept was inappropriate. The word ‘new’ was unnecessary because there were no old citizens. So after 2017, the name we officially set was called the citizenship movement, advocating that everyone be a citizen and take the rights, identity, and responsibilities of citizenship seriously. When every Chinese becomes a citizen, this country will have changed and completed its historical transformation ——
We really didn’t think of the Bible at that time, but later we realized that justice and love, fit the Bible. A nation and a society where individual freedom is maximized, where people are fair and just and love one another, is our ideal society. It is the banner of our entire social movement, and it represents such a great age for us.”
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