They helped Chinese women, workers, the forgotten & dying.
Wang Jianbing visited dying construction workers. Sophia Huang Xueqin investigated China’s earliest #MeToo cases. Fang Ran wanted to empower factory workers in the south. This year, all three disappeared.
The recent censorship of Peng Shuai, a tennis player who was erased from the Chinese internet after accusing a former party leader of sexual abuse, has drawn a global outcry of concern for her safety and freedom. But lesser-known individuals such as Wang, Huang and Fang have been vanishing as China tightens restrictions for activism on gender, labor and other issues.
The three activists were held in a form of secret detention called “residential surveillance at a designated location,” or RSDL, which allows the state to lock up people in “black jails” without trial. The human rights group
Safeguard Defenders estimates that 45,000 to 55,000 people have been subjected to RSDL since Xi Jinping became president in 2013, including as many as 15,000 in 2020 alone.
Wang and Huang were later moved to formal detention in Guangzhou on charges of “inciting subversion of state power,” according to their families and friends. Fang’s whereabouts remain unknown.
Many RSDL detainees are accused of endangering national security. Human rights lawyers, political dissidents, petitioners and members of religious or ethnic minorities have been common targets. Women’s and workers’ rights were once considered safer issues for social activists to pursue without crossing political lines. But that has changed as the Communist Party moves to silence any citizen it deems a “stability” threat.
President Xi considers civil society a “Western” phenomenon that challenges party authority. He has criminalized and decimated civil society with waves of arrests, starting with a mass roundup of lawyers and rights activists in 2015. Nowadays, security services tend to go after individuals one by one, perhaps knowing it attracts less attention.
“They finished with the high-profiles and now they go for the low-profiles,” said Rio, 35, a labor activist and friend of Wang’s who asked to use only his English name for protection.
Under Xi’s leadership, the Communist Party is also trying to transform its own system. Disciplinary purges have targeted thousands of cadres and officials for disloyalty or corruption. A party remake of Chinese society is also underway, with billionaires and celebrities pressured to renounce selfish, shallow or foreign-influenced behavior and to vow to serve the party better.
Fang was the first of the three activists to vanish. The 26-year-old was studying for a PhD in sociology at the University of Hong Kong, writing a thesis on labor empowerment in mainland China. He was also a Communist Party member, according to his father, Fang Jianzhong, who reportedly wrote a WeChat post begging for help for his son that was shared widely before it was censored.
“Fang Ran is absolutely not a criminal faction that would harm party affairs, but an ambitious youth whose work benefits our party,” the father wrote. He said state security services had taken his son into RSDL for “subverting state power.”
The Times viewed the post but was unable to reach the father for confirmation, although friends of Fang said it was authentic.
Abner Law, a university friend, said Fang had a “simple sense of justice in society.” Fang frequently posted on WeChat about issues such as workers’ rights, sexual harassment or displacement of migrants. He roamed the factory towns of southern China, immersing himself in workers’ lives and supporting them when they tried to strike or seek compensation for work injuries.
Fang had been asked multiple times to “drink tea” — a euphemism for being threatened by security services — for his activism, Law said. But he was undeterred. In February, he gave an online talk about the labor movement that grew under South Korea’s authoritarian regime in the 1970s.
In August he was back in mainland China for academic fieldwork. State security agents asked him to come in for another “tea” late that month. Fang has not been heard from since, though a relative who asked to remain anonymous for protection said Fang was receiving “education” and should be out “soon.”
Not long after Fang vanished, Wang and Huang disappeared on Sept. 19, en route to the airport. An independent journalist and #MeToo activist, Huang had received a prestigious Chevening scholarship to the University of Sussex in England to study gender, violence and conflict issues.
Wang, 38, a labor activist who often hosted gatherings of likeminded young people in his home, was sending her off. Then they both stopped answering their phones.