新公民运动New Citizens Movement
做了什么：许志永是法学博士，早年在北京高校任教。2003年，他与法学界同仁就“孙志刚事件”上书全国人大，促成收容遣送制度废除；2009年，他创办的法律援助组织“公盟”被以偷税名义查封。2012年，他发表《新公民》系列文章，发起新公民运动：不组党、不搞街头对抗，以“公民”的身份做具体的事——要求官员公示财产，为随迁子女争取在父母打工的城市参加高考的权利，并通过定期的“同城聚餐”联络同道。运动的口号是“自由、公义、爱”，自我定位是堂堂正正做公民，以合法、公开、非暴力的方式行使宪法权利。参与者多为律师、学者、企业主和普通家长。What they did: Xu Zhiyong, a doctor of law who had taught at a Beijing university, first came to prominence in 2003 when he and fellow legal scholars petitioned the National People's Congress over the death of Sun Zhigang, helping to bring about the abolition of the custody-and-repatriation system. In 2009, his legal-aid organization, the Open Constitution Initiative (“Gongmeng”), was shut down on tax charges. In 2012 he published the “New Citizen” essays and launched the New Citizens Movement: no party, no street confrontation — acting as citizens on concrete issues. Its demands were officials' asset disclosure and the right of migrant workers' children to sit college entrance exams in the cities where their parents work; its method was regular “citizen dinners” in the same city to keep like-minded people connected. Its motto was “freedom, justice, love,” and its self-definition was to be upright citizens exercising constitutional rights openly, lawfully and non-violently. Participants were mostly lawyers, scholars, business owners and ordinary parents.
前史：许志永的路是从具体个案走出来的。2003年4月，湖北青年孙志刚在广州因没有暂住证被收容，在收容遣送站内被殴打致死。许志永与法学博士滕彪、俞江向全国人大常委会提交建议书，要求审查《城市流浪乞讨人员收容遣送办法》；三个月后，国务院宣布废止该办法，实行了二十多年的收容遣送制度就此终结。2008年三聚氰胺毒奶粉事件后，他创办的公盟为受害家庭提供法律援助，与当局的关系迅速恶化。2009年7月，公盟被以“偷税”名义罚款、查封，许志永一度被拘，国内外法学界联名声援后取保。公盟关了门，人没有散——新公民运动的班底，多半是那几年在个案里聚起来的人。Prehistory: Xu Zhiyong's road was built case by case. In April 2003, Sun Zhigang, a young man from Hubei, was beaten to death inside a Guangzhou custody-and-repatriation station after being detained for lacking a temporary residence permit. Xu, together with legal scholars Teng Biao and Yu Jiang, submitted a proposal to the NPC Standing Committee asking for review of the custody-and-repatriation measures; three months later the State Council abolished them, ending a system in force for over twenty years. After the melamine-tainted milk scandal of 2008, his organization Gongmeng gave legal aid to victims' families, and relations with the authorities deteriorated fast. In July 2009 Gongmeng was fined and shut down for “tax evasion,” and Xu was briefly detained, released on bail after legal scholars at home and abroad petitioned for him. The office closed; the people did not disperse — the backbone of the later New Citizens Movement was largely the network gathered through those case years.
经过：2012年起，随迁子女教育平权成为运动最有号召力的议题。在北京、上海等地，成百上千名外来打工的父母——出租车司机、小贩、保洁员——每周聚集，到教育部门递交联名信，要求孩子能在自己身边读书、考试。2013年春天，行动的另一条线转向官员财产公示。3月31日，袁冬、张宝成、马新立、侯欣四人在北京西单文化广场拉开“要求官员公开财产”的横幅，当场被抓，后来分别被判刑一年半到两年不等。江西新余，下岗女工刘萍与魏忠平、李思华公开声援财产公示并要求释放被抓者，同样被捕。2013年7月16日，许志永被刑事拘留；2014年1月，北京市第一中级人民法院以“聚众扰乱公共场所秩序罪”判处他有期徒刑四年。他在最后陈述中说，新公民运动就是一场推动中国走向民主法治的政治运动，陈述随即被法庭打断。Course of events: From 2012, education equality for migrants' children became the movement's most resonant cause. In Beijing, Shanghai and other cities, hundreds and thousands of migrant parents — taxi drivers, street vendors, cleaners — gathered weekly to deliver joint petitions to education departments, asking that their children be allowed to study and sit exams where the family actually lived. In the spring of 2013 a second front opened: officials' asset disclosure. On March 31, Yuan Dong, Zhang Baocheng, Ma Xinli and Hou Xin unfurled a banner demanding that officials make their assets public at Xidan Culture Square in Beijing and were seized on the spot; they later received sentences ranging from a year and a half to two years. In Xinyu, Jiangxi, laid-off steelworker Liu Ping, together with Wei Zhongping and Li Sihua, publicly supported asset disclosure and demanded the detainees' release — and were arrested in turn. On July 16, 2013, Xu Zhiyong was criminally detained; in January 2014, Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate Court sentenced him to four years for “gathering a crowd to disturb order in a public place.” In his closing statement he said the New Citizens Movement was precisely a political movement to move China toward democracy and the rule of law — at which point the court cut him off.
两条行动线：教育平权的具体做法很“公民”：家长们组织起来统计随迁子女的人数，每周四到教育部的人民来访接待室递交联名信，前后坚持了两年多；联名信征集到的签名数以万计。财产公示线的标志性文本，是2013年初许志永等人发出的公民建议书，呼吁205名新任部级以上官员率先公示财产，征集到数千名公民实名联署。正是这两条公开、合法的行动线，构成了后来起诉书里“聚众扰乱公共场所秩序”的主要内容。Two lines of action: The education campaign worked in a distinctly “citizen” way: parents organized to count the numbers of migrant children, and for over two years went every Thursday to the Education Ministry's public-complaints office to deliver joint petitions, gathering signatures in the tens of thousands. The emblematic document of the asset-disclosure line was the citizens' proposal issued by Xu Zhiyong and others in early 2013, calling on 205 newly appointed officials of ministerial rank and above to disclose their assets first; it drew thousands of real-name co-signatures. It was precisely these two open, lawful lines of action that later formed the substance of the indictment for “gathering a crowd to disturb order in a public place.”
家长们：教育平权这条线上，站在最前面的不是学者，是孩子的父母。他们大多是来北京、上海打工十年以上的人：开出租的、摆摊的、在餐馆后厨的、在工地上的。孩子生在城里、长在城里，到了中考却要回老家参加考试，多数人只能让孩子回乡留守，或者在城里读完初中就辍学打工。2012年起，这批家长自发组织起来，轮流到教育部信访接待室递信，风雨无阻地坚持了两年多；有人因此被单位施压、被房东清退，有人的孩子被学校老师单独“谈话”。他们在联名信上写的要求并不复杂：让孩子在父母工作、纳税的城市参加中考和高考。许志永为他们提供法律意见和行动框架，但走进信访办的，始终是家长本人。The parents: On the education front, the people at the very front were not scholars but children's parents. Most had worked in Beijing or Shanghai for over a decade: taxi drivers, stall holders, restaurant kitchen hands, construction workers. Their children were born and raised in the city, yet at exam time had to return to their ancestral hometowns to sit the tests; most families could only send the child back to be left behind, or watch them drop out after middle school to work. From 2012, these parents organized themselves, taking turns to deliver petitions to the Education Ministry's complaints office, in all weathers, for over two years. Some were pressured by employers or evicted by landlords for it; some had their children “spoken to” individually by teachers. What they wrote in their petitions was not complicated: let our children take the entrance exams in the city where their parents work and pay taxes. Xu Zhiyong gave them legal advice and a framework for action, but it was always the parents themselves who walked into the petitions office.
被捕者群像：2013到2014年的抓捕名单很长。资深活动人士赵常青，1989年时是学生，坐过牢，出狱后仍投身公民行动，此次因推动财产公示被判刑两年半。商人王功权是新公民运动的出资者和参与者，2013年9月被刑拘，次年取保获释，此后退出公共领域。公盟的年轻工作人员宋泽等人被拘留、监视。江西新余的刘萍案2014年6月宣判时，刘萍、魏忠平被判六年半，李思华被判三年——起因不过是举牌声援和要求官员公示财产。这一批案件的共同特点是：行为公开、诉求具体、程序上却被装进“聚众扰乱”“寻衅滋事”的口袋罪名里，逐个消化。The arrested, in group portrait: The arrest lists of 2013–14 are long. Veteran activist Zhao Changqing, a student in 1989 who had already served prison time, was sentenced to two and a half years this time for promoting asset disclosure. Businessman Wang Gongquan, a funder and participant of the movement, was detained in September 2013 and released on bail the following year, withdrawing from public life thereafter. Young Gongmeng staff such as Song Ze were detained and surveilled. When the Xinyu case was decided in June 2014, Liu Ping and Wei Zhongping received six and a half years and Li Sihua three — for holding placards and demanding that officials disclose their assets. These cases share a pattern: the conduct was open, the demands specific, yet procedurally everything was stuffed into the pocket charges of “gathering to disturb order” and “picking quarrels,” and disposed of one by one.
公民聚餐：新公民运动的组织形态，说来近乎简陋：同城聚餐。2011年起，北京等地出现每月一次的公民聚餐，参加者二三十人，AA制，在饭馆的包间里边吃边谈，话题是读书、时事和各自手头的维权个案。聚餐不设领导、不收会费、合影留念，照片公开上传——这种近乎透明的松散，正是发起者刻意的选择：一切都在阳光下，让“阴谋”无从谈起。但从2012年起，聚餐地点的饭馆开始受到压力，有的临时取消订位；参加者被逐一拍照登记；有人在聚餐后接到单位领导的电话。厦门聚会之所以被办成“颠覆”大案，部分原因正在于此：当聚餐的人从二三十个变成跨省串联，当局看到的就不再是一顿饭，而是一张网。Citizen dinners: The New Citizens Movement's organizational form was almost rudimentary: dinners in the same city. From 2011, monthly citizen dinners appeared in Beijing and elsewhere — twenty or thirty participants, splitting the bill, eating in a restaurant's private room while discussing books, current affairs and the rights cases each was handling. No leader, no dues, group photos taken and posted publicly: this near-transparent looseness was the founders' deliberate choice — everything in daylight, leaving no room to speak of conspiracy. But from 2012, restaurants hosting the dinners came under pressure and some cancelled bookings at the last moment; participants were photographed and registered one by one; some received calls from their work-unit leaders after attending. The Xiamen gathering was prosecuted as a major “subversion” case partly for this reason: once the diners grew from twenty or thirty locals into a cross-provincial network, what the authorities saw was no longer a meal but a web.
具体的人：这场运动里站到前台的，许多是被生活推着走的普通人。刘萍是江西新余钢铁厂的下岗女工，2011年以独立参选人身份竞选当地人大代表，成为普通人参政的样本；2014年，她被以“寻衅滋事”等罪名判刑六年半，在狱中健康严重受损。丁家喜原是航空系统出身的工程师、商人，家境优渥，后转行做维权律师，2013年因推动财产公示获刑三年半。出狱后他没有收手，继续在各地奔走联络。许志永2017年出狱，短暂休整后重新写作。2019年12月，许志永、丁家喜等人在厦门聚会，讨论时局和公民社会的出路，随即引发抓捕；丁家喜逃亡数月后被抓。许志永在逃亡中发表《劝退书》，公开呼吁习近平辞职，2020年2月15日在广州被抓。2023年4月10日，山东临沭县法院闭门宣判：许志永以“颠覆国家政权罪”判刑十四年，丁家喜同案判刑十二年。据家属称，两人在狱中长期被单独关押，健康状况堪忧。许志永的伴侣、劳工权益活动者李翘楚因在网上呼吁关注此案，被以“煽动颠覆国家政权罪”判刑三年八个月。The people: Many who stepped forward in this movement were ordinary people pushed there by life. Liu Ping was a laid-off worker from the Xinyu steelworks in Jiangxi; in 2011 she ran as an independent candidate for her local people's congress and became a symbol of grassroots participation. In 2014 she was sentenced to six and a half years on charges including “picking quarrels,” and her health deteriorated badly in prison. Ding Jiaxi had been an engineer in the aviation sector and then a businessman, comfortably off, before retraining as a rights lawyer; in 2013 he was sentenced to three and a half years for promoting asset disclosure. After his release he did not stop, traveling the country to keep the network connected. Xu Zhiyong, released in 2017, resumed writing after only a brief rest. In December 2019 Xu, Ding and others met in Xiamen to discuss current affairs and the future of civil society; arrests followed. Ding was seized after months on the run. Xu, also in hiding, published an open letter calling on Xi Jinping to resign, and was captured in Guangzhou on February 15, 2020. On April 10, 2023, a court in Linshu, Shandong, announced its verdict behind closed doors: 14 years for Xu and 12 years for Ding, both for “subversion of state power.” Families say both men are held in prolonged solitary confinement and in poor health. Xu's partner, labor-rights activist Li Qiaochu, was sentenced to three years and eight months for “inciting subversion” after campaigning online for attention to the case.
厦门聚会案的细节：2019年12月中旬，二十多名公民和律师在厦门聚会数日，话题是时局和公民社会的出路。12月26日起，警方在多省同步抓人，案件由山东烟台警方办理：多名与会者被带到烟台“指定居所监视居住”，与外界隔绝数月，罪名先是“煽动颠覆”，后升级为“颠覆国家政权”。许志永、丁家喜被带到山东临沭关押，2022年6月22日在临沭县法院秘密开庭，律师和家属均不得旁听，判决又拖了近一年才宣布。与此同时，只因在网上呼吁关注此案，李翘楚先在2020年2月被监视居住四个月，2021年3月再次被捕，最终被判刑三年八个月。Details of the Xiamen case: In mid-December 2019, more than twenty citizens and lawyers spent several days meeting in Xiamen, talking about current affairs and the future of civil society. From December 26, police moved simultaneously in several provinces; the case was handled by police in Yantai, Shandong, and many participants were taken there for “residential surveillance at a designated location,” cut off from the outside for months — the charge first “inciting subversion,” later upgraded to “subversion of state power.” Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi were held in Linshu, Shandong, and tried in secret at the Linshu County Court on June 22, 2022, with neither their lawyers' full participation nor family attendance permitted; the verdict was then withheld for nearly a year. Meanwhile, solely for campaigning online about the case, Li Qiaochu was first held under residential surveillance for four months in February 2020, arrested again in March 2021, and finally sentenced to three years and eight months.
平权的有限成果：教育平权的推动并非全无回响。2012年底，教育部门要求各省份在2013年内出台异地高考方案；此后几年，多数省份陆续打开随迁子女就地高考的口子，尽管北京、上海的门槛始终最高，被家长们称为“开了一道门缝”。数以十万计的随迁子女因此得以在父母身边完成中学学业。这条行动线的结局构成一个刺眼的对照：诉求部分实现了，推动诉求的人却进了监狱。此后，再没有家长团体敢以同样的方式公开组织递信。The limited gains of the education campaign: The campaign was not without echo. At the end of 2012, education authorities required every province to issue a local-exam plan for migrant children during 2013; over the following years most provinces opened the door to some degree, though Beijing and Shanghai kept the highest thresholds — “a crack in the door,” the parents called it. Hundreds of thousands of migrant children were thereby able to finish secondary school beside their parents. The ending of this line of action forms a glaring contrast: the demand was partly met, while the people who had pressed it went to prison. Afterward, no parent group dared organize public petitioning in the same way again.
庭审：许志永案于2014年1月22日在北京市第一中级人民法院开庭。法院周边布满警察，前来声援的公民和访民被驱赶、带走，外国记者被阻拦。许志永当庭拒绝为自己做无罪之外的辩解，只在最后陈述时系统阐述新公民运动的主张，被审判长打断。1月26日宣判：有期徒刑四年。此后二审书面审理，维持原判。丁家喜等人的财产公示系列案在2014年4月集中宣判，刑期从一年半到三年半不等。旁听席上能坐的，只有官选的人；家属席上，许志永的姐姐从河南赶来，在宣判后对着镜头喊：我弟弟没有罪。The trials: Xu Zhiyong's trial opened on January 22, 2014, at Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate Court. Police filled the streets around the courthouse; citizens and petitioners who came to show support were driven off or taken away, and foreign journalists were blocked. In court, Xu declined to plead for leniency and used his closing statement to set out the movement's positions systematically, until the presiding judge cut him off. The verdict came on January 26: four years. The appeal was handled on paper and upheld the sentence. The asset-disclosure cases of Ding Jiaxi and others were decided in a batch in April 2014, with sentences from eighteen months to three and a half years. The public gallery held only officially chosen observers; in the family seats, Xu's elder sister, who had traveled from Henan, shouted toward the cameras after sentencing: my brother is innocent.
事后处理：2013至2014年，参与财产公示和教育平权的公民在十多个城市被抓，达数十人，多数以“聚众扰乱公共场所秩序”“寻衅滋事”定罪，官媒称之为“许志永等人组成的犯罪团伙”。此后“公民聚餐”成为敏感活动，参与者被逐一约谈、盯梢。2019年厦门聚会案被并入“颠覆”案件办理，许志永、丁家喜的重判，标志着当局对这一代温和改良派的彻底清算。相关事件页：许志永与新公民运动Aftermath: In 2013–14, citizens who had taken part in the asset-disclosure and education campaigns were arrested in more than ten cities — dozens of people, most convicted of “gathering a crowd to disturb public order” or “picking quarrels.” State media called them “a criminal gang organized by Xu Zhiyong and others.” Afterward, “citizen dinners” themselves became a sensitive activity, and participants were summoned and watched one by one. The Xiamen gathering case of 2019 was folded into a “subversion” prosecution, and the heavy sentences for Xu and Ding marked the authorities' final liquidation of this generation of moderate reformers. See: Xu Zhiyong and the New Citizens Movement
国际反应与最新状态：许志永、丁家喜案在审理和宣判的每个节点，都有美国国务院、欧盟对外行动署和联合国人权机构的声明跟进，要求释放两人。联合国任意拘留问题工作组经审议认定，对两人的拘留缺乏法律依据、属于任意拘留。2023年14年和12年的判决宣布后，多国政府和国际律师组织发表谴责声明。据家属和代理律师零星透出的消息，许志永被关押在山东的监狱，丁家喜亦在山东服刑，两人会见权利受到严格限制，外界能得到的最新消息往往滞后数月。李翘楚据维权圈消息已于2024年8月刑满获释，出狱后仍生活在严密监控之中。她在获释前写给外界的信里说，自己不后悔为许志永发声。International response and current status: At every stage of the Xu and Ding cases, statements followed from the US State Department, the European External Action Service and UN human rights bodies, calling for their release. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, after deliberation, found the detention of both men to lack legal basis and to be arbitrary. When the sentences of 14 and 12 years were announced in 2023, several governments and international lawyers' organizations issued condemnations. From fragments of information released by families and lawyers, Xu Zhiyong is imprisoned in Shandong, as is Ding Jiaxi; their visitation rights are tightly restricted, and news from inside typically lags by months. According to rights-circle sources, Li Qiaochu completed her sentence and was released in August 2024, living since then under close surveillance. In a letter smuggled out before her release, she wrote that she did not regret speaking up for Xu Zhiyong.
罗胜春：丁家喜的妻子罗胜春是厦门案家属抗争的代表。她本人在科技行业工作，丈夫被抓后，她带着女儿在美国一边生活一边奔走：会见国会议员和国务院官员，在听证会上作证，把丁家喜在狱中受虐待的消息一条条发出来。她说自己过去是个“岁月静好”的人，是丈夫的案子把她推上了讲台。许志永的姐姐多年为弟弟奔走送衣送钱——本站按家属隐私原则不展开其细节。厦门案的四名主要当事人家属，在山东、河南、湖北、福建几地之间往返探视，路费和律师费靠朋友接济。这些家属的名字不在判决书里，但这场运动的代价，至少有一半是她们在付。Luo Shengchun: Ding Jiaxi's wife, Luo Shengchun, represents the Xiamen case's family resistance. She had worked in the technology industry; after her husband's arrest she lived in the United States with their daughter while campaigning without pause: meeting members of Congress and State Department officials, testifying at hearings, releasing item by item the news of Ding's mistreatment in prison. She says she used to be a person of “quiet good days,” and her husband's case pushed her onto the podium. Xu Zhiyong's elder sister has traveled for years to deliver clothes and money to him — this site does not expand on her details, by its family-privacy principle. The families of the Xiamen case's principal defendants shuttled between Shandong, Henan, Hubei and Fujian to visit, their travel and legal fees carried by friends. These families' names appear in no judgment, but at least half the price of this movement has been paid by them.
狱中消息：关于许志永和丁家喜在狱中的状况，外界所知来自家属会见后的转述和偶尔流出的只言片语。据这些转述，许志永在狱中坚持锻炼和读书写作，被没收的稿件不计其数；丁家喜的健康在关押初期明显恶化，监视居住期间曾被剥夺睡眠、坐老虎凳的消息经妻子公开后，狱中待遇有所改善。两人均被单独关押，与普通服刑人员隔绝，会见时隔着玻璃，谈话被监听，不能谈案情。这些转述无法由本站独立核实，但在多家国际媒体和人权组织的报告中彼此印证，本站按“多家来源一致”采用，并在此注明其性质：这是关于中国监狱内状况的典型信息困境——最该被记录的部分，恰恰是最难核实的部分。News from prison: What is known of Xu Zhiyong's and Ding Jiaxi's conditions comes from families' accounts after visits and occasional fragments that reach the outside. By these accounts, Xu keeps to a regime of exercise, reading and writing in prison, with countless manuscripts confiscated; Ding's health visibly deteriorated early in his detention, and after his wife publicized the sleep deprivation and “tiger bench” of his residential-surveillance period, his treatment in prison somewhat improved. Both men are held in isolation from ordinary prisoners; visits take place through glass, conversations are monitored, and the case may not be discussed. This site cannot independently verify these accounts, but they corroborate one another across multiple international media and human rights reports, and are used here on that basis, with their nature stated: this is the classic information predicament of Chinese prisons — the part that most needs recording is precisely the part hardest to verify.
留下的东西：新公民运动留下的，是“公民”这个自称：一批普通人第一次以“公民”而不是“群众”“百姓”自居，把官员晒财产、孩子在身边上学这类具体要求，说成写在宪法里的权利。在教育平权的持续推动下，2013年以后多数省份陆续出台异地高考办法，随迁子女就地升学的口子被撕开一道缝，尽管门槛至今仍高。许志永的庭审陈述和《劝退书》在网上广为流传，成为这代改良者留给后来者的文本。运动被镇压的过程也留下一个注脚：从此以后，任何有组织的、哪怕是公开合法的公民行动，都不再被容忍。What it left behind: What the New Citizens Movement left behind is the word “citizen” itself: a group of ordinary people who, for the first time, called themselves citizens rather than “the masses,” and framed concrete demands — officials disclosing their wealth, children schooling where their parents work — as rights written into the constitution. Under sustained pressure from the education campaign, most provinces after 2013 introduced rules allowing migrant children to take entrance exams locally; the door was pried open a crack, though the threshold remains high. Xu Zhiyong's court statement and his open letter calling for Xi's resignation circulated widely online and remain this generation of reformers' testament to those who follow. The way the movement was crushed left a footnote of its own: after it, no organized civic action — however open and lawful — would be tolerated again.
空间的关闭：新公民运动被镇压之后的十年里，大陆公开公民社会的空间一层层收紧：2016年《境外非政府组织境内活动管理法》出台，2017年《民法总则》讨论期间的公民讨论已无人组织；律师、记者、劳工 NGO、女权团体、教会，先后在各自的年份里遭到整肃。2013年内部文件提出的“七个不要讲”，把公民社会列为要防范的思潮之一。今天回头看，新公民运动是这条关闭曲线上最醒目的一个坐标：一群人试过用最温和、最合法的方式行使宪法权利——聚餐、递信、举牌、写文章——然后连同这些方式本身一起被定了罪。The closing of space: In the decade since the New Citizens Movement was crushed, the space for open civil society on the mainland has tightened layer by layer: the 2016 law on foreign NGOs, and, one after another in their own years, rectification campaigns against lawyers, journalists, labor NGOs, feminist groups and churches. An internal document of 2013, listing “seven things not to be discussed,” counted civil society itself among the trends to guard against. Looking back, the New Citizens Movement is the most conspicuous marker on that closing curve: a group of people tried the mildest, most lawful means of exercising constitutional rights — dinners, petitions, placards, essays — and were convicted together with the means themselves.
参与者的构成：回头统计新公民运动的被抓名单，会看到一个特殊的构成：律师占了很大比例，其次是商人、教师、记者、家庭主妇和退休工人。他们多数有正当职业、有家庭、有房有车，按通常的理解是这个社会最“稳定”的一群人。运动对他们的要求也并不激进：官员公示财产，随迁子女就地高考——都是写在官方文件里的话。正是这个构成，让镇压的方式显得格外刺眼：当局无法把他们描绘成“暴徒”或“境外势力”，只能使用“聚众扰乱”这样含糊的口袋罪，把一场由中产者和普通家长组成的、要求兑现官方承诺的行动，办成刑事案件。名单里最后一个值得记录的群体是声援者：每次开庭，法院外站着的人里有相当一部分是素不相识的普通公民，他们被警察拍下照片、记下身份证，其中一些人后来也上了名单。Who the participants were: Looking back over the New Citizens Movement's arrest lists, the composition is distinctive: lawyers form the largest share, followed by businesspeople, teachers, journalists, housewives and retired workers. Most had regular professions, families, homes and cars — by conventional reckoning the most “stable” stratum of society. Nor were the movement's demands radical: officials disclosing their assets, migrant children sitting exams locally — both phrases lifted from official documents. It is exactly this composition that makes the method of suppression stand out: unable to paint them as “rioters” or “foreign forces,” the authorities could only use a vague pocket charge like “gathering to disturb order” to convert an action by middle-class citizens and ordinary parents, demanding that official promises be honored, into criminal cases. The last group on the lists worth recording is the supporters: at every trial, a good part of those standing outside the court were ordinary citizens who knew no one inside; police photographed them and recorded their ID numbers, and some of them later appeared on lists of their own.
档案来源：本条目的材料来源包括：许志永的公开文章与庭审陈述文本、丁家喜案判决前后的家属公开信、刘萍等当事人出狱后的自述、中国人权捍卫者网络和国际特赦组织的个案档案、联合国任意拘留问题工作组的意见书，以及路透社、美联社等关于厦门案和2023年宣判的报道。中国法院从未公开许志永、丁家喜案的判决书全文，2014年许案的庭审记录亦未公开。本站对两人狱中状况的叙述已在上文注明来源性质；对判决前媒体未报道的细节，本站不采用单一匿名来源的说法。Sources for this entry: Materials behind this entry include Xu Zhiyong's public essays and the text of his court statement; family open letters around the Ding Jiaxi verdict; the post-release accounts of Liu Ping and other defendants; case files of CHRD and Amnesty International; the opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; and reporting by Reuters, AP and others on the Xiamen case and the 2023 verdicts. Chinese courts have never published the full judgments in the Xu and Ding cases, nor the transcript of Xu's 2014 trial. This site's account of the two men's prison conditions is sourced as noted above; for details unreported before the verdicts, this site does not rely on single anonymous sources.
文本的存档：新公民运动留下的文本数量，超过此前任何一波公民行动：许志永从2003年到2023年的文章、公开信和庭审陈述，丁家喜的自述与妻子罗胜春的公开信，刘萍的参选文告和狱中书信摘录，都在海外档案网站和出版物中保存。许志永的文集在海外结集出版，他的2014年庭审陈述《美好中国》被译成多国文字。这些文本的共同点是语气平静、论证克制，几乎找不到一句煽动性的话——这正是研究者反复指出的一点：镇压的对象不是暴力，甚至不是反对，而是有组织的理性本身。本站收录这些文本的出处，供读者自行查阅原稿：档案的意义，一半在记录发生了什么，另一半在让后人能读到当事人自己的话，而不是转述。The archive of texts: The New Citizens Movement left more text than any previous wave of citizen action: Xu Zhiyong's essays, open letters and court statements from 2003 to 2023; Ding Jiaxi's self-accounts and his wife Luo Shengchun's open letters; Liu Ping's candidacy statements and excerpts of her prison letters — all preserved in overseas archive sites and publications. Xu's collected essays were published abroad, and his 2014 court statement, “A Beautiful China,” has been translated into several languages. These texts share a calm tone and restrained argument; it is hard to find an inflammatory sentence in them — which is exactly the point researchers make repeatedly: what was suppressed was not violence, nor even opposition, but organized rationality itself. This site records where these texts are kept, so readers can consult the originals: half of an archive's meaning is recording what happened; the other half is letting later readers hear the participants' own words rather than paraphrase.
两次入狱之间：许志永2017年7月出狱到2020年2月再被抓的两年半，是理解厦门案的一把钥匙。出狱后他没有申请任何职位，在北京郊区租屋写作，走访各地的老朋友，写下长篇文字总结公民运动十年的成败，核心结论只有一条：非暴力、公开、合法的路没有走完，还要继续走。2019年，他应各地公民之邀不断出行，厦门聚会就是这种串联的一站。警方后来公布的案情里，把这些拜访和聚餐描述为“组织策划颠覆国家政权”的活动网络。从他的文章看，他预见到自己会再次入狱，并在《劝退书》里把话说到了头：不是要求对话，而是要求习近平辞职。这封信的流传范围，超过了他此前所有文章的总和。Between two imprisonments: The two and a half years between Xu Zhiyong's release in July 2017 and his recapture in February 2020 are a key to the Xiamen case. After release he took no position anywhere, rented a room outside Beijing to write, visited old friends around the country, and set down long essays summing up a decade of citizen activism, with one core conclusion: the road of non-violence, openness and legality had not been walked to its end, and must be walked on. In 2019 he traveled constantly at the invitation of citizens in many places; the Xiamen gathering was one stop in that circuit. The police version later described these visits and dinners as a network “organizing and plotting to subvert state power.” From his essays, he foresaw his own return to prison, and in the open letter he said the thing to its end: not a request for dialogue, but a call for Xi Jinping to resign. That letter circulated further than everything he had written before it, combined.
The lengthening list: The Xiamen verdict named only two men, but the price list of this movement runs far longer. Zhang Baocheng, sentenced to two years in the 2013 Xidan banner case, resumed public activity after his release; on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of June Fourth in 2019 he was taken away again, and in December 2023 a Beijing court sentenced him to three and a half years on charges including picking quarrels — exactly ten years after he was first imprisoned for holding a banner. The Shaanxi lawyer Chang Weiping, who had attended the Xiamen gathering, was held under residential surveillance in early 2020 and, after release on bail, posted a video describing being tortured on a tiger bench during interrogation; he was arrested again that October. In June 2023 the Baoji court sentenced him to three and a half years for inciting subversion; he was released in April 2024, his lawyer's license long revoked. One man in the north, one in the west, neither of them in the Xiamen case file — yet they are the measure of that case's reach: the main verdict sentenced two men; the aftershock disposed of a generation.
The banner relay: In 2013, banner actions demanding that officials disclose their assets flared across the country: citizens in Hunan, Guangdong, Shaanxi and elsewhere posted photographs of their banners online and called it a relay, most of them strangers to one another. Changsha's same-city dinner circle was among the most active; according to rights circles' records, one of its organizers was Ou Biaofeng, a former printing-factory worker. Years later he was still documenting rights cases online and had become a representative citizen journalist; he was arrested in December 2020 and in August 2023 sentenced to three and a half years for inciting subversion. The banner outlived the movement itself: it costs no more than a sheet of cardboard, spreads with a single photograph — and its price rose from administrative detention to a subversion sentence. That price curve marks the speed at which the space for citizen action contracted over a decade.