Chinese Identity Tested by Xi Jinping's Authoritarian Revolution

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Yang Bin was born wanting more. Her parents wanted her to be like them: a factory worker with a steady income, a guaranteed pension, and state-provided housing. They both worked at a state-run auto parts factory that never closed, even though it almost never turned a profit. But Yang was consumed by an insistent sense that her life’s purpose could be greater. In person, she exudes energy—outgoing, with bright eyes and deep dimples that appear whenever she smiles or laughs (and they do often), but her outward confidence was the product of a lesson. As a child, she was shy and prone to blushing. She was born into the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political violence that began in the 1960s and claimed the lives of at least half a million people, and she learned to value conformity. Growing up, her parents would darkly mention the earlier purges under Mao Zedong, who ruled the Communist Party until his death in 1976. Those tales taught her that standing out was the quickest way to become a target in the next political campaign to come. In college, she chose what she thought was the politically safest major: a now-defunct field called “ Building Chinese Socialism,” an archaic discipline that arose to analyze Deng Xiaoping’s famous line about creating “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Yang was fortunate to enter adulthood just as China was seeking a new way to redefine itself after Mao. The economic and political reforms begun in 1978 by Deng—a senior Party leader who had been purged twice by Mao—allowed people to choose their own jobs, if they were brave enough, in the few new private enterprises that were springing up. So after graduating in 1990, when Yang was offered a job joining her parents in the same factory unit, she turned it down. Two decades earlier, such a move would have been unthinkable, but she was of a new generation. “I didn’t want a life where I could already imagine the end,” she told me. She didn’t yet know what she wanted exactly, but she knew for sure that she wouldn’t find it in a provincial factory in Hunan, where “a person can live and die in a factory with 10,000 workers, from kindergarten to morgue,” as she described it—the “iron rice bowl” of socialist welfare. Her search for adventure took her to the coastal province of Guangdong, where her brother had already moved. It was a lucky choice. Yang quickly found work at a new private pesticide factory. In the 1990s, in the heady days of China’s policy of opening up and reform, enormous financial opportunities were opening up after nearly four decades of strict ideological control over the economy. Guangdong was perfectly positioned to benefit from this new phase, given its proximity to the then British colony of Hong Kong, which was rich in capital and trading expertise. Guangdong’s large port also made it an ideal place to establish one of the country’s first pilot economic zones, where private businesses could set up shop and trade internationally, accelerating China’s economic opening. When she was fired from the factory—which had sponsored her Guangdong residency papers—Yang couldn’t bear to return home. One of the factory managers, a man she still calls her guardian angel, stepped in and got her another job, at the county attorney's office, as a secretary . The job didn't pay well, but it was a civil service position, coveted for its benefits and stability. The job allowed her to reinvent herself.

In the prosecutor's office it did not matter that she was the daughter of workers and that she was destined to become one of them.

Inside the prosecutor’s office, it didn’t matter that she was the daughter of blue-collar workers and that, just a few years earlier, she had been destined to become one of them; in Guangdong, she could learn to become a servant of the law. She knew little then of the challenges that lay ahead in the decades to come, but even if she had, she would have persisted. Her career would put her at the forefront of the struggle to define a nascent Chinese legal system: on whose behalf it was fighting, and what kind of country it aspired to create. That was the purpose she was seeking. Yang began her career at a time when much of China’s economic and political system was reinventing itself, including the legal system. China wanted to build a more cosmopolitan legal system, grounded in the rule of law. Controls on private enterprise were loosening, and economic growth was booming after three decades of pent-up demand . China would need fair courts and transparent laws to guide and contain this economic experiment. She also wanted to present itself as a modern country, a safe destination for foreign investment. To do that, it needed a regulatory body with rules to enforce, and legal officials like Yang to enforce them.

The Party invited foreign experts and absorbed as much knowledge as possible. “A considerable part of our success in building the rule of law over the past 40 years has been achieved by absorbing advanced foreign experience,” wrote Xiao Yang, former president of China’s Supreme Court. […] The overhaul of China’s legal system was crucial to demonstrating that the country was ready to enter the global economic order. In 2001, China won admission to the World Trade Organization—the result of a long campaign to prove that it could (and would) abide by international fair trade rules, at least for a while. Unfortunately, intellectual property theft and counterfeiting were endemic, especially in Guangdong province, where thousands of Chinese factories continued to produce much of the world’s consumer goods. The prosecutor’s office where Yang worked could barely deal with trademark infringement cases. Instead, they focused on underground crimes. China’s economic miracle had spawned an explosion of lawlessness . Crime increased exponentially in the 1990s as people moved from villages to growing cities. Yang faced gruesome cases as a state prosecutor. […] Amid all this uncertainty and chaos, Yang believed strongly in maintaining social order through rigorous enforcement of the law, and she approached her job with an activist fervor that other bureaucrats found excessive.

She was eager to get started, but her first assignments at the prosecutor’s office were deeply tedious: filing stacks of court documents and transcribing court records. […] In 1997, she was promoted to assistant prosecutor, and soon afterward she was assigned to the county office, with responsibility for serious misdemeanors and violent crimes. She wasn’t a natural speaker: At her first hearing, she was so nervous she couldn’t hold her statement steady. But she loved the satisfaction of building a case, and she learned to embrace the adrenaline rush of speaking in court. Her work gave her the power to change — or end — someone’s life. She decided she would personally attend every execution in the cases she handled. After about five years in the role, Yang sent her first defendant to death row. She was assigned the case of a man who had stabbed another man to death with a fruit knife . She encouraged him to repent for his crime and seek redemption. […] The policies of opening and reform that had changed Yang’s life were also changing the rhythms of life for rural residents, who could now live and work in places other than those registered on their hukou (household registration). In the 1990s, some 90 million migrant workers left the countryside and small towns each year for major urban centers like Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, moving in and out of cities based on where they found work. Many of them endured harsh working conditions and long periods away from family and friends. Yet they were the ones who contributed to China’s unbridled economic growth. But their sudden influx into a few cities put pressure on local welfare systems.

One such migrant worker, a woman named Zhou Moying, would test Yang’s capacity for compassion and forgiveness. Zhou worked in Guangzhou, far from her hometown. Life was tough. She and her husband barely earned enough to feed their family of five, including a very sick eight-month-old daughter. Zhou struggled to convince her husband, who was often absent, to take on family responsibilities. One hot July morning in 2005, she got up and fed her baby some rice porridge, but the baby wouldn’t stop crying. Her husband didn’t even move. Feeling completely abandoned, Zhou impulsively walked to the river near her home and put her baby in. She intended to jump in herself, but the thought of her two older children made her desist. She then turned herself in, confessing to drowning her daughter. Yang was charged with prosecuting Zhou. She braced herself to face a mother cruel enough to kill her own daughter, but the defeated woman she faced in the Guangzhou detention center was not the monster she had imagined. Zhou was so shocked that she could barely speak when they first met. Through sobs, she begged Yang to sentence her to death: she had failed as a mother, she had failed at taking her own life, and now she was asking Yang to finish the job.

Yang remembered the man she had sentenced to death, and how futile her hatred for him had been. She wrote later that she could never fully understand Zhou’s crime, but she could understand the systemic forces of poverty that had created it. She decided to handle the case differently. “We must not forget people like her, struggling at the bottom of society,” she said in an interview at the time . “That is the conscience the law should have.” Her office was prepared to prosecute Zhou Moying for murder. The penalty? Death. But Yang did something unheard of for a prosecutor: she began to defend the defendant. She invoked a little-used clause in China’s criminal code: “extenuating circumstances” of extreme poverty and neglect. Zhou was a desperate mother, overwhelmed by an absent husband and a dying son. Yang argued that this was not a premeditated crime, but an act of desperation. She wrote a long report explaining that Zhou was not a danger to society and deserved a second chance. At first, her superiors reacted with hostility. “Are you crazy?” they asked. “You’re talking like a defense lawyer!” In China, prosecutors are considered direct representatives of the state and the Communist Party. Defending a defendant—especially in an emotionally charged case—was perceived as a betrayal of the institutional mission. But Yang did not give up. She appealed to the press. She contacted local and national journalists, telling the story of Zhou and her misery. She managed to turn the case into a media event, turning public opinion on the mother’s side. People began to see Zhou as a victim of the system, not just a criminal.

Her move was risky. The Chinese state is often allergic to what it perceives as judicial sentimentality . But in this case, the court granted Yang’s request. Zhou Moying was given a three-year suspended sentence. In effect, she was released. The decision was welcomed with relief by Yang. But it was also the beginning of a profound change. “From that moment on, I could never again see a case in purely legal terms,” she wrote. “I saw human beings, not articles of law.” Yang began to question everything: the severity of the system, the role of the prosecutor, and ultimately whether it was possible to reform the justice system from within. This was the seed that led her to take the most radical step of her career.

In 2006, Yang did something that few legal officials in China had ever dared to do: he left the system.

In 2006, Yang did something few legal officials in China had ever dared to do: She left the system. She resigned from her post at the prosecutor’s office and announced that she would become a defense lawyer. Not only that, she would take on the most inconvenient and politicized cases—the ones no one wanted to touch. Friends and colleagues tried to talk her out of it. “You have a brilliant career ahead of you,” they told her. “You have a secure position, a salary, respect.” But Yang had already made up her mind. She had seen too much. She had witnessed firsthand the dehumanizing effects of a legal system that rewards obedience and punishes conscience. Her new career immediately set her on a collision course with the state. She defended journalists accused of “spreading rumors,” civil rights activists, and people protesting forced land grabs. She often worked for free, sleeping on couches, eating at night markets, running from courthouse to courthouse with her papers stuffed in canvas bags. Her name became a byword in China’s nascent civil rights lawyers’ movement. But it came at a cost. Her contacts were put under surveillance. The police regularly summoned her for “interviews.” On at least one occasion, she was held for hours and interrogated without access to a lawyer . Yet she persisted. “My goal is not to win cases,” she once said. “My goal is to show that there is another way to serve the law: the way of justice.” In 2011, she was the protagonist in one of the most high-profile cases of that decade: the defense of a farmer who had sued a local official for illegally confiscating his land. Not only did the court refuse to uphold the complaint, it charged the farmer with “inciting subversion of state power.” Yang mounted a spirited defense, managing to reduce the sentence from ten to three years. It was, in China, a victory. Over time, she became a symbol of another possible China—one in which the law is not a tool of control, but a space for negotiating power and conscience. Yet she knew her days as a freelancer were numbered. With the rise of Xi Jinping, the Party was tightening its grip on everything, including justice. Many of her colleagues were arrested or disappeared. Law firms that handled “sensitive” cases were being closed. The room for maneuver was closing. Yang began to seriously consider leaving the country. “But I don’t know if I would know who I am outside of China,” she once said. “Maybe my mission is to hold out as long as I can.”

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