“Sitting in a prison cell waiting for daybreak”: this is how Chinese legal activist Xu Zhiyong described the prospect of enduring a 14-year prison sentence, handed down by a Shandong court in 2023. Xu’s “crime”? Advocating for civil liberties.
Xu Qin, 63, was sentenced to four years in prison when authorities claimed her human rights activism constituted “inciting subversion”; mistreatment in detention has left her paralyzed and in dire need of medical care.
Xu Zhiyong and Xu Qin (who are not related) are just two of the 1,545 activists sentenced to prison by the Chinese government between 2019 and 2024, a period of heightened repression dictated by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping.
Beijing’s reputation for persecuting its critics is well established, but in 2017 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention issued a grim new warning: the scope and scale of arbitrary detention in China “may constitute crimes against humanity.”
Our new research echoes that concern. In the cases outlined in our report, activists were sentenced for wholly lawful acts like posting on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), defending women’s and workers’ rights, traveling or speaking to relatives abroad, or holding a primary election in Hong Kong. Every level of the criminal justice system – police, prosecutors, and courts – is complicit in these abuses across China, underscoring that the problem is widespread and systematic.
Activists paid a steep price for exercising and promoting human rights: the average prison sentence between 2019 to 2024 was six years, rising to seven if convicted of a national security crime. Three prisoners of conscience were sentenced to death, and two – including prominent Uyghur professor Rahile Dawut, who was disappeared in 2017 – were sentenced to life in prison. Forty-eight activists were given sentences of a decade or more.
Some communities are disproportionately targeted. Women make up 48 percent of China’s population, but we found that they comprise nearly 60 percent of arbitrarily detained activists. Of the more than 700 older prisoners of conscience, defined as over the age of 60, two-thirds are women. Eight percent of all prisoners of conscience we documented are Tibetan, even though they are just 0.5 percent of China’s total population. And between 2019-2024, more people were convicted of the national security crimes of “subversion” and “inciting subversion” in Hong Kong than in mainland China, according to available data.
Authorities relied heavily on three criminal charges. The most frequently used – “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” – is so vague that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk called on Chinese authorities to revise it. Religious believers find themselves prosecuted for “organizing and using a cult to undermine implementation of the law,” even when their activities are legally protected. Convictions of crimes in the category of “endangering national security” are common because the government treats peaceful criticism as a threat to the nation.
Since its first statement of concern about arbitrary detention as possible crimes against humanity in 2017, the same U.N. Working Group repeated its alarm in 25 subsequent cases. And in August 2022, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights determined that the Chinese government’s policies and treatment of Muslim groups in the Uyghur region may also constitute crimes against humanity.
And yet as the U.N. Human Rights Council, the world’s flagship political human rights body, meets in Geneva debating some of the most serious human rights crises globally, one government’s crimes are notably absent from its agenda.
Beijing has succeeded in thwarting U.N. scrutiny because it pressures and purchases other governments’ support. Democracies came tantalizingly close to having a debate about the Uyghur region report in October 2022. They should use these new findings about arbitrary detention to redouble efforts to examine the CCP’s crimes against humanity. They should also support a special session focused on China at the HRC, and sustain their support for independent civil society.
Thanks to the impunity the CCP has enjoyed thus far, its leaders can continue to punish critically important, rights-respecting groups and individuals inside the country – some of the only independent sources of information about domestic developments, like COVID-19. Chinese officials are also emboldened to commit crimes beyond the country’s borders, including harassing critics in democracies. More governments than ever before have a stake in ending Xi’s human rights violations.
In that same court statement, Xu Zhiyong said his “life has been one arduous journey toward a dream that was also the dream of generations of Chinese before me.” To end the nightmare of Xi’s vast human rights crimes, democracies should step up international efforts to challenge Beijing’s crimes against humanity, and align with the aspirations of human rights defenders across China.