[The institute’s troubles mounted in 2012, after Mr. Guo helped the blind legal advocate Chen Guangcheng escape from house arrest in rural Shandong Province. Mr. Chen later found refuge in the United States Embassy in Beijing, prompting a diplomatic crisis and a deluge of international news media attention. Not long after Mr. Chen departed for the United States, the police put Mr. Guo himself under house arrest for 81 days.]
By Andrew Jacobs and Chris Buckley
BEIJING — First, the police took away
the think tank’s former graphic designer, then the young man who organized
seminars, and eventually its founder. Another employee fled China’s
capital, fearing he would be forced to testify against his colleagues in rigged
trials.
“The anxiety is overwhelming, not knowing if they are coming for
you,” said the employee, Yang Zili, a researcher at the Transition Institute of
Social and Economic Research in Beijing, who has been in hiding since November.
“It’s frightening because as they disappear, one friend after another, the
police are not following any law. They just do as they please.”
These are perilous days for independent civic groups in China,
especially those that take on politically contentious causes like workers’
rights, legal advocacy and discrimination against people with AIDS. Such groups
have long struggled to survive inside China’s ill-defined, shifting margins of
official tolerance, but they have served as havens for socially committed
citizens.
Under President Xi Jinping,
however, the Communist Party has forcefully narrowed the bounds of accepted activity,
setting off fears that these pockets of greater openness in China’s generally
restrictive political landscape may soon disappear.
In recent months the government has moved against several
groups, including one that fights discrimination against people with hepatitis
B and even a volunteer network of 22 rural libraries.
“The pressure on grass-roots organizations has never been this
intense,” said Zhang Zhiru, who runs a labor rights group in the southern
manufacturing city of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province. In the past year, his car
has been vandalized, and police harassment has forced his organization to move
more than 10 times. In December, the last of his five employees quit.
Regulations that took effect last month in Guangzhou, a city in
southern China, have intensified scrutiny of nonprofit organizations that
receive foreign donations, and the central government has proposed legislation
to tighten controls on foreign nongovernment organizations active in China,
according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. With Chinese
philanthropists wary of upsetting the authorities, funding to Mr. Zhang’s
organization, the Shenzhen Chunfeng
Labor Dispute Service Center, has dried up, and even Chinese
crowdfunding websites refuse to list it.
“The government just wants us to disappear,” Mr. Zhang said.
The campaign has focused on groups deemed sanctuaries for
dissent. From its cramped offices in the university district of northwest
Beijing, the Transition Institute championed a mix of free market economics and
support for the downtrodden, conducting research on the exploitation of taxi
drivers, school policies that shortchange rural children and the environmental
costs of the massive Three Gorges Dam on
the Yangtze River. But the institute also attracted advocates of democratic
reform, some of whom had prior run-ins with the authorities.
“We always hoped to eke out survival in tough circumstances,”
said Mr. Yang, 43, the researcher now in hiding, who spent eight
years in prison for holding informal discussions with a group
of friends about multiparty elections and a free press. “But the more
independent NGOs,” he added, referring to nongovernmental organizations,
“especially the ones that criticize government policies or don’t help the
government’s image, have encountered a policy of containment, even
destruction.”
Before its employees began vanishing, the Transition Institute
was part of an undergrowth of privately funded organizations that spread
despite the government’s ambivalence toward independent, civil society groups.
Guo Yushan, an activist and economist from rural eastern China, established the
institute in 2007 after parting ways with a legal rights advocate, Xu Zhiyong, who
embraced a bolder approach to campaigning for citizens’ rights.
“You can make your arguments online, or write articles
criticizing the government, but once you mobilize people you’re going to have
some serious problems,” Mr. Guo said in an interview shortly after Mr. Xu was
arrested in the summer of 2013 for organizing street protests
against official corruption.
Mr. Guo’s new organization avoided street activism. Instead, it
aimed to give citizens the expertise and arguments to win a bigger say in
government policy, a process that Mr. Guo argued would help China move
peacefully toward democracy. He and his team of researchers picked subjects
that brought into focus questions about the reach of the state — such as tax
policy — and then spread their findings through meetings, reports and media
interviews.
The authorities closely monitored the institute’s work, especially
the lectures and conferences it organized. “Sometimes they would force us to
limit the number of attendees, and sometimes they would just tell us to cancel
an event at the last minute,” Mr. Yang said.
The Communist Party says charities and other grass-roots
organizations can offer much-needed social services in a nation strained by
poverty and urbanization, and the number of such organizations has grown. But
the party is also wary of citizen activism that it cannot control, and groups
must be sponsored by a state entity before registering as nonprofits. Like many
others, the Transition Institute instead registered as a private business.
The furtive relationship that many Chinese grass-roots
organizations have with the government makes it difficult to count just how
many there are, said Anthony J. Spires, an associate professor at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong who
studies China’s nongovernment organizations. He estimated there were 2,500 to
3,000, excluding those that are essentially puppets run by the government.
“They help fill a need in Chinese society that the government
recognizes,” he said. But that tolerance, he added, “can be taken away at a
moment’s notice.”
The Transition Institute was especially vulnerable, partly
because a large share of its annual budget of $480,000 to $650,000 has come
from overseas foundations, according to former employees, who would not specify
the sources, fearing it might hurt other groups that receive donations from
abroad. Such foreign links are viewed with suspicion by the party authorities
who increasingly consider international foundations to beagents of
political subversion.
The institute’s troubles mounted in 2012, after Mr. Guo helped
the blind legal advocate Chen
Guangcheng escape from house arrest in rural Shandong Province.
Mr. Chen later found refuge in the United States Embassy in Beijing, prompting
a diplomatic crisis and a deluge of international news media attention. Not
long after Mr. Chen departed for
the United States, the police put Mr. Guo himself under house arrest for 81
days.
The institute resumed its research, but whenever it convened a
meeting or event, the police visited and issued warnings. In July 2013,
officials from the civil affairs department, which oversees nongovernment
organizations, raided the institute’s offices, seized hundreds of copies of
research reports and accused the institute of operating illegally.
Early last year, Mr. Guo resigned as head of the Transition
Institute. His wife, Pan Haixia, said he told her that security officials had
promised in exchange to allow the institute to register as a nonprofit and
continue its research, provided it refrained from organizing meetings or other
events that could become a magnet for protests.
But in early October, the police detained a
former intern, Ling Lisha, for photocopying leaflets supporting the
pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and discovered that she had asked the copy
shop for a receipt under the name of the institute.
Days later, on Oct. 9, just before 2 a.m., more than a dozen
police officers and security agents rushed into Mr. Guo’s apartment on the
outskirts of the capital. They grabbed personal computers, an iPad and mobile
phones, andled Mr. Guo
away. The police also raided the institute’s offices three times
that month, taking away more material each time an employee was detained.
Ms. Pan said she received a notice last month saying her husband
had been formally arrested on the charge of “running an
illegal business.” The lawyer she hired to represent him, Xia Lin,
has also been detained, on charges that remain unclear. At least five others
associated with the institute had been detained as well; four were later
released, and one, He Zhengjun, the institute’s office manager, has also been
charged with running an illegal business.
Calls and faxed requests for comment to the Beijing Public
Security Bureauwent unanswered.
With his colleagues disappearing one by one, Mr.
Yang decided to go underground. He was in the institute office one
morning in late November when a police officer called and told him to go to a
station for questioning. Instead, Mr. Yang left an Internet message for his
wife, shut off his cellphone, and slipped away, taking only the clothes on his
back. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,” he said in an interview.
Meeting with a reporter at a location several hours’ drive from
Beijing, he said he missed his wife and 4-year-old son, and visibly nervous, he
talked about his fear of being returned to prison.
Mr. Yang said he would turn himself in should a warrant be issued
for his arrest, but he was not interested in cooperating with what he described
as an extralegal persecution of his colleagues.
“I still don’t understand what we did wrong,” he said. “We were
just trying to help improve China.”
Patrick Zuo contributed research.
