Xi Jinping and Collective Punishment of Human Rights Defenders’ Families

For two years Chinese authorities secretly detained the newborn baby, her siblings, and their parents. 

Their whereabouts and wellbeing remained unknown to family members or lawyers until word began to trickle out in July 2022: the baby and her sister, then 6 years old, had been kept in a psychiatric hospital since October 2020. Their brother, who turned 8 that year, had been sent, without the parents’ consent, to be fostered by a local police informant. 

The children’s mother, human rights defender He Fangmei, had been detained at the psychiatric hospital, where she gave birth in February 2021. She was then transferred to pre-trial detention in Xinxiang Detention Center, Henan Province. She awaits prosecution for advocating safer vaccines and seeking justice for her daughter, who was disabled by tainted medications. The children’s father is serving a five-year sentence on baseless charges. Lawyers were denied access to the family until a first visit to He in late 2022.

He Fangmei tried to authorize her sister to care for the children, but authorities ignored that effort. In January 2024 Henan authorities coerced He’s 75-year-old mother, who cannot read, into agreeing to a written document relinquishing custody of the children.

On April 1, 2024, officials from the psychiatric hospital, seemingly fed up with growing pressure from He’s family’s lawyers and other activists trying to visit the girls, dropped them off at the mayor’s office in Chengguan, Hui county. In mid-April, we learned that the two girls have been removed from that office. As this piece went to press, their whereabouts are unknown.

These children don’t need clinical or foster care, and they have committed no crimes. They have relatives willing to take care of them. The authorities’ actions – devoid of parental consent – are clear violations of Chinese and international human rights law.

But Chinese authorities regularly inflict collective punishment against families of activists and dissidents – penalizing them by proxy by harming their children, spouses, or parents. 

He’s is far from an isolated case. New research from Chinese Human Rights Defenders shows dozens of instances in 2023 alone in which Chinese authorities prosecuted family members on trumped-up charges and blocked access to loved ones in detention, among other tactics. 

Disbarred human rights lawyer Tang Jitian’s daughter, Tang Zhengqi, died of meningitis in Japan on February 21, 2024. Tang had pleaded with authorities to let him visit his daughter as her health deteriorated throughout 2023. Authorities not only barred him from travel on vague “national security” grounds, depriving him of a last chance to see his child, but also proceeded to hold him incommunicado until weeks after his daughter’s death, leaving him in unimaginable grief and isolation.

Blocking defenders’ children’s access to school is another disturbing tactic. Wang Quanquan, the son of activist Li Wenzu and debarred rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, has on at least five separate occasions been forced to leave school. This began when Quanquan was in kindergarten and continues to this day. In March 2024, 20 police arrived at the Guangdong school Quanquan had begun to attend just 10 days earlier, searched the school, and terrorized school officials, who eventually asked the boy to leave campus. Li believes her son is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after years of harassment.

In late 2022, Peng Lifa hung a banner on a bridge in Beijing calling for an end to the draconian “zero-COVID” lockdowns. He was arrested on the spot and hasn’t been heard from since. Authorities put his wife and two daughters under house arrest in Beijing, and summoned and threatened Peng’s siblings and his wife’s relatives in their home village in Heilongjiang province. But even that isn’t enough: The entire village was reportedly sealed off, and supporters and citizen journalists were blocked from entering.

Collective punishment turns the idea of the rule of law on its head. Those peacefully seeking redress for rights abuses put themselves at risk – and invite reprisals against their families and communities. Officials who harass, beat, torture, and otherwise persecute innocents do so with full impunity. None of the officials responsible for terrorizing these defenders’ children, spouses, and parents has been held accountable.

As “zero-COVID” controls lift and leaders of democracies rush to resume interactions with Xi and his government, they should ensure they are not working with authorities responsible for inflicting collective punishment against human rights defenders. They can call publicly for an end to the practice, especially in high-level meetings. They should publicly urge the release of those wrongfully detained across China, and the immediate reunification of families kept apart. 

The Chinese government could signal its willingness to reverse course and uphold its own legal obligations by immediately returning He Fangmei’s children into the loving care of their relatives – and by freeing He and her husband from wrongful detention.