Xu Zhangrun: China’s persecuted voice of democracy

Xu Zhangrun is not a name you hear often in SA. But we should know him since he is one of the world’s great literary proponents of democracy. Xu used to be a professor of law at Tsinghua University in Beijing, but since March 2019 has been the subject of increasingly harsh measures by the Chinese state.

His plight, like the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, has not elicited a response from the ANC. Instead, the minister of social development, Lindiwe Zulu, pranced around during the lockdown in the red star cap of the Chinese army while 2.2-million people lost their jobs and 9-million children went hungry.

In February, Xu wrote an essay, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear, that explains how Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, altered the course of modern Chinese history. Xi turned away from political reform and instituted a Mao Zedong-style personality cult. The result of this is that China has been experiencing, as Xu describes in a 2018 essay, Imminent Fears, Immediate Hopes, a “thoroughgoing return to totalitarian politics”.

In Viral Alarm, Xu writes: “I can all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last thing I write. But that is not up to me.” He was arrested on July 6 and released on July 12, and continues to be isolated under house arrest. All for seeking “freedom … that secular value that is the most divine aspiration of humankind”. Individuals in China are standing up for Xu at great cost. The publisher Geng Xiaonan publicly supported Xu and echoed his call for democracy. On September 9, Geng and her husband were arrested. The interrogations continue and, eventually, Geng and Xu will enter China’s vast system of re-education camps.

And those camps are humming in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, home to the mostly Muslim Turkic Uyghur minority. Since 2017, the Chinese state has built 380 concentration camps in Xinjiang and has interned at least 1-million Uyghurs in them for “crimes” such as praying, studying abroad, wearing a veil or having children. Eleven-million Uyghurs live in Xinjiang. Despite the Chinese state’s best efforts to control information, details of the repression leak out. There are tender documents for camp construction, memos on how to run the camps, survivor testimonies and satellite photos.

The details are disturbing: beatings, torture, rape, forced labour, indoctrination in the glories of the Communist Party and the evils of religion. On July 1, US customs intercepted a shipment from Xinjiang of 11.8t of human hair taken from a camp of inmates to be sold as hair weaves. Mosques, cemeteries and shrines have been bulldozed. One of the holiest sites for Uyghurs, the Sultanim Cemetery in Hotan city, was razed last year and replaced with a parking lot. Uyghurs are subjected to intense electronic surveillance, what Xu calls “big data totalitarianism”, and overwhelming pressure to assimilate into Han Chinese culture and only speak Mandarin.

Communist Party cadres are sent to Uyghur homes to “live” with families and Uyghur children are forcibly sent to state orphanages. The Associated Press and China scholar Adrian Zenz have revealed an ongoing campaign of mass sterilisation. Zenz writes: “Documents from 2019 reveal plans for a campaign of mass female sterilisation in [two] rural Uyghur regions, targeting 14% and 34% of all married women of child-bearing age … By 2019, Xinjiang planned to subject at least 80% of women of child-bearing age in the rural southern four minority prefectures to intrusive birth prevention surgeries.”

Xu’s core thesis is that, starting with the Qing dynasty in 1860, there have been three waves of reform, all leading towards democracy and freedom

Uyghur birth rates have plummeted. This is genocide. The UN’s Convention on the Prevention & Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) states: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.

Xu’s core thesis is that, starting with the Qing dynasty in 1860, there have been three waves of reform, all leading towards democracy and freedom. The third wave of reform began in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping started the reform and open door policy, and ended when Xi came to power in 2012. In Viral Alarm, Xu says that “a political culture has been nurtured that, in terms of the actual public good, is ethically bankrupt, for it is one that strains to vouchsafe its privatised party-state … while abandoning the people over which it holds sway to suffer the vicissitudes of a cruel fate”.

We shouldn’t just know Xu, we should listen to him with every ounce of our being. For when information is withheld, power monopolised and liberty cast aside, you get “a system that turns every natural disaster into an even greater man-made catastrophe”.

• Taylor is a research associate of the Unit for Environmental Ethics, department of philosophy, Stellenbosch University