President Biden, Don’t Forget China’s Political Prisoners

As the sun sets on Asia-Pacific Economic Conference, the curtain closes on another high-level diplomatic and business forum bringing East and West together. No doubt many deals were made, and many handshakes secured guarantees of mutual economic benefit for those at the top of the represented societies.

But one crucial piece was missing. In particular, the widely-anticipated meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping held the promise for many Americans—and many citizens abroad—that the U.S. president might hold the Chinese dictator to account for human rights abuses in China. Sadly, it appears that the universal values that form the bedrock of Western democracies did not make it onto the summit agenda.

In advance of the meeting, we presented a list to President Biden with the names of 23 political prisoners, urging him to raise the issue with the Chinese Communist Party leader. This list represents a fraction of the more than 1,500 men and women currently being held in China’s prisons, detention centers, and unofficial “black jails,” as documented by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which also submitted a separate prisoner list. An accurate count of the missing, disappeared, and wrongly incarcerated would likely be much longer. Sadly, the whereabouts of many victims of China’s authoritarianism are either unknown or their families are too afraid to speak out.

The cumulative time represented by the “official” sentences on our list exceeds 122 years. This doesn’t include the “unofficial” time many have spent in extralegal captivity, whether in detention centers, under house arrest, or in secret police facilities. And it doesn’t include life sentences currently being served by two individuals: democracy advocate Wang Bingzhang and Uyghur economics professor Ilham Tohti, imprisoned since 2002 and 2014, respectively.

Truly, how does one calculate these expanses of lost time?

Often, one “official” sentence is simply followed by another, arbitrarily slapped on by the regime to keep its critics silenced behind bars. Activist Qin Yongmin, for instance, is currently serving a 13-year sentence for calling for peaceful democratic reforms, despite having already spent more than 20 years in prison for trying to register a pro-democracy party in 1998.

Many of the 23 have been given egregious sentences for the smallest infractions. Zhang Haitao was active in exposing the repression of minorities in Xinjiang. After sharing social media posts and photos online, he was sentenced in 2016 to 19 years in prison. His wife maintains he has been tortured there.

Others have come into the crosshairs of the regime for simply doing good works. Entrepreneur Sun Dawu built hospitals and offered free health care for the indigent, a “crime” for which he is now serving 18 years in prison.

Zhang Zhan, a lawyer from Shanghai, traveled to Wuhan to document the coronavirus pandemic during the initial outbreak in 2020. She wrote up her observations and shared them online. Amid the vacuum of information that many experienced at the time, her work could be called heroic, as she put her own life and health at risk in order to help others protect themselves. Her reward? A four-year prison sentence.

Then there are the disappeared. Gao Zhisheng was one of the most promising lawyers in China, according to the CCP itself, which awarded him public accolades for bringing civil society cases in the early 2000s. But when he turned his legal efforts to helping persecuted members of the Falun Gong, Gao was imprisoned, jailed, and tortured to within an inch of his life. A few reprieves in his jail time allowed him to write about his experiences, and later, under house arrest, to sneak a memoir out of China, reportedly one page at a time. In 2017, however, he was abducted near his home; since then, his family has had no word of his well-being or whereabouts.

The list includes individuals from Hong Kong who had tasted freedom and democracy, only to see it snatched away during China’s brutal crackdown. Jimmy Lai, head of Apple Daily, one of the last independent media companies in Hong Kong, sits in jail along with young political activist Joshua Wong, who took to the streets while just a teenager to protest the political takeover of the territory by Beijing. After three years, we have no indication of when either will be released.

The absurd sentences of each of these people illustrate the capricious nature of those in power in China. When pricked by the smallest itch of activism or altruism, their instinct is to bring the hammer down upon citizens of good will. There is simply no way to adequately describe the suffering endured by the 23 people on this list. They are but the tip of the iceberg of injustice.

It is no secret that authoritarians around the world are seeking to upset the international order, to wreak chaos and misery across democratic nations for the gain of demagogues in power. Never has it been more important to stand up for the values—freedom, democracy, and respect for basic human rights—that stand not only at the foundation of America but also in the core of every human heart.

We can only hope the next time Biden meets an authoritarian dictator-for-life like Xi, he will make use of his unique position and stand up for the rights that define us and those courageous individuals fighting for freedom and democracy under the most perilous conditions. In that case, we will still have a list—no doubt much longer—to present to the president.

Chen Guangcheng is founder of the Chen Guangcheng Foundation and a fellow at the Center for Human Rights at Catholic University. Fang Zheng is president of Humanitarian China. Bob Fu is founder of ChinaAid. Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett is president of the Lantos Foundation. Zhou Fengsuo is president of Human Rights in China.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.

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