第104案 | 徐文立Case 104 | Xu Wenli
同道叫他「异见教父」，监狱叫他「001」。徐文立本来只是北京铁路系统的一个电工，业余自修政治学，1978年冬天办起民主墙上第一份平民私办的刊物《四五论坛》。为这份刊物、一次游行、一场组党座谈和一份变法建议书，他1981年被捕，1982年以「反革命」判刑十五年，在单独关押与三年不见家人的囚室里，偷偷写出一份《我的自我辩护》送出了高墙。1993年他提前出狱，五年后又走到同一步：1998年，他公开向民政部门申请、把名单贴在网上，组建中国民主党——回答他的是三个半小时的审理和十三年「颠覆国家政权」，检方举证里最大的一笔「资金」是五百美元。两段刑期合计二十八年，他实服十六年。两次出狱都不是因为判决被认为错了：一次赶上申奥，一次在圣诞夜被警车直接送上停机坪，赶美国报纸的晨版。他说过，离开的条件只有一个：妻子同行。人已经八十三岁，住在普罗维登斯；那两份判决，一份也没有被撤销过。His comrades called him the Godfather of Dissent; the prison called him 001. Xu Wenli was a Beijing railway electrician who studied political science on his own time, and in the winter of 1978 founded April Fifth Forum, Democracy Wall's first privately run civilian journal. For that journal, one march, one conversation about founding a party and one reform proposal, he was arrested in 1981 and sentenced in 1982 to fifteen years as a 'counterrevolutionary'; in solitary confinement, across years when he saw no member of his family, he secretly wrote a Self-Defense and got it out over the wall. Paroled in 1993, five years later he arrived at the same step again: in 1998 he founded the China Democracy Party in the open — filing registration applications with the civil affairs bureaus, posting the membership list on the internet — and the answer was a trial of three and a half hours and thirteen years for 'subversion of state power', on evidence whose largest item of 'funding' was five hundred dollars. The two sentences total twenty-eight years; he served sixteen. Neither release came because a judgment was found wrong: one coincided with an Olympic bid, the other was delivered by police car to an airport tarmac on Christmas Eve, in time for the American morning editions. He named one condition for leaving: that his wife go with him. He is eighty-three now, living in Providence. Neither judgment has ever been revoked.
The man: born in Anfu, rooted in Anqing, an electrician who refused university
Xu Wenli was born on 9 July 1943. Birthplace and ancestral home must be written separately, because both appear in the sources and they do not contradict each other: the Hoover Institution and the English and Chinese Wikipedias record his birth in Anfu County, Jiangxi Province, in the middle of the war against Japan; his ancestral home is Anqing, Anhui, and the Chinese Wikipedia entry opens by calling him a man of Anqing, Anhui, while also recording the Anfu birth. This page's treatment: born in Anfu, Jiangxi; ancestral home Anqing, Anhui; the layering is stated here and in the Verification Note rather than being compressed into a single misleading label. His father, Xu Yuwen, was a wartime military surgeon who directed a rear hospital and held general-officer rank (the English Wikipedia's formulation; this page records him as a general-grade army surgeon and adds no specific rank). After the war the family moved successively through Nanjing, Chu County in Anhui, Fuzhou in Fujian and Anqing, where he finished elementary school. In 1957 he went to Changchun to attend the high school attached to Northeast Normal University; in 1960 he moved to Beijing to live with his mother and elder siblings, studying at Beijing No. 7 High School.
In 1963 he finished high school with an outstanding record — and decided not to apply to university. The Hoover Institution and Wikipedia agree on the reason: dissatisfaction with the higher-education system and its teaching methods, and a determination to be an independent, self-taught thinker. He taught himself philosophy, political science, history and world literature, and made several self-funded study trips to the countryside in 1963–64. From 1964 to 1969 he served in the People's Liberation Army Naval Air Force. After demobilisation he joined the Beijing Railway Branch and worked there from 1969 until his arrest in 1981 — as an electrician. In Reason magazine's long 1988 account he described himself as a "small potato", a forty-three-year-old electrician. The biography deserves slowing down at exactly this point: he was not a theorist produced by an academy, nor a professional revolutionary on any organisation's payroll. He was a railway electrician who studied political science in his spare time, and who at thirty-five started a journal. Only with that in view can the weight of the two later judgments be felt: the state machine spent twenty-eight years of sentences on what an electrician did after his shifts.
In 1977 he applied to study the history of publishing in Peking University's journalism department (English Wikipedia). The detail stands alone in the biographical record; this page records it with its attribution and builds nothing on it. What carried him onto the public stage was the aftermath of 1976 and the thaw of the winter of 1978. In April 1976, after Zhou Enlai's death, Beijing saw the mourning-and-protest movement remembered as the April Fifth Movement, which was suppressed; Xu took part in the workers' mourning activities (Lawyers Committee biography). In November 1978, around the movement's official rehabilitation, posters began appearing on a wall at Xidan in Beijing, and the Democracy Wall movement was under way. He named his journal April Fifth Forum — the name itself nails the spring of 1976 into the masthead: it was taken from the April Fifth Movement, in memory of people who had been punished for mourning. The name was the programme, and it later appeared in his indictment.
April Fifth Forum: the longest-lived journal of Democracy Wall
April Fifth Forum was founded in November 1978. It was the Democracy Wall movement's first journal to be run privately by civilians (the Hoover Institution and the English Wikipedia agree), and its editorial office was Xu Wenli's own apartment — on 23 June 1979 the Austrian journalist Helmut Opletal interviewed him at length at 274 Baiguang Street in Beijing, in that apartment-cum-office; the transcript survives in the University of Vienna's "Peking Spring" archive project, and in it Xu observed that in thirty years of the People's Republic no private newspaper had ever appeared. That sentence is his own positioning of the journal: not that its contents were the most radical, but that private publishing itself was happening for the first time since 1949.
The journal's scale and lifespan cross-check: from November 1978 to January 1980 it published seventeen issues, making it the longest-lasting civilian publication of the Democracy Wall movement (English Wikipedia; his main partners were Zhao Nan and Lü Pu). That winter, the Xidan wall carried hundreds of posters and dozens of unofficial journals, most of which lived only a few months. April Fifth Forum lived for fourteen. Its manner, on Reason's account, was academic rather than polemical — it discussed institutions and paths of reform rather than chanting slogans. The manner is the same line as his lifelong political route: open, rational, peaceful reform from within the system — the route he himself summarised in 1997 as "openness, rationality, peace and non-violence" was already formed in the journal of 1978.
Two further episodes of the Democracy Wall period later entered the 1981 conviction narrative, and both must be pinned. First, on 1 October 1979 he took part in organising and leading the demonstration of the "Stars" art exhibition — a march by self-taught painters whose show had been shut down (English Wikipedia and its sources). Second, from 10 to 12 June 1980, at Ganjiakou in Beijing, he met Wang Xizhe, Sun Weibang and Liu Er'an to discuss founding a political opposition party (English Wikipedia). Note the date: by June 1980 he was already seriously discussing party-founding. His two imprisonments — the first indictment's "organising counterrevolutionary groups", the second's founding of the China Democracy Party — stand eighteen years apart, but the idea of a party was on the table at Ganjiakou in the summer of 1980.
Third, the writing. On 15 November 1980 he put forward his "Gengshen Reform Proposal", calling for comprehensive reform of Chinese society (the Chinese and English Wikipedias agree). 1980 was a gengshen year, and "reform" — bianfa — reaches straight back to the reformers of 1898: he placed himself in the genealogy of China's modern reformers, not its revolutionaries. That self-placement recurs throughout his life: what he wanted was reform by edict and law, not insurrection. The 1981 judgment did not see it that way. Democracy Wall was progressively closed down from late 1979; Wei Jingsheng had already been sentenced to fifteen years in 1979; in the spring of 1981 the turn of the journal editors came. On the night of 9 April 1981 the police entered Xu Wenli's home.
The night of 9 April 1981: the first arrest, and seventeen months of waiting
The date of the first arrest is carried by this page in graded parallel. The Hoover Institution and both Wikipedias give 9 April 1981; the Chinese Wikipedia specifies the night of 9 April; the Lawyers Committee biography speaks of a "midnight raid"; Reason magazine's 1988 report gives an arrest at midnight on 10 April 1981 and seventeen months in detention before trial. The three formulations point at the same night — the night of 9–10 April. This page takes the night of 9 April as its baseline, records Reason's "midnight on 10 April" as a same-night variant, and does not pretend to settle the hour. The New York Times of 20 April 1981 carried an Associated Press report of China's arrest of two political activists (as cited by the English Wikipedia) — among the earliest international records of that wave of arrests.
After the arrest came some seventeen months of detention (Reason). In 1982 he was convicted and sentenced: the Dui Hua Foundation's release statement dates the conviction to June 1982; the offences were organising counterrevolutionary groups and counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement; the sentence was fifteen years' imprisonment with four years' deprivation of political rights (the Hoover Institution, Dui Hua and both Wikipedias agree). English-language summaries of the charge vary slightly — Human Rights Watch's 2002 release paraphrases the original charge as "illegally organising a clique to overthrow the government", and Brown University's introduction uses "illegally organising a clique to overthrow the government" as well — and this page takes the Chinese offence names as its baseline, treating the English variants as reference only. The conduct on which the conviction rested, as later accounts summarise it, was exactly the Democracy Wall record: editing April Fifth Forum, the Stars exhibition march, the Ganjiakou party discussion, the Gengshen Reform Proposal. One journal, one march, one conversation, one proposal — fifteen years.
On the openness of the proceedings: the Lawyers Committee biography states that he was "tried in secret". The full text of the judgment and a detailed account of the trial were not found by this site in any public source — no public record; what the outside world knows of that procedure comes chiefly from the Self-Defense he wrote in prison, which is the next section's story. One piece of arithmetic belongs here first: he was thirty-seven when arrested in April 1981; a full fifteen years would have freed him at fifty-two. His daughter Xu Jin was about nine at the time (the Brown Alumni Magazine's reckoning from her history: she was nine when her father was first arrested). A nine-year-old who wanted her father home had first to wait out her entire childhood.
Beijing No. 1 Prison: prisoner "001", solitary confinement, and a self-defense smuggled out
The first term was served in Beijing No. 1 Prison (Boston University's BU Bridge, January 1999; Human Rights Watch). The Lawyers Committee's biography of him uses a name his colleagues used and a number: his fellow dissidents called him the "Godfather of Dissent" — the BBC used the same title in 1998 — but for most of twenty years, inside the prison, he was known simply as "001", his prisoner identification number. This page records the title and the number on the Lawyers Committee's text, without embroidery: a man called a godfather outside the walls was, inside them, a number — and number one.
The conditions of confinement are recorded in layers, not merged into a single figure. Boston University's report (on his daughter Xu Jin's account): across twelve years in No. 1 Prison his human contact was limited; his wife and daughter could visit for forty minutes roughly every two months, except for a period of about three years when he was kept in a tiny cell and allowed no visitors whatsoever. Brown University's introduction (its press release): he was paroled after serving twelve years and forty-eight days, much of it in solitary confinement, and his health suffered significantly. The Lawyers Committee biography: visits were only sporadic and brief; in his cell he secretly drafted My Self-Defense, a memoir documenting his secret trial and imprisonment — and in retaliation the authorities placed him in solitary confinement, where he remained until his release in 1993. The Brown Alumni Magazine's long profile gives one further concrete image: after a prison diary of his was smuggled out and published, he was moved from ordinary solitary confinement into a still smaller cell — "three square meters", he says — where he remained for four years. The four-year figure comes from that magazine's interview with Xu himself and is recorded with that attribution; it does not necessarily contradict Boston University's "about three years without visits" — one speaks of a cell and a span of years, the other of the interruption of visits — and this page sets them side by side rather than rounding either into the other.
How My Self-Defense got out is the most important single thread of this term. Reason reported in 1988: in 1985, through contacts within China's secret police, the magazine China Spring managed to spirit out of a Beijing prison a 243-page manuscript entitled "My Defense", written by Xu Wenli, the former editor of April Fifth Forum. This page records that route on Reason's attribution — the "contacts within the secret police" element is Reason's claim, not independently corroborated, and is graded as a single-source relay. The Lawyers Committee's version is simpler: he drafted the memoir covertly in his cell, documenting his secret trial and imprisonment. Either way, the substance is this: in solitary confinement, in the years when he saw no family at all, the thing he did was write a defence — a public record for a secret trial. That manuscript became one of the principal texts through which the outside world of the 1980s understood the fate of the Democracy Wall generation, and the only large-scale utterance of prisoner "001" in twelve years.
The health ledger, by the end of 1992, could no longer be carried. The China section of Human Rights Watch's World Report 1993 records that at the end of 1992 Xu Wenli, Ren Wanding and Li Guiren were all in urgent need of medical treatment: Ren had retinal and cataract problems; Li was too weak to walk; and Xu "had lost control of his bladder". This page records the symptom in Human Rights Watch's own words and draws no medical inference. A man of forty-nine, held in prison until incontinent, with more than three years of his sentence still to run. In the spring of 1993 the situation suddenly turned — and the turn came not from inside the prison but from the large chessboard outside it.
26 May 1993: parole, thirty-five months early
Xu Wenli was released on 26 May 1993 (the New York Times carried the Associated Press report the same day — "Beijing Frees Foe It Held 12 Years"; both Wikipedias and Dui Hua agree). The legal form and the size of the remission: Dui Hua records that he was paroled thirty-five months before the conclusion of his fifteen-year sentence; Brown gives parole after twelve years and forty-eight days served; the Brown Alumni Magazine relays the formula "released for good behavior". This page's treatment: the form of release is parole, on Dui Hua and Brown; the "good behavior" formula is carried alongside on the magazine's attribution — because the official formula for parole and the real drivers of a release are never the same thing, and the drivers must be attributed separately.
The grading of the drivers runs as follows. The family's account: his daughter Xu Jin told Boston University that he was released in 1993 at the urging of the U.S. government; China was then applying to host the 2000 Olympics and wanted to soften its human-rights image. The Brown Alumni Magazine's narrative agrees: Beijing, hoping to persuade the world it deserved the Games, was responding to international pressure to improve its human-rights record. The contemporaneous records of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International confirm one factual layer: in 1993 three Democracy Wall veterans detained since the late 1970s and early 1980s — Wei Jingsheng, Xu Wenli and Wang Xizhe — were released amid wide publicity (Amnesty International, January 1994), and Amnesty added that many political prisoners of the same generation remained inside, among China's "forgotten prisoners". This page's summary: the release on 26 May 1993 is a multiply confirmed fact; the "Olympic bid and American pressure" explanation is the shared account of the family and several human-rights organisations and is adopted with that attribution; it has never been acknowledged by the authorities, and this page does not write it as an official reason.
He was fifty years old in the year of his release. Twelve years and forty-eight days. He had missed his daughter's whole growing-up, from nine to twenty-one, and he had missed 1989 — in that year he was in prison, and what happened outside reached him only through the cracks of a cell. By ordinary reckoning, a man released after twelve years with a ruined body should rest, recover, and be with his family. What Xu Wenli did instead fills the next section: over five years, under round-the-clock surveillance, he talked the unfinished conversation of Ganjiakou in 1980 all the way into a political party.
Five years out: constant surveillance, at least eight detentions, and a human-rights group that was never approved
For the years 1993 to 1998, this page's spine is two Human Rights Watch documents. Its press release of 24 December 2002 is the most complete: after his 1993 release, surveillance was constant, and he was briefly detained at least eight times, for such things as appealing for government permission to set up an independent group to monitor Chinese human-rights conditions and publishing the first few issues of the unofficial Human Rights Monitor. Human Rights Watch's 1998 dissident-activity chronology (entry of 30 November 1998) adds that since his return to open activism in 1996 the Beijing Public Security Bureau had kept a constant watch on him, frequently hauling him in for questioning, and that surveillance increased after he and Qin Yongmin formed China Human Rights Watch in March 1998. Read together, the two documents give a graduated timeline rather than a blanket claim: not uniform high-intensity activism from the day of release, but a return to open work from 1996, with surveillance hardening in step — and this page writes the five years in that layered form, even though the 2002 release's own wording is simply that surveillance "was constant".
One scene from those years must be pinned separately, because it concerns the family. Human Rights Watch's World Report 1995 records that in early April 1994, after Xu Wenli had been detained twice within twenty-four hours, his wife tried to talk with foreign reporters and police officers forcibly dragged her into her house; five foreign journalists were held for questioning in the incident. (The same report notes that Xu and other Beijing and Shanghai dissidents had been detained just before French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur's visit that April, and that the Chinese Foreign Ministry denied the detentions had taken place at all.) This page records the scene on Human Rights Watch's attribution: a wife, trying to tell foreign reporters about her detained husband, dragged back indoors by police — the first time He Xintong appears in this case's archive as an actor rather than as a visitor.
On 29 November 1997 he set out his political programme — "end the one-party system, establish the Third Republic, rebuild constitutional democracy, and protect human rights and freedom" — and his political route of "transparency, rationality, peace and non-violence", and began, with Qin Yongmin and dissidents across the country, to build a Chinese political opposition (the Chinese and English Wikipedias agree). In March 1998, after China announced its decision to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, he promptly applied in Beijing to register a human-rights organisation called China Human Rights Watch (Human Rights Watch, Nipped in the Bud); the Human Rights Watch fax-letter produced with Qin Yongmin's circle ran to eighty-six issues before the authorities stopped it in May 1998 (the same report, recording Qin's Wuhan fax publication — the issue count belongs to that publication and is recorded on the report's attribution, not conflated with Xu's own Beijing issues). Meanwhile he travelled around the country meeting dissidents in province after province, preparing the organisational and intellectual ground for an opposition party (the Hoover Institution; Wikipedia). The watchers watched all of it, and recorded all of it. In June 1998, Hangzhou moved first.
Founding a party in 1998: from the Hangzhou declaration to the Beijing–Tianjin branch
The China Democracy Party's starting point has an exact date and place. On 25 June 1998, on the eve of U.S. President Bill Clinton's state visit, Wang Youcai and others in Hangzhou signed the "Open Declaration of the Establishment of the CDP Zhejiang Preparatory Committee" and applied to the Zhejiang Civil Affairs Bureau for formal registration (Human Rights Watch, Nipped in the Bud). It was the first time since the founding of the People's Republic that anyone had attempted to register the preparatory organisation of an opposition party through legal channels. The declaration's position was stated in the open: all political power can only come from the public and can only be used in the public's service; a government is the public's servant, not its master (this page paraphrases the declaration as quoted by Human Rights Watch rather than quoting it at length). In the months that followed, preparatory committees formed province by province, all walking the same road: applications to civil affairs departments, invoking Article 35 of the constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that China had just signed. The strategy, from the first day, was openness and legality — open to the point of posting some two hundred members' names and telephone numbers on the internet (Human Rights Watch: by December 1998 there were some twenty-four provincial preparatory committees).
The authorities' response came in two phases. The first was delay and localised pressure: on 10 July 1998, shortly after Clinton left China, Wang Youcai and fourteen others were detained; Wang was formally arrested on 7 August on an incitement charge and then, unusually, released on 31 August into residential surveillance (Human Rights Watch). In September, Beijing preparatory figures including Ren Wanding planned their registration; members were interrogated and a home was ransacked, and the police put the position plainly — China remained under Communist Party leadership, and forming parties was not permitted (Human Rights Watch, relaying a participant's account). The second phase was definition from the top: on 1 December 1998 Li Peng, chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, told the German daily Handelsblatt that any group designed to negate the leadership of the Communist Party "will not be allowed to exist" (Human Rights Watch, quoting the interview). The question the founders had spent half a year testing — does the law permit an opposition party to register? — received its answer at the highest level on 1 December. Note the date: on the day that answer was published, Xu Wenli was already in detention.
Xu's place in the founding: on 9 November 1998 he and Zha Jianguo, Gao Hongming, Liu Shizun and He Depu announced the establishment of the CDP's Beijing–Tianjin branch, with Xu as chairman (Human Rights Watch's chronology and report; Dui Hua; both Wikipedias — some lists name six announcers rather than five, and this page takes the five-name list as its baseline and notes the variance here). The decision was controversial inside the movement at the time: Hangzhou and others considered that proclaiming a "branch" implied the party was already operational rather than still in preparation, and therefore premature (Human Rights Watch). Xu's judgement was to step forward. On 10 November the CDP's National Preparatory Committee wrote directly to the State Council, asking to exercise what it called the heaven-bestowed right to organise a party; the letter carried fifty-three signatures from nineteen provinces and municipalities (Human Rights Watch). On 11 November the Beijing–Tianjin branch issued its first statement, saying it would take two years to build the party and hoped to convene a first national congress at the beginning of 2000 (Human Rights Watch). From 9 November to 30 November is twenty-one days. A party half a year in preparation had, in its Beijing branch, an open existence of twenty-one days.
30 November 1998: detained a second time, and a four-hour search
On 30 November 1998 Xu Wenli was detained. The operational detail is layered by source. Human Rights Watch's 1998 chronology (entry of 30 November) records that some twenty officials arrived with search and arrest warrants describing him as a "criminal suspect", then searched his home for four hours, seizing his computer, printer, fax machine and various China Democracy Party documents. Human Rights in China's statement of 21 December 1998 records an exhaustive search that night, confiscating a computer, address books and party-founding documents. Amnesty International's document (ASA 17/42/98) records that from his detention on 30 November his wife He Xintong was denied all information about his whereabouts and legal status until 18 December, when she was informed of the trial date. The three accounts differ slightly on the seizure list (the printer and fax machine appear in the chronology but not the other two), and this page records them in layers rather than merging them into a single "complete" inventory. PEN International's bulletin of 22 December 1998 gives his arrest as 1 December — one day later than the detention date — and this page follows 30 November (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Human Rights in China in agreement), carrying PEN's 1 December in the Verification Note as a variant.
He was held at Beijing's Banbuqiao Detention Center (Human Rights Watch, Nipped in the Bud). From detention to trial: three weeks. Amnesty International observed that the three founders — Xu Wenli, Wang Youcai and Qin Yongmin — were brought to trial barely three weeks after detention, at a speed that made it impossible for the defendants to hire lawyers of their own choice or prepare a proper defence; Wang and Qin had no lawyers at all at their trials, and Xu had only a state-appointed one (Amnesty International's own words, in substance). The wave's wider arithmetic: within three weeks at least thirty-two people had been detained or questioned (the Associated Press, reporting from Beijing on 21 December 1998); the three leading defendants were tried within days of one another in Beijing, Hangzhou and Wuhan. On 18 December, speaking in Japan, Jiang Zemin set the tone for the wave in a phrase: infiltrating, subversive and splittist activities must be "nipped in the bud" (Human Rights Watch, quoting the speech) — Human Rights Watch later took that very phrase as the title of its full report on the party's suppression.
21 December 1998: a trial of three and a half hours
The proceedings began earlier than the trial day: on court material, Human Rights Watch's Nipped in the Bud records that court proceedings against Xu Wenli started on 9 December 1998; the indictment accused him under Articles 105(1), 106 and 66 of the Criminal Law of plotting to overthrow the government and undermine state security, and noted his advocacy of "ending one-party dictatorship, establishing a third republic, and guaranteeing human rights and freedom". The prosecution's evidence, on that report, included: drafting the Democracy Party's declaration and programmatic documents and circulating them; recruiting members; "linking up" with Yan Jiaqi, the exiled former adviser to Zhao Ziyang, and collaborating with him in drafting the party's constitution; calling for independent labour unions; giving interviews to foreign journalists; and accepting US$500 from abroad. The official Xinhua version (as relayed by Amnesty International) held that in November Xu had "secretly planned the founding of the so-called Beijing and Tianjin regional Party Committee of the China Democratic Party, with the purpose of subverting state power", had attempted to recruit members, and had sought and accepted funds from "hostile organisations abroad" in order to organise subversive activities; the Associated Press added that Xinhua said the courts had ruled that Xu and Wang should be "severely punished" as repeat offenders. This page sets the two evidentiary texts side by side: the human-rights report's version and the state news agency's; the skeleton of the accusation is the same in both — a party, some members, some interviews, five hundred dollars.
The defence requires the correction of a detail that is easily written wrong. Xu Wenli's lawyer was Mo Shaoping: the Associated Press report of the day names him as "the court-appointed attorney, Mo Shaoping" and quotes him; Human Rights Watch's 2000 report records that Mo defended him free of charge and argued in court that there was no evidence Xu had been directly involved in drafting the party charter and that the other allegations had no basis. Human Rights Watch's pre-trial statement of 18 December 1998 adds that Xu's lawyer had his first meeting with his client only on the Thursday before the trial — 17 December. That is to say, "state-appointed lawyer" and "Mo Shaoping defended him" are not two contradictory accounts but two faces of one fact: the lawyer was Mo Shaoping, but he entered the case by court appointment rather than family choice, and first saw his client four days before the hearing. This page records the fact in that assembled form and explains the assembly in the Verification Note.
The hearing itself: 21 December 1998, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court, lasting about three and a half hours (Amnesty International, the Associated Press and the New York Times in agreement). Outside, scores of uniformed and plainclothes police sealed off the court and foreign reporters were kept five hundred metres from the building; inside, his wife was the only friend or family member permitted to watch, alongside an audience selected by court officials (the Associated Press). Xu's bearing in court is consistent across sources: he refused to answer questions from prosecutors and judges and responded only to those of his own lawyer (the Associated Press, relaying Mo Shaoping). Human Rights Watch's report records that he told the court the trial was a grave political repression of the China Democracy Party, that he refused to answer any questions from the prosecution, and that he stressed the party's formation aimed not at beating down or overthrowing the Communist Party but merely at ending one-party rule by peaceful means. The sentence: subversion of state power, thirteen years' imprisonment and three years' deprivation of political rights — the longest term given to a Chinese dissident in three years (the Associated Press). Asked whether he would appeal, he answered that he would not, on the ground that this was political persecution (the Associated Press, relaying Mo Shaoping's account of his words; PEN International's bulletin likewise records that he had no intention of appealing — this page grades the sentence as a relayed account of his position, not as a verbatim quotation). The same day, Wang Youcai was sentenced in Hangzhou to eleven years; Qin Yongmin, tried in Wuhan on 17 December, was sentenced on 22 December to twelve years (Human Rights Watch). The judgements of Human Rights in China's executive director Xiao Qiang and of Human Rights Watch's Asia director on that day are preserved in the next section, on the international reaction.
Boston University's BU Bridge report of January 1999 gives the sentencing date as "20 December" and the trial's length as three hours, at variance with every other account (21 December, about three and a half hours); that report's source was his daughter Xu Jin's telling. This page takes 21 December and about three and a half hours as its baseline — Amnesty International, the Associated Press, the New York Times and Human Rights Watch agree — and carries the BU Bridge version in the Verification Note as a family-relayed variant: retained, not deleted, because it comes from the mouth of his closest family, and the archive's method with such a variant is to grade it, not to pretend it does not exist.
The second term: Banbuqiao, Tuanhe, Yanqing — and a hepatitis B diagnosis in 1999
The order of his places of imprisonment had to be assembled from three sources, and the assembly is shown to the reader here. Human Rights Watch's Nipped in the Bud (2000) records that, according to his wife, after the trial he was transferred from Banbuqiao Detention Center to Tuanhe Reform-Through-Labour Farm on the outskirts of Beijing, but that he was "now" held in Yanqing Prison. Human Rights Watch's testimony to the U.S. Congress in January 1999 likewise states that Xu Wenli had recently been transferred to Yanqing Prison. The Dui Hua Foundation's 2002 release statement closes the sequence with the warden of Yanqing Prison ordering his release. Assembled, the order is: Banbuqiao Detention Center (pre-trial custody) → Tuanhe Reform-Through-Labour Farm (the early post-sentence period, on his wife's relayed account) → Yanqing Prison (1999 to his release in 2002). This page records the sequence in that order; the Tuanhe segment's evidence grade is "his wife, relayed by Human Rights Watch", while Yanqing rests on two mutually confirming sources — the congressional testimony and the Dui Hua statement. The release date the judgment had written for him, on Human Rights Watch's report, was 29 November 2011 — thirteen years counted from 30 November 1998. That date never arrived, because he was freed in 2002; but it belongs in the archive: it was the future the judgment had assigned to a man of fifty-five — imprisonment until he was sixty-eight.
Health is this term's main line. PEN International's Writers in Prison Committee, in an urgent bulletin of 14 March 2000, records that Xu Wenli was officially diagnosed with hepatitis B in September 1999, having exhibited symptoms for several months; the bulletin considered his condition severe, and reported his wife He Xintong's account that, despite her appeals for improved treatment, he was still receiving insufficient medical care and a poor diet. The Lawyers Committee biography likewise records the 1999 hepatitis B diagnosis, and that the lobbying by family and international organisations centred in part on medical care. Brown University's introduction supplies the first term's old ledger: the health that had begun to return after his 1993 parole deteriorated rapidly in the second term, particularly from malnutrition and hepatitis B infection. By 2002 his wife feared he would die in prison (the Brown Alumni Magazine). On the eve of the June Fourth anniversary in 2002, He Xintong staged a well-publicised hunger strike that politically embarrassed the authorities (the Brown Alumni Magazine's account; this page records it on that attribution — the strike's exact duration and location are matters of no public record). At the same time their daughter Xu Jin, in the United States, lobbied politicians and wrote to the editors of prominent newspapers on her father's behalf (the same magazine). One family in three places: a man in a cell in Yanqing with a worsening liver, a wife on hunger strike in Beijing, a daughter writing letters in Boston — the release of the winter of 2002 was pushed into being from all three places at once, and, of course, by the bargain between great powers described in the next section.
The international record: from "prisoner of conscience" to a name on the human-rights dialogue table
The international record falls into three periods. The first is the 1980s: Amnesty International adopted Xu Wenli as a prisoner of conscience — a status its 1998 document confirms again ("jailed for 12 years as a prisoner of conscience"). In 1985 his Self-Defense reached the outside world through China Spring, becoming a window through which the West followed the fate of the Democracy Wall generation; Free China Review ran a 1986 piece on the tortured cry of the imprisoned dissident (as cited by the English Wikipedia). At his release in 1993 the New York Times reported the same day, and Amnesty International's document of the following year set him alongside Wei Jingsheng and Wang Xizhe as the three famous dissidents released in 1993 amid wide publicity.
The second period is December 1998. On 18 December Human Rights Watch's pre-trial statement demanded that the proceedings be open to the international press and diplomatic corps, argued that the three men's efforts were protected by the association provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and recorded that foreign journalists and diplomats (including a U.S. embassy official) had been denied access to the courtrooms and that Human Rights Watch's request to send a trial observer had gone unanswered. On 21 December, the day of the sentences, Human Rights Watch condemned them: its Asia director Sidney Jones noted that China had signed the Covenant only two months earlier and then rushed through summary trials of party-founders; the statement called on dialogue partners to press at the highest level for commutation, to suspend high-level trade delegations scheduled for early 1999, and to bring a resolution condemning China's human-rights record at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights the following March. Amnesty International's document of the same day (ASA 17/42/98) called the three trials "a state-managed exercise and a mockery of justice" and demanded the prisoners' immediate and unconditional release. Human Rights in China's statement the same day expressed outrage; its executive director Xiao Qiang said the three men were not attempting to subvert the government but simply trying to hold it accountable to its own people. PEN International's bulletin of 22 December likewise demanded his release. The U.S. State Department criticised the trials publicly as "a step backwards in what had been an improved human rights performance over the last year or two"; a senior British Foreign Ministry official said he was shocked at the severity of the sentences; German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said the sentences threatened Sino-German human-rights talks (all as compiled by Human Rights Watch in Nipped in the Bud). Inside China there was a response too: more than two hundred dissidents addressed a petition to the government demanding the prisoners' release and launched a hunger strike scheduled from 24 December 1998 to 10 April 1999, which in practice continued through January 1999 (Human Rights Watch).
The third period is the rescue campaign of 2000 to 2002. In September 2000 Human Rights Watch published its thirty-five-page report Nipped in the Bud, systematically documenting the party's emergence and the sentencing of at least thirty-four of its members, and demanding the release of all party prisoners. In March 2000 PEN International issued an urgent appeal over his hepatitis B, demanding adequate medical care immediately and unconditional release. His case then entered the formal agenda of the resumed U.S.–China human-rights dialogue: the Dui Hua Foundation records that Xu Wenli's case was a focus of the dialogue that resumed in Washington in October 2001. On the European side, Ambassador Tyge Lehmann of Denmark, who led the European delegation in the November 2002 EU–China bilateral dialogue, argued strongly for granting Xu humanitarian clemency and "significantly contributed" to his medical parole (the Dui Hua Foundation's own words). The Jamestown Foundation's China Brief relays John Kamm's account that the decision to free Xu was made at "the highest level" during President Jiang Zemin's visit to President George W. Bush's Texas ranch in October 2002 — this page records that as Kamm's account relayed by Jamestown; the other end of the transaction is the Dui Hua Foundation's own record that the details of the release and departure were finalised at the latest round of the dialogue held in Beijing on 16–17 December 2002. The two records stand together: one says the decision was made at the ranch in October, the other that the details were settled at the table in December — and this page does not pretend to adjudicate which moment was "really" the decisive one; it nails both into the archive.
24 December 2002: medical parole, a tarmac, and the first reunion of a family in twenty years
The release is told most concretely in the Brown Alumni Magazine's profile, and this page adopts its account in graded layers. On 18 December 2002 Chinese officials asked Xu Wenli to fill out an application for medical parole in the United States. It was not the first such offer; he had refused previous offers, not wanting to abandon his homeland. But his health had deteriorated dangerously, and this time he suspected he had leverage: if he did not actually get on the plane, he said, it would have been a huge problem for China. So he told the officials he would leave on one condition — that his wife went with him. The next day his release was announced in the Chinese papers. On 24 December a police car delivered him to the tarmac beneath a waiting commercial jet. An official shook his hand, welcomed him to the United States, and then told him: "Your wife is on the plane." On board the two talked nonstop, Xu says, and when they landed in Chicago, Jin Xu — who had been nine at the time of her father's first arrest — met them at the airport. They had not been together as a family in twenty years (the magazine's narrative, on Xu's own account). The Dui Hua Foundation's statement gives the institutional version: accompanied by his wife, He Xintong, and an official of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Xu Wenli departed Beijing on 24 December 2002; the Prison Administration Bureau of the Ministry of Justice and the warden of Yanqing Prison, citing his chronic progressive hepatitis B infection, exercised humanitarian clemency under the 1990 Measures on Implementing Medical Parole — and Dui Hua pointedly noted that he was released after serving slightly less than one-third of his 1998 sentence, although the Measures required a third. This page's ruling on the date: 24 December 2002 is the release and departure date, on the agreement of Dui Hua, Human Rights Watch, Brown University and the New York Times of 25 December 2002; the coordination brief's mention of a minority text giving 26 December was not located to a primary source in this check, and is recorded in the Verification Note as an unlocated variant only.
Human Rights Watch's press release of the same day, 24 December 2002, carried in its title the characterisation of this release: "Release of Xu Wenli 'Not Enough'". Its Asia division executive director, Brad Adams, said the organisation was thrilled that Xu Wenli was free, but that no one should mistake his release as a sign of improvement in China's human-rights record; the statement urged the U.S. and other governments to press for the immediate, unconditional release of the other key China Democracy Party organisers still imprisoned. This page records that judgement because it accurately foretold the shape of the next two decades: Xu Wenli came out; Wang Youcai served more than two further years before reaching the United States by the same route; Qin Yongmin served his twelve years in full and was imprisoned again afterwards for party-related activity. A case's release has never been a case's end — the archive must say so in so many words. The handshake on the tarmac and the sentence "Welcome to the United States" are the most human moments of this transaction; but the archive's duty is to write down the transaction as well: a man with hepatitis B, delivered on Christmas Eve as a token in a two-country relationship, on time for the morning editions — the Dui Hua Foundation's founder John Kamm recalls being woken at 1:15 a.m. by a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, and that the State Council Information Office hoped to make the morning papers.
American years: asylum, Brown University, and twenty years of an exiled party
The legal status is pinned first. With the help of the Lawyers Committee and its pro bono lawyers, Xu Wenli and He Xintong were granted political asylum in the United States in February 2003 (the Lawyers Committee's media alert of October 2003 states it in so many words; another Lawyers Committee biography says "in the winter of 2003" — this page takes February as its baseline, noting that February is itself winter, so the two formulations are broadly compatible but the month rests on the media alert). For his daughter the conflict is wider: the Lawyers Committee biography says Jin was granted asylum in 1998, the media alert says 2000 — and this page carries both, uncensored, in the Verification Note.
The academic landing was Brown University. In early 2003 he was appointed a visiting senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, for a first term through 30 June 2003 (Brown University press release). On 26 May 2003 Brown awarded him an honorary doctorate — the date, exactly ten years to the day after his first release in 1993, is a coincidence the archive notes without interpreting. The Lawyers Committee biography states that he gave the university's commencement address in May of that year; this page records the address on that biography's attribution and does not extend it into its contents, for which no public record was found. From 28 January 2004 he taught an international-relations seminar at Brown titled "Chinese Democracy Wall: History of Chinese Democracy, Chinese Modern History and Chinese History" (English Wikipedia). He worked at the Watson Institute as a senior research fellow from 2003 to 2013, teaching for nine years (Chinese Wikipedia).
The exiled party's trajectory carries its own dates. On 26 March 2003 he founded the Caring for China Center and became its chairman; in November 2003 he and his wife were received by former President Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where he was honoured as a "human rights defender on the frontlines of freedom" (the Hoover Institution's caption). On 23 October 2003 the Lawyers Committee honoured Xu Wenli and Xu Jin together at its 25th Anniversary Human Rights Awards dinner. On 3 December 2004 he helped found the China Democracy Party Overseas Exile Headquarters and became its general convener; on 5 June 2007, at the first Overseas Representatives Assembly, he was elected chairman of the party's National Joint Headquarters; on 6 June 2011 he was re-elected. On 25 September 2009 he launched the signing of a "Peace Agreement" open letter to leaders across the Taiwan Strait; in 2010 he took part in the nomination of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize (each item on the English Wikipedia's chronology and its sources, adopted at relay grade with the chronology's dates). As for writing: the Rational Structure of Human Society begun in prison was published in Hong Kong in November 2008, with an English edition in 2020; Prison in Prison and Prison Outside Prison appeared in 2021, and an Anthology of Xu Wenli's Twenty Years in Exile in 2022; his early Prison Letters (1996) and an autobiographical work published in Chinese in 2001 and circulated in the United States, Taiwan and Hong Kong (the Brown Alumni Magazine) belong in the same bibliography — titles are recorded in the two sources' separate renderings and are not forcibly unified.
On 9 July 2013, his seventieth birthday, he voluntarily resigned the chairmanship of the China Democracy Party's National Joint Headquarters and retired from Brown University in the same year (English Wikipedia). After that his public activity thinned, and his centre of gravity moved to writing and to the ordering of his papers. The latest public record is the Hoover Institution Library & Archives' announcement that it has acquired Xu Wenli's personal papers: manuscripts and writings on China's democratisation written in prison, correspondence with friends at home and abroad — including senior officials of the George W. Bush administration — photographs of his activities inside and outside China, and website materials relating to his political work (Hoover Institution press release). That institution's introduction closes his present situation in a single sentence: now retired, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his family. As of this site's check on 1 November 2026, that is the latest verifiable text on his present condition; he is eighty-three. His two sentences — fifteen years in 1982, thirteen in 1998 — have never been the subject of any revocation or rehabilitation in any public record, and he himself summed up the twenty years of exile in his 2022 collection. This page does not write the next chapter for him.
The family: He Xintong's visiting book, and Xu Jin's twenty years
The last block of a persecution archive belongs, by this site's custom, to those outside the walls. Outside the walls of this case there were two people: a wife and a daughter.
He Xintong. During the first twelve-year term she visited Beijing No. 1 Prison for about forty minutes roughly every two months, with a period of about three years in which no visit was permitted at all (Boston University, on Xu Jin's account); the Lawyers Committee describes the visits as sporadic and brief. After his 1993 release she watched her husband resume his work under surveillance for five years; in April 1994, when he had been detained twice in twenty-four hours, she tried to speak to foreign reporters and was dragged back into her house by police (Human Rights Watch, World Report 1995). On 30 November 1998 police searched her home at night and took her husband away; for eighteen days she could learn nothing of his whereabouts or legal status, until on 18 December she was told the trial date (Amnesty International); on 21 December she was the only family member permitted to watch the trial (the Associated Press). During the second term she pressed for better medical care and food for his hepatitis B (PEN International, relaying her reports); on the eve of the June Fourth anniversary in 2002 she went on hunger strike (the Brown Alumni Magazine). In December 2002 her husband wrote her into the terms of his medical parole — "if his wife went with him" — and when he reached the tarmac she was already on the plane waiting. In 2003 she was granted political asylum in the United States with him. Looking back in 2026, this line contains no grand speeches at all, only a sequence of concrete acts: visiting, inquiring, being dragged indoors, hunger-striking, boarding a plane. To record the acts in full is the archive's way of doing justice to the person.
Xu Jin. She was about nine when her father was first arrested (the Brown Alumni Magazine's reckoning); by the second arrest she was studying in the United States. She studied at Boston University's School for the Arts (class of 2000), and, alongside her graduate studies, she campaigned for her father's release: after his thirteen-year sentence of December 1998 she worked for it tirelessly — staging hunger strikes and appealing to prime ministers and presidents (the Lawyers Committee biography, paraphrased here). Much of this page's family-side detail comes through her telling chain to Boston University — the forty-minute visits, the three years unseen, the Olympic-bid background of the 1993 release — and every borrowing is flagged where it occurs. She was herself a target of the Chinese authorities (the Lawyers Committee media alert states that she "was also targeted by Chinese authorities") and won political asylum in the United States before her parents (the year is given as 1998 in one Lawyers Committee text and 2000 in another — carried side by side, see the Verification Note). On Christmas Eve 2002 she met her parents at Chicago O'Hare Airport: a family together for the first time in twenty years (the Brown Alumni Magazine). Afterwards she joined her parents in an apartment behind the Watson Institute and taught studio art at Moses Brown School in Providence (the same magazine) — her settling in Providence was itself one reason her father accepted Brown's appointment (the same magazine). In October 2003 she received the Lawyers Committee's Human Rights Award together with her father. A child who lost her father at nine spent twenty years calling him out of two prisons — that sentence is not rhetoric; it is the sum of every date in this section.
Timeline
9 July 1943: Xu Wenli is born in Anfu, Jiangxi; ancestral home Anqing, Anhui. His father, Xu Yuwen, is a wartime military surgeon and director of a rear hospital (Hoover Institution; the two Wikipedias).
1963: After graduating from high school he declines to apply to university and teaches himself philosophy, political science, history and world literature (Hoover Institution; Wikipedia).
1964–1969: He serves in the PLA Naval Air Force; after demobilisation he works as an electrician in the Beijing railway system until 1981 (Wikipedia).
April 1976: He takes part in the Beijing workers' mourning activities for Zhou Enlai in the April Fifth Movement (Lawyers Committee biography).
November 1978: He founds April Fifth Forum in Beijing and serves as chief editor; the editorial office is his apartment. The journal runs to January 1980, seventeen issues, the longest-lived of the Democracy Wall journals (Hoover Institution; Wikipedia).
1 October 1979: He takes part in organising and leading the Stars art exhibition demonstration (Wikipedia).
10–12 June 1980: At Ganjiakou he meets Wang Xizhe and others to discuss founding an opposition party (Wikipedia).
15 November 1980: He puts forward the "Gengshen Reform Proposal" for the comprehensive reform of Chinese society (the two Wikipedias).
Night of 9 April 1981: His first arrest (Reason gives the night of 9/10 April — see the Verification Note). He waits some seventeen months for trial.
1982 (June, on Dui Hua's account): Convicted of organising counterrevolutionary groups and of counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement — fifteen years' imprisonment and four years' deprivation of political rights. He enters Beijing No. 1 Prison as prisoner "001" (Lawyers Committee), serves long periods in solitary confinement, and receives family visits of about forty minutes every two months, with about three years of no visits at all (Boston University, on his daughter's account).
1985: His prison manuscript My Self-Defense is carried out and published via China Spring (Reason, 1988); his solitary confinement is intensified afterwards (Lawyers Committee; the Brown Alumni Magazine, in their separate layers in the text).
End of 1992: Human Rights Watch records his health in prison deteriorating to loss of bladder control, in urgent need of medical treatment (World Report 1993).
26 May 1993: He is paroled after twelve years actually served — thirty-five months early (Dui Hua). The family and several organisations attribute the release's background to the Olympic bid and American pressure (graded in the text).
April 1994: He is detained twice within twenty-four hours; his wife He Xintong, trying to speak to foreign reporters, is dragged back into her house by police (Human Rights Watch, World Report 1995).
1993–1998: Under constant surveillance he is briefly detained at least eight times, for such things as applying to found a human-rights monitoring group and publishing the Human Rights Monitor (Human Rights Watch, press release of 24 December 2002).
29 November 1997: He sets out the programme "end the single-party system, establish the Third Republic, rebuild constitutional democracy, protect human rights and freedom" and the route of "transparency, rationality, peace and non-violence" (the two Wikipedias).
March 1998: He applies in Beijing to register a "China Human Rights Watch" organisation; his Human Rights Watch activity with Qin Yongmin unfolds in the same period and surveillance tightens (Human Rights Watch).
25 June 1998: Wang Youcai and others in Hangzhou issue the open declaration of the CDP Zhejiang Preparatory Committee and apply for registration (Human Rights Watch).
9 November 1998: With Zha Jianguo, Gao Hongming, Liu Shizun and He Depu he announces the CDP Beijing–Tianjin branch and becomes its chairman.
30 November 1998: He is detained a second time; some twenty officials search his home for four hours, seizing a computer, printer, fax machine and party documents (Human Rights Watch chronology; the seizure list's variants are in the text). He is held at Banbuqiao Detention Center. His wife can learn nothing of his whereabouts until 18 December (Amnesty International).
9 December 1998: Court proceedings against him begin (Human Rights Watch, Nipped in the Bud, on court material). On 17 December his lawyer Mo Shaoping meets him for the first time (Human Rights Watch pre-trial statement).
21 December 1998: The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court tries him in about three and a half hours and sentences him to thirteen years for subversion of state power and three years' deprivation of political rights; he states in court that he will not appeal. Wang Youcai is sentenced to eleven years the same day; Qin Yongmin receives twelve years on 22 December.
1999: He passes first through Tuanhe Reform-Through-Labour Farm (his wife, relayed by Human Rights Watch) and then Yanqing Prison (Human Rights Watch testimony; Dui Hua).
September 1999: He is diagnosed with hepatitis B; his wife appeals for better medical care and food (PEN International bulletin, March 2000).
Eve of the June Fourth anniversary, 2002: He Xintong stages a hunger strike over his health (the Brown Alumni Magazine). Their daughter Xu Jin lobbies continuously in the United States (the magazine; the Lawyers Committee).
18 December 2002: Officials ask him to fill out a medical-parole application for the United States; he makes his wife's accompanying him the condition (the Brown Alumni Magazine). On 16–17 December the U.S.–China human-rights dialogue in Beijing finalises the release details (Dui Hua).
24 December 2002: He is released on medical parole; a police car takes him to the tarmac at Beijing airport, where he joins his wife, already aboard, and flies to the United States via Chicago, his daughter meeting them at the airport (the Brown Alumni Magazine; Dui Hua; Human Rights Watch). The second term actually served: about four years; sixteen years served across both terms.
February 2003: He and He Xintong are granted political asylum in the United States (Lawyers Committee media alert).
26 May 2003: He receives an honorary doctorate from Brown University; he serves as a visiting senior fellow at the Watson Institute the same year and as a senior research fellow there through 2013 (Brown University; Wikipedia).
23 October 2003: He and his daughter Xu Jin receive the Lawyers Committee's Human Rights Award together (Lawyers Committee). In November he is received by President and Mrs Carter at the Carter Center (Hoover Institution caption).
3 December 2004: He helps found the CDP's Overseas Exile Headquarters; on 5 June 2007 he is elected chairman of the National Joint Headquarters and re-elected on 6 June 2011 (Wikipedia chronology).
9 July 2013: On his seventieth birthday he resigns the chairmanship; he retires from Brown the same year (Wikipedia).
2022: An Anthology of Twenty Years in Exile is published (Wikipedia bibliography).
Latest record: the Hoover Institution at Stanford announces its acquisition of his personal papers and states that he is now retired and lives with his family in Providence (Hoover Institution press release; checked by this site on 1 November 2026).
Our Take
This site's commentary on this case stays with this case's own facts.
First: between the two judgments lies a renaming of the Chinese Criminal Law. In 1982 he was convicted as a "counterrevolutionary": organising counterrevolutionary groups, counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement. In the 1997 revision of the Criminal Law the offence of counterrevolution was abolished and replaced by crimes "endangering state security"; in 1998 he became one of the first high-profile dissidents tried under the new provisions (Amnesty International states this "first batch" point in terms), and the offence was written as "subversion of state power". The name changed; the conduct list barely did — publishing, party-founding, interviews, money: counterrevolution the first time, subversion the second. The case is therefore a specimen: it proves that the continuity of these offences does not depend on their name but on a single structure — peacefully organising political forces outside the Communist Party is itself the crime. The word "counterrevolution" vanished from Chinese law the year after his second trial; not one day was subtracted from his thirteen years.
Second: the heart of the 1998 episode is that he did everything in the open, deliberately. The founders' strategy was openness and legality: file the application with the civil affairs bureau, invoke the constitution, post the membership list on the internet, announce a national congress in two years, write to the State Council demanding the exercise of the right to organise. Xu's founding of a "branch" rather than a "preparatory committee" on 9 November was thought too fast even by his own comrades — he meant to force the question onto the table: does the law allow it, or not? The authorities' answer was equally crisp: Li Peng said such a group would not be allowed to exist; Jiang Zemin said nipped in the bud; the court, in three and a half hours, gave thirteen years. A legal test conducted under a self-imposed discipline of "openness, rationality, peace and non-violence" measured out its own result: the test itself was the crime. This page preserves the declaration, the applications, the open letters and the judgment side by side precisely so that later readers can see the complete specimen of that test — not that they failed to be legal enough, but that on the question of founding a party the road of legality did not exist.
Third: read the prosecution's evidence list, for it says more about what "subversion" actually denoted than any commentary can. Drafting a declaration; recruiting some members; giving interviews to foreign journalists; accepting five hundred dollars; corresponding and collaborating with one exiled scholar. No violence, no weapons, no plot to seize a radio station or a warehouse — and five hundred dollars is the list's only "funding". The Xinhua version even wrote "repeat offender" into the grounds for severity: the twelve years he had served in the 1980s counted in 1998 not as a reason for sympathy but for a heavier sentence. When a system gives thirteen years on a list like this, the list itself has already told you how fragile the "state power" it defines itself to be. This site adds no adjectives; it requires only that the list be preserved in the archive in its original form.
Fourth: the manner of his two releases is the coldest thread in this case. In 1993, parole thirty-five months early, against the background of an Olympic bid and American pressure; in 2002, medical parole nearly nine years early, its details settled at a human-rights dialogue table, announced by a Foreign Ministry telephone call in the small hours, timed for American morning editions. Neither time did he come out because the judgment had been found wrong; he came out because, at a particular moment, his freedom was worth more to the regime that held him than his imprisonment. This site does not thereby slight the rescue — John Kamm's organisation, Xu Jin's campaigning, He Xintong's hunger strike were all real, and they saved a life — but the archive must write down the other face of the bargain at the same time: when a man's release can be scheduled for Christmas Eve and packaged as morning news, his imprisonment could always be scheduled too. Case-by-case rescue saves persons; it does not save the next person — and the later fates of Wang Youcai and Qin Yongmin are in this page too.
Last, a word about "001". His comrades called him the Godfather of Dissent; the prison called him 001. In a three-square-metre cell, across years in which he saw no member of his family, he wrote a Self-Defense and contrived to get it out. Its nominal addressee was a court; its real addressee was history: he knew a secret trial would leave no public record, so he wrote one himself. What this site does is the same thing he did then — leave the record, pinned with dates and sources. The difference is only in the price: his self-defense cost him intensified solitary confinement; our archive costs only time. An electrician, with sixteen years of imprisonment and one smuggled-out manuscript, bought this record its preservation to the present day; and in the 2020s the Hoover Institution at Stanford took his entire papers into its collections. The judgments tried to turn him into a number. The archive turns him back into a name. That is the whole reason this site records his case.
Verification Note
This site's characterisation: a case of political persecution in which party-founding and publishing activities were criminalised — the first term under the old code's "counterrevolutionary" offences, the second as subversion of state power — both terms imposed for peaceful speech, publication and association; the case meets this site's criteria for the persecution archive. Sorting rule: this subject has two major imprisonments (1981 and 1998), and this site sorts multi-term cases by the most recent major imprisonment, so the page's sort date is 30 November 1998 (the second detention) and its sort year is 1998; the title and timeline present the 1981 first term in full, unsuppressed by the sorting. The source structure must be stated first. The mainland authorities left very few public texts on this case, and those highly selective — for 1998 there is Xinhua's brief account (as relayed by Amnesty International); for the rest — the full 1982 judgment, complete transcripts of either trial, prison files — no official public channel exists. The outside record derives chiefly from Human Rights Watch (including its 2000 special report Nipped in the Bud, its 1998–2002 statements, chronology and congressional testimony), Amnesty International documents, PEN International bulletins, Human Rights in China's statement, the Dui Hua Foundation's statement and memoir, the Lawyers Committee's biography and media alert, Brown University's and Boston University's institutional reporting, the Associated Press's and the New York Times' same-day news, and the Hoover Institution's acquisition announcement. This page cites in those layers; wherever a matter rests on a single source, the text grades it.
Facts verified across sources: born 9 July 1943 (all sources); the founding and editorship of April Fifth Forum from November 1978 to January 1980 (Hoover Institution; Wikipedia); the arrest of 9 April 1981, the fifteen years and four years' deprivation of political rights of 1982, and the release of 26 May 1993 after twelve years actually served (Hoover Institution; Dui Hua; the two Wikipedias; the New York Times); constant surveillance and at least eight brief detentions after 1993 (Human Rights Watch, 2002); the announcement of the CDP Beijing–Tianjin branch on 9 November 1998 (Human Rights Watch; Dui Hua; Wikipedia); the detention of 30 November 1998 and the search of his home that night (Human Rights Watch chronology; Human Rights in China; Amnesty International); the sentence of 21 December 1998 — thirteen years and three years' deprivation of political rights for subversion, after a trial of about three and a half hours (Amnesty International; the Associated Press; the New York Times; Human Rights Watch); the sequence of post-sentence custody — Tuanhe first, then Yanqing (assembled from his wife's account relayed by Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch's congressional testimony, and Dui Hua — see the text); the hepatitis B diagnosis of 1999 (PEN International; the Lawyers Committee); the medical-parole release of 24 December 2002 and departure for the United States the same day (Dui Hua; Human Rights Watch; Brown University; the New York Times); the two sentences totalling twenty-eight years, with sixteen actually served (Wikipedia; the Lawyers Committee; Human Rights Watch); the Brown honorary doctorate of 26 May 2003 and the Watson Institute tenure of 2003–2013 (Brown University; Wikipedia).
Matters resting on a single source or on relay, graded in the text: the prisoner number "001" and the "Godfather of Dissent" title (the Lawyers Committee biography; the title also appears in the BBC's 1998 report); the carrying-out of My Self-Defense through contacts inside the secret police (Reason's single-source claim); the four years in a three-square-metre cell (the Brown Alumni Magazine, on its interview with Xu himself); his wife's 2002 hunger strike (the same magazine); the claim that the 2002 release decision was taken at the Texas ranch meeting during Jiang Zemin's visit (Kamm, relayed by the Jamestown Foundation); his wife being dragged back into her house in 1994 (Human Rights Watch, World Report 1995); his commencement address at Brown (the Lawyers Committee biography); and the 1977 application to Peking University's journalism department (the English Wikipedia). One error in an external text is corrected here expressly: Brown University's 2003 press release states that he was "arrested for the first time in 1979" — contradicted by every other source (9 April 1981) and treated by this page as that release's slip, not adopted; the text follows 1981.
Source conflicts and this site's treatment. First, the moment of the first arrest: Hoover and the Wikipedias give 9 April; the Chinese Wikipedia specifies the night of 9 April; the Lawyers Committee speaks of a midnight raid; Reason gives midnight on 10 April — this page writes "the night of 9 April (the night of 9/10 April)" and carries the variants. Second, birthplace and ancestral home: Hoover and the English Wikipedia give birth in Anfu, Jiangxi; the Chinese Wikipedia calls him a man of Anqing, Anhui while also recording the Anfu birth — this page layers the two ("born in Anfu, Jiangxi; ancestral home Anqing, Anhui"), which are compatible rather than in conflict. Third, the 1998 arrest date: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Human Rights in China give detention on 30 November; PEN International's bulletin gives arrest on 1 December — 30 November is the baseline, PEN's version carried alongside. Fourth, the 1998 sentencing date and duration: Amnesty International, the Associated Press and the New York Times give 21 December and about three and a half hours; Boston University's BU Bridge, on his daughter's telling, gives 20 December and three hours — 21 December is the baseline and the family-relayed variant is carried alongside. Fifth, the seizure inventory of the search: the Human Rights Watch chronology gives computer, printer, fax machine and party documents; Human Rights in China gives computer, address books and party documents — recorded in layers, not merged. Sixth, the defence lawyer's identity: Amnesty International says a state-appointed lawyer; the Associated Press names the appointed attorney as Mo Shaoping; Human Rights Watch's report records that Mo defended him without fee and argued want of evidence — the three assemble into one fact (court appointment of Mo Shaoping), as the text explains. Seventh, the second term's places of imprisonment: his wife, relayed by Human Rights Watch, gives Tuanhe Reform-Through-Labour Farm; Human Rights Watch's testimony and Dui Hua give Yanqing Prison — assembled into a sequence (Tuanhe first, Yanqing later), written in that order in the text and the timeline. Eighth, the form of the 1993 release: Dui Hua and Brown give parole; the Brown Alumni Magazine gives "released for good behavior" — parole is the baseline. Ninth, asylum dates: for Xu and his wife, the Lawyers Committee's media alert gives February 2003 and its biography "the winter of 2003" — February is the baseline; for his daughter Xu Jin, the biography gives 1998 and the media alert 2000 — carried side by side, undecided. Tenth, the release-date variant: the coordinating brief mentioned a minority text giving 26 December 2002; in this check this site did not locate that variant's primary source, so the text follows 24 December (four sources in agreement) and the variant is recorded here alone as unverified.
Matters of no public record, flagged wherever they arise in the text: the full text of the 1982 judgment and a complete transcript of the first trial; the complete transcript of the 1998 trial (only the prosecution's evidence and the defence's gist survive in institutional relays); the exact beginning and end dates of his solitary confinement in the first term (the sources offer only layered formulations — "much of it", "about three years without visits", "four years in three square metres"); the exact boundary date between Tuanhe and Yanqing in the second term; details of his health in later life (after 2022 only the Hoover Institution's summary wording — "now retired, living with his family in Providence"); and details of He Xintong's and Xu Jin's present lives. Quotation discipline: direct quotations in the text are each kept under fifty words and attributed at the point of use; Xu's courtroom position "this is political persecution" comes to us through the Associated Press relaying his lawyer, and this page treats it as a relayed account of his position rather than as a verbatim quotation.
The three-requirements check: time and place are confirmed (birth, the journal's founding, both arrests, both sentences, both releases, the exile, the Brown tenure and the retirement all rest on the anchor sources above, with variants set out item by item); cross-verification has been completed (human-rights organisations' documents, university reporting, same-day news, the foundation's statements and biographical materials kept in five separate layers throughout, with conflicts inside each layer listed one by one); documentary and visual evidence — his personal papers, including prison manuscripts, are now held by the Hoover Institution, and the recording and transcript of his 1979 interview are held by the University of Vienna's "Peking Spring" archive project — is recorded here as to existence and provenance only, with no unverified visual detail relayed.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, September 2000, Nipped in the Bud: The Suppression of the China Democracy Party: the party's emergence, registration strategy and provincial preparatory committees; proceedings against Xu Wenli beginning 9 December 1998, the indictment invoking Criminal Law Articles 105(1), 106 and 66; the prosecution's evidence (drafting the declaration, "linking up" with Yan Jiaqi to draft the charter, calling for independent unions, interviews with foreign journalists, accepting US$500 from abroad); Mo Shaoping's unpaid defence and his want-of-evidence argument; Xu's refusal to answer the prosecution and his statement that the trial was political repression; the 21 December sentence of thirteen years and three years' deprivation of political rights, the term's expiry on 29 November 2011, and the absence of an appeal; on his wife's account, the transfer from Banbuqiao to Tuanhe Reform-Through-Labour Farm and his then being held in Yanqing Prison; the petition and hunger strike of more than two hundred dissidents and the reactions of foreign governments. The spine of this page's second-term record.
- Human Rights Watch, documents of 1998–2002: the November–December 1998 dissident-activity chronology (the Beijing–Tianjin branch announcement of 9 November; some twenty officials with warrants detaining him on 30 November and searching his home for four hours, seizing computer, printer, fax machine and party documents; constant surveillance since 1996, intensified after the March 1998 founding of China Human Rights Watch); the pre-trial statement of 18 December 1998 (the lawyer's first meeting with his client on 17 December; the U.S. embassy official denied access); the statement of 21 December 1998, "No Justice in China" (condemning the Xu and Wang sentences; the call for commutation and a U.N. resolution); the congressional testimony of January 1999 (Xu transferred to Yanqing Prison); and the press release of 24 December 2002, "Release of Xu Wenli 'Not Enough'" (sixteen years in prison in total; the 1981 charge as paraphrased; constant post-1993 surveillance and at least eight brief detentions with their grounds; Brad Adams's judgement).
- Amnesty International, 21 December 1998 (AI Index: ASA 17/42/98), "China: heavy prison sentences on high-profile dissidents show disregard for international human rights standards": the three founders among the first tried under the national-security provisions that replaced the counterrevolutionary offences in the 1997 Criminal Law revision; trial within three weeks of detention, no time to hire counsel of choice, Xu with only a state-appointed lawyer; the Beijing trial of 21 December, about three and a half hours, thirteen years; the wife denied information from 30 November and informed of the trial date only on 18 December; the Xinhua account (secretly planning the Beijing–Tianjin branch, recruiting members, accepting funds from hostile organisations abroad); the verdict "a state-managed exercise and a mockery of justice".
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 1993 and World Report 1995, China sections: at the end of 1992, Xu in prison had lost control of his bladder and was in urgent need of medical treatment; in April 1994 his wife, after his two detentions within twenty-four hours, tried to speak to foreign reporters and was forcibly dragged into her house by police.
- The Dui Hua Foundation, statement of 24 December 2002 and John Kamm's memoir "Home for Christmas": conviction in June 1982, fifteen years; parole thirty-five months early (May 1993); detention on 30 November 1998 and the thirteen years and three years' deprivation of political rights from the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Court; the warden of Yanqing Prison ordering medical parole for chronic progressive hepatitis B, after slightly less than one-third of the term had been served; the 24 December departure from Beijing accompanied by his wife and a U.S. embassy official; the release details finalised at the 16–17 December Beijing round of the human-rights dialogue; Ambassador Tyge Lehmann's advocacy for clemency in the EU–China dialogue; the Foreign Ministry's 1:15 a.m. telephone call and the morning-editions timing.
- The Associated Press, reporting from Beijing, 21 December 1998 (APW19981221.0236): the three-and-a-half-hour trial and thirteen years, the longest dissident sentence in three years; the court-appointed attorney Mo Shaoping named, and his relayed account (Xu refusing prosecutors' and judges' questions; asked about an appeal, answering that he would not appeal and that this was political persecution); police sealing the court, foreign reporters kept five hundred metres away, the wife the only family member permitted to watch; at least thirty-two people detained or questioned in three weeks; Xinhua's "severely punished as repeat offenders".
- The New York Times, same-day reports: the Associated Press item of 20 April 1981 (two activists arrested; as cited by the English Wikipedia); the Associated Press item of 26 May 1993, "Beijing Frees Foe It Held 12 Years"; Erik Eckholm, 21 December 1998, "Top Dissident Gets 13 Years After Trial In Beijing"; Erik Eckholm, 25 December 2002, "Beijing Releases Leading Dissident" (each as cited by the English Wikipedia).
- Brown University, press release 02-052 (2003), "Chinese dissident Xu Wenli to serve as visiting senior fellow at Brown", and the Brown Alumni Magazine profile "From the Stones Beneath the Sea" (2007): the Christmas Eve medical release and flight to the United States, the police car to the tarmac, the wife already aboard the plane, the Chicago reunion with their daughter and twenty years without the family together; twelve years and forty-eight days served, much of it in solitary confinement; after his prison diary was smuggled out, transfer to a three-square-metre cell for four years (on his own interview account); the Olympic-bid background of the 1993 release; the rapid deterioration of his health after 1998 from malnutrition and hepatitis B, his wife's fear that he would die in prison and her hunger strike on the eve of the June Fourth anniversary in 2002, his daughter's lobbying of politicians and newspapers; the 18 December 2002 form and the condition that his wife accompany him. The 2003 press release's "arrested for the first time in 1979" is a slip — see the Verification Note.
- Boston University, BU Bridge, 15 January 1999, "Dissident's daughter seeks justice" (Eric McHenry): his daughter Xu Jin's (School for the Arts, class of 2000) family account — twelve years in Beijing No. 1 Prison, visits of forty minutes about every two months, about three years in a tiny cell with no visits at all, the American urging and Olympic background of the 1993 release, the five years of round-the-clock surveillance and home searches that followed, the prosecution evidence including interviews with foreign reporters and the US$500, and that report's variant dating of the 1998 trial (20 December, three hours — see the Verification Note).
- The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First), 2003 materials: the 25th Anniversary Awards biography (the "Godfather of Dissent" title; the prisoner number "001"; sixteen of twenty years in prison; the secret trial and My Self-Defense; solitary confinement in retaliation after the manuscript got out; the 1999 hepatitis B diagnosis; the wife's and daughter's lobbying that brought about the medical parole; asylum for the couple in the winter of 2003; Jin's asylum in 1998; the Brown commencement address; Xu Jin's hunger strikes and appeals to heads of government) and the media alert of 16 October 2003 (Xu Wenli's asylum in February 2003; Xu Jin's asylum in 2000; father and daughter receiving the 2003 Human Rights Award together). The internal discrepancies between the two texts are treated in the Verification Note.
- PEN International, Writers in Prison Committee bulletins: 22 December 1998 (via IFEX: the one-day trial and thirteen years of 21 December; the conviction for "secretly planning" the party; its 1 December arrest date as a variant; no intention of appealing) and 14 March 2000 (the health appeal: formal diagnosis of hepatitis B in September 1999 after months of symptoms; the condition believed severe; his wife's reports of insufficient medical care and a poor diet; the demand for adequate medical care and unconditional release).
- Human Rights in China, statement of 21 December 1998: condemnation of the eleven years for Wang Youcai and thirteen for Xu Wenli; his taking on the night of 30 November and the exhaustive search seizing a computer, address books and party-founding documents; Xiao Qiang's judgement; the appended list of eighteen detained human-rights defenders of 1998.
- The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, press release, "Hoover Acquires Personal Papers Of Xu Wenli" (checked by this site in November 2026): born in Anfu, Jiangxi, in 1943; the refusal of university in 1963; Beijing railway work 1969–1981; chief editor of April Fifth Forum, the Democracy Wall movement's first privately-run civilian journal, November 1978 to January 1980; arrest on 9 April 1981 and fifteen years; release in May 1993; the 1998 founding of the Democracy Party with several dozen activists and the thirteen years; exile to the United States on medical parole on 24 December 2002; the Brown honorary doctorate and the Watson Institute senior fellowship; now retired, living in Providence with his family; the papers' contents (prison manuscripts, correspondence with senior Bush-administration officials, photographs and website materials); and the Carter Center photograph caption of November 2003. The latest source for his current status.
- Reason magazine, February 1988, "Dissident China": the midnight arrest of 10 April 1981 (variant); seventeen months in detention before trial; the fifteen years (in its rendering: organising counter-revolutionary groups, disseminating counter-revolutionary propaganda and attempting to destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat); China Spring's carrying out, in 1985 and through contacts within the secret police, of the 243-page manuscript "My Defense"; April Fifth Forum as north China's most popular unofficial journal, academic in manner.
- The Jamestown Foundation, China Brief, Jonathan Mirsky, "Xu Wenli, Into American Exile" (2003): John Kamm's account — the release decision made at the highest level during Jiang Zemin's October 2002 stay at President Bush's Texas ranch; Xu as the first prisoner convicted of "endangering state security" to be released (Kamm's claim, with its attribution); CNN's Chinese broadcast being blacked out as it began reporting the release.
- The Chinese and English Wikipedias, entries "徐文立 / Xu Wenli" (checked by this site in November 2026) and the sources they cite: the Anfu birth and Anqing ancestral home; the father Xu Yuwen's career as a military surgeon; schooling and service (PLA Naval Air Force, 1964–1969); the Beijing Railway Branch, 1969–1981; the 1977 application to Peking University's journalism department; the partners Zhao Nan and Lü Pu and the seventeen issues; the Stars exhibition demonstration of 1979; the Ganjiakou party discussion of June 1980; the Gengshen Reform Proposal of 15 November 1980; the programme and route of 29 November 1997; the five-name list of the Beijing–Tianjin branch announcement of 9 November 1998; honours and characterisations (the New York Times' "China's most prominent political prisoner"; Nancy Pelosi; the BBC's "godfather of dissent"); the post-2003 chronology (the Caring for China Center, the exile headquarters, two elections as chairman, the 2013 resignation and retirement); and the bibliography (1996 Prison Letters; the 2001 autobiography; A Survey of the Normal Human Social Order, 2008; the English edition of 2020; Prison in Prison and Prison Outside Prison, 2021; the Anthology of Twenty Years in Exile, 2022). Biographical and chronological secondary sources; wherever the text leans on them alone, that reliance is flagged.
- The University of Vienna "Peking Spring" archive project, interview with Xu Wenli of 23 June 1979 (interviewer Helmut Opletal): the interview's location at 274 Baiguang Street, Beijing, his apartment and the April Fifth Forum editorial office; his observation that no private newspaper had appeared in thirty years of the People's Republic. Cited for existence and provenance only; no detail relayed.