Human rights activist Charles recalls a time when civil society was flourishing in China and he was able to devote his time to helping improve the lives of working-class people.
Now after 10 years President Xi Jinping’s power grab, community organizations like his have been dismantled, with no hope of being reborn.
Charles fled China and several of his activist friends are in jail.
“After 2015, the whole of civil society began to collapse and fragment,” he tells AFP, using a pseudonym for security reasons.
Xi, about to seal a third term in the world’s most populous country, has led a decade of destruction of civic movements, emerging independent media and academic freedoms.
As Xi tried to remove threats to the Communist Party, many NGO workers, rights lawyers, and activists were threatened, jailed, or exiled.
AFP interviewed eight Chinese activists and intellectuals, some still active, who describe this process. Some are harassed by security officers and others are not allowed to post using their names.
“My colleagues and I have frequently experienced 24-hour interrogations,” an employee of an LGBTIQ+ rights NGO tells AFP on condition of anonymity, who suffers psychological trauma from these events.
“We have become increasingly incapable, whether from a financial, operational or personal perspective,” he adds.
Road to dismantling
The process has been long and difficult for activists.
In 2015, some 300 lawyers and human rights defenders were arrested in a wide-ranging campaign known as the “709 crackdown” because it began on July 9.
Many lawyers were jailed or under surveillance for years and others were disbarred, according to rights groups.
Another key moment was the adoption in 2016 of the so-called foreign NGO law, which imposed restrictions and gave the police extensive powers over these organizations in the country.
“In 2014 we could display protest banners, carry out scientific fieldwork and collaborate with Chinese media to expose environmental abuses,” a worker at an environmental organization told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“Now we have to inform the police before we do anything. Each project must be in collaboration with a government department that acts more like a supervisory committee », he assures.
The situation is very different in the early 2010s, when civilian groups could act under the relatively permissive climate of former President Hu Jintao.
“Several LGBTIQ+ and gender groups sprang up on campus in 2015,” recalls Carl, a member of an LGBTIQ+ group.
But in 2018, the intolerance towards activism took shape with the suppression of the #MeToo feminist movement and the arrest of dozens of student activists.
“Activities quietly permitted before were banned while ideological work like political education classes intensified,” says Carl.
In July 2022, the prestigious Beijing Tsinghua University warned two students for distributing rainbow flags and dozens of LGBTIQ+ pages of student groups were blocked.
“Unwinnable War”
Another bad omen was an internal Communist Party communique in 2013 that forbade defending what it described as Western liberal values, such as constitutional democracy or freedom of the press.
“He treated these ideologies as hostile, even though in the 1980s we could discuss them and publish books about them,” says Gao Yu, a freelance journalist in Beijing who was jailed between 2014 and 2019 for allegedly leaking this document.
“In a normal society, intellectuals can question the mistakes of the government. If not, (…) isn’t it the same as in the Mao era?” he asks, referring to the founder of communist China, Mao Zedong.
Gao, 78, is under surveillance, has no income and is unable to receive calls from abroad or meet friends. “We are all like grains of corn ground by the village mill,” he says.
In the place of Gao and his colleagues there are now famous academics who repeat the nationalist ideology of the leaders. Others have been forced out of office or watched by their own students.
“A culture of whistleblowing has flourished in the Chinese intellectual realm in the past decade,” says Wu Qiang, a former political science professor at Tsinghua and a critic of the Party.
“Students have become censors who review every sentence of the teacher, instead of learning through mutual discussion.”
Faced with this climate, many activists have left the country or suspended their militancy. Only a handful persevere despite growing hostility like online bullying.
“Maybe we’re at the bottom of the valley now … but people still talk endlessly,” says Feng Yuan, founder of the gender rights group Equity.
For others, like the environmental activist, it is an “unwinnable war” against nationalist trolls for whom NGO workers are “anti-China and brainwashed by the West.”
“It makes me feel like all my efforts were in vain,” he says.
Charles’s friends, #MeToo activist Huan Xueqing and labor rights advocate Wang Jianbing, were detained for a year without trial on charges of subversion.
In his opinion, the authorities saw his gatherings of young activists as a threat. And the bar is getting lower and lower.
“The government is now targeting individuals who do subtle, low-profile, small-scale activism,” he says. “They have made sure that there is not a new generation of activists.”