Legal experts in China are pushing to reform a long-standing practice that can cause law-abiding citizens to lose their shot at joining the civil service or getting into certain university programs or the military if they happen to be related to a convicted criminal.
The reform push has the potential to curtail the practice, known as collective punishment, which has been criticized for violating basic legal norms and putting a vast share of China’s population at risk of being punished for the actions of another.
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This article outlines some of the issues
New report: China is ramping up collective punishment of families of rights defenders
Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly using collective punishment as a political tool to control human rights defenders and raise the personal cost of speaking up in China, according to a new report released today, International Human Rights Day.
Families in Fear: Collective Punishment in 21st Century China uses interviews and media reports to show how this feudal practice is being increasingly used both in terms of numbers and in type of punishment.
Download report here.
Download executive summary here.
No one is considered out of bounds: everyone from babies and toddlers to pensioners are being targeted.
Collective punishment is used to coerce confessions, frighten family members from advocacy and silence overseas critics. It is also increasingly adopted as a tool of transnational repression in “persuade to return” operations to coerce overseas targets, including telecom fraud suspects, to go back to China.
China’s CCP pressured the 70-year-old father of activist Yang Zhanqing’s to get his son to stop his rights work. After Yang, who lives in exile in the US, refused, his aged father lost his job and his home.
“Activists get used to this [CCP harassment] after being subjected to it so many times, but for people like my father, to them it’s like the world is ending,” says Yang.
Former miner Dong Jianbiao paid the ultimate price.
In 2022, he died in prison, his bruised body covered in blood. Police rushed through the cremation, forbidding the family their request for an autopsy.
The CCP punished Dong because his daughter splashed ink over a poster of Xi Jinping in 2018. She has since disappeared into the black hole of China’s illegal psychiatric detentions.
