Qin Yongmin has been in prison longer than some readers of these words have been alive: 22 years. He is 64, so a third of his life. This week Qin was sentenced to another 13 years in prison, this time for “subversion against the state.” He was arrested in 2015 for promoting the idea that China could transition peacefully to constitutional democracy, an idea Chinese authorities took to mean Qin and his confederates wanted to overthrow the government. He would not speak at his trial.
In 1978, shortly after the death of Mao Zedong, Qin, a steelworker in Wuhan in eastern China, co-founded and edited a pro-democracy magazine called Zhongsheng, or The Bell. He coordinated with reformist magazines from across the country and, with other dissidents, openly advocated democratic reforms in the hope that the end of the Cultural Revolution would mean a new era of constitutional self-government.
It was not to be. He was arrested in 1981 and a year later sentenced by Wuhan authorities to eight years in prison. He was released in 1989, just as the Tiananmen protests seemed to augur the democratic future he had argued for, but arrested again in 1993 and sentenced to two years in an RTL, or camp for “reeducation through labor.” There he was savagely beaten. In 1998 Qin and allied democrats petitioned the government to form a human rights watchdog organization. They received no answer and so founded China Human Rights Watch. The group published a magazine cataloging human rights abuses in China. His home was searched, his office ransacked, he was arrested, and a court sentenced him to prison for 12 years for “subverting state power.”
He would not admit guilt and consequently suffered enormously in prison. When he was freed in 2010, Qin’s health was shattered and he was blind in one eye.
Between 2010 and his arrest in 2015, Qin wrote essays and books on the Chinese government’s abusive treatment of its citizens. He has spent the last three years in detention—waiting in vain for the authorities to produce evidence against him. Those years will count towards his sentence; he’ll be released in 2028, when he’ll be 74.
For forty years, either as a magazine editor and writer or as a prisoner, Qin Yongmin has advocated democratic self-government and reproached a vicious government for its lies and abuses. As editors of a magazine in the freest nation in the world, where there is no threat of arrest and where no government goons will raid our offices, we are humbled by this great man’s courage and resilience. He is one of hundreds, and likely thousands, of Chinese and Tibetans jailed in China for expressing the belief that men and women are born with ineradicable rights. The fact that Xi Jinping’s police state can’t keep them quiet is a powerful admission that they are right.
