Building on Fear

In December 2017, the Second Tianjin Intermediate Court sentenced Wu Gan, whose internet nickname was “Super Vulgar Butcher,” to eight years in prison. The verdict accused Wu of “seriously threatening state security and social stability,” a crime synonymous with “counterrevolutionary” in the era of Mao Zedong (c. 1927-1976). Among his main “crimes” were providing legal support to victims of local government abuses, expressing anti-government rhetoric on the internet, “[O]rganizing boisterous protests outside courthouses and government offices,” and conducting illegal demonstrations. Among many Westerners, Wu Gan is not as famous as other Chinese political dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Fang Lizhi, a leading figure in the 1986 student demonstrations. Since 2008, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has beefed up crackdowns against outspoken political critics and Wu Gan was just one of the many minor targets. Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years of imprisonment in 2009 for his championing of a “democratic charter.” In 2014, a Beijing court convicted Xu Zhiyong, a civil rights lawyer, for “gathering a crowd to disturb public order” and sentenced him to four years in prison. In June 2016, two dissidents in Zhejiang who had tried to promote a political party and “published prodemocracy essays on overseas websites” were harshly punished with eleven years in prison.

The People's Republic's campaigns against political dissenters and critics are by no means limited to the provinces of the mainland. The Party's long arm has extended to territories considered to be part of China or even to other countries.