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.
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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.
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