In October 2008, petitioner Ma Xirong sent Xu Zhiyong a plea for help. Ma had journeyed to Beijing to protest a court judgment involving her son's death, but instead found herself locked inside one of the city's black jails. Responding to her call, Xu found himself behind a youth hotel near Taoranting Park. Three enforcers jumped out of a van and began to pummel one of his associates. Xu, who had been beaten in the same place a month earlier, resisted the urge to join the altercation. “We weren't here to fight,” Xu had to remind himself, “we were here to suffer” (p. 112).
Xu Zhiyong is among China's most prominent rights lawyers. In 2014, he was sentenced to a four-year prison term for organizing grassroots efforts to support education and anti-corruption reform. To Build a Free China: A Citizen's Journey is his personal memoir, shared from prison, centred around his citizen-led vision for a freer China. From his solitary childhood growing up in a rural Henan village to his 2014 conviction in Beijing, the book offers a fascinating glimpse into the psyche of a man who has spent an entire career testing the limits of citizen advocacy in Party-run China.
Those familiar with Xu's work will be pleased to find detailed first-hand accounts of his better-known victories: his contribution to the demise of an abusive detention system in 2003 (chapter three); his successful bid as an independent candidate for a seat on his local People's Congress (chapter five); and his work with the Open Constitution Initiative (gongmeng), through which he assisted the blind “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng and victims of the sanlu milk scandal (chapter eight).
The book, however, is far from a celebration of triumphs. For every sentence suspended or petitioner saved, Xu can recount many more harrowing experiences of being investigated, detained and beaten. In chapter seven, he is mistaken for a petitioner and attacked outside the State Bureau of Letters and Visits. In chapter 12, he spends over 20 days in Beijing Number One Detention Centre on charges of tax fraud. And in chapter 27, he delivers a moving closing statement in court just before he is sentenced to prison for “gathering crowds to disrupt public order.”
Through adept translation, Xu's memoirs are told through an authentic voice that will appeal to a generalist audience. In grappling with the enormity of China's problems, Xu is often unsure of whether his approach is appropriately calibrated. “Have my actions been too radical,” he asks at one point, “or have they in fact been too timid?” (p. 141). We learn, too, that Xu is only human, failing once to control his anger as he brawls with hired thugs who have knocked a white-haired old-woman petitioner to the ground. “In the face of such brutal force,” Xu laments, “the weak often have no other weapon than their curses.”
For academics, Xu's repeated dust-ups with the state offer important case studies in entrepreneurial resistance under autocracy. Xu's distinctive style of advocacy focuses on leveraging public opinion to pressure government officials to correct obvious moral wrongs. The book very much proceeds in a series of episodic struggles between the individual and the State. Some stories, as when Xu agonizes in jail over whether he should lie to authorities to save an imprisoned colleague, tell us more about the personal struggles of the individual rather than the machinations of the State. But other stories, as when the authorities shut down Qinglong Lake Park after learning that Xu was organizing volunteers to plant trees in the park, reveal more about the insecurity of the State than the manoeuvrings of any one actor.
Readers will also find a number of compelling rejoinders to Xu's critics. At one point, Xu responds to the accusation that he undermines judicial independence through his use of media to shape public opinion: “Our aim,” he says with a lawyer's cleverness, “was to interfere with those forces outside the law that themselves interfere with the judicial process.” Later, in response to the many faceless state agents who have repeatedly asked him, “What is your motive?” Xu responds elegantly: “Love is not a conspiracy” (p. 174).
Ultimately, the book's dominant theme is optimism. Xu sees China as marching inexorably towards a liberal future, one in which his New Citizen Movement's ideals of freedom, justice, and love will “become … core value[s] for the Chinese people” (p. 282). At times, Xu's sanguinity shades into what some might consider naïveté. But for an individual to come up this many times against the machinery of the Party-state, to be rebuffed almost as many times, only to return again and again with the same level of resolve, that person must possess an outlier's sense of purpose. Xu likes to say he is just an ordinary citizen. To Build a Free China: A Citizen's Journey chronicles the early life of an individual who is anything but ordinary.
