I Cannot Remain Silent

Liu Jiming
Source: Bohuozhe (The Fire-Bringer) website, October 11, 2026

All I know is this: if even recording injustice must be done with caution, or can land you in prison, then what we will finally be left with is a society that is very clean, very quiet, and very empty of people. Such quiet is a deathly stillness, a tolling bell. In the face of it, I cannot remain silent. For silence is complicity.

On September 14, 2026, a young man named Feng Rui was placed under criminal detention by the Yuexiu District Branch of the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau on a charge of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble."[1] He is being held at the Yuexiu District Detention Center. As of today, it has been nearly a month.

He is better known by the name "Xiao Wu," and he ran a WeChat public account called Chiapas East Wind Television.[2] What the account did was simple: it documented the conditions of working people (unpaid wages, layoffs, workplace injuries, excessive overtime), and for several years running it published an annual review of labor rights.

Feng Rui graduated from the Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University in 2017. He did not take the more "respectable" path. According to a report in South Reviews, he went to Picun and worked at the Workers' Home.[3] "Of course his parents weren't happy about it. They wanted him to be like everyone else, but he felt his interest lay in subjects like workers and peasants."

He compiled the labor rights review five years in a row. The 2025 edition ran to roughly 100,000 characters and cited 589 separate sources. Nearly forty of these were government websites, and more than seventy were official or state-owned media outlets.

In the preface to his review, he wrote: "We hope that one day there will be less and less for us to record. That people will gather together only to dance, not to document injustice."

Here was a chronicler who hoped to put himself out of work, because that would mean there was no longer any injustice left to record.

In the face of this shocking incident, most mainstream media have chosen silence.

But as a writer, I cannot remain silent.

If we all choose silence, the next person stuffed into the catch-all sack of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" could be anyone at all.[4]

The charge of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" has long been controversial for its vague boundaries. The four situations listed in Article 293 of the Criminal Law are: wantonly assaulting others; chasing, intercepting, insulting, or intimidating others; forcibly taking or damaging property; and creating a disturbance in a public place. Every one of them describes a direct violation of a person's body, of property, or of order in a public place.

Whom did Feng Rui assault? Whom did he intimidate? Whose property did he seize?

Treating online posts as "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" rests on a provision in the 2013 judicial interpretation issued by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate,[5] which covers "fabricating false information" and spreading it online to stir up trouble. But the prerequisite is that the information was fabricated, and that the person knew it was fabricated. Feng Rui's review cited nearly six hundred sources, a large share of them official channels. If that information is false, then who did the fabricating: the National Bureau of Statistics? CCTV?

The Supreme People's Procuratorate's own official commentary states plainly that the essence of this crime is "endangering the public's stable expectations of social order," and that what it protects is "social order, a supra-individual legal interest." A labor rights review posted on a personal WeChat account: which public place did it shut down? Which public activity did it interrupt? Whom did it leave fearing that they "might be beaten up the moment they step outside"?

A person whose wages are withheld will not get paid because no one talks about it. A person who is wrongfully laid off will not get their job back because no one wrote it down. Injustice does not disappear in silence. It only becomes invisible.

Many working people have no voice. They have no reporters, no public accounts, no means of turning what has happened to them into an article that many people will read. A worker owed several months' wages; a delivery rider running orders in the rain all day for a pittance per trip; a young person suddenly told they have been laid off. When these things happen, they are real lives being lived. But once they have passed, they tend to vanish very quickly.

Feng Rui was willing to preserve them, so that at the very least others would know they had happened. That is the most basic meaning of documenting labor rights. It does not "manufacture" conflict. Most of these conflicts existed long before anyone recorded them. The chronicler merely carries them out of one person's private ordeal and into public view.

For that alone, he deserves to be called a man of courage.

The last update to Feng Rui's account was on February 15, 2026. It was a poem, which ends:

"Thinking of what kind of prison we will be in the next time we meet, and that you will still insist on wishing me well."

The sorrow of these lines lies in this: he had already foreseen his fate, yet he still held on to a kind of sincere hope.

Eight years ago, I wrote an essay titled "A Remembrance That Must Not Be Forgotten" for several young people who had been criminally detained.[6] Today, I find myself once again writing for a young man who has met the same fate, and my heart aches.

I do not know what Feng Rui is thinking at this moment. All I know is this: if even recording injustice must be done with caution, or can land you in prison, then what we will finally be left with is a society that is very clean, very quiet, and very empty of people.

Such quiet is a deathly stillness, a tolling bell.

In the face of it, I cannot remain silent. For silence is complicity.

October 11, 2026

[Editor's tagline on the original posting:] The first renowned writer and leading intellectual to speak out publicly on this matter.

Translator's notes

[1] 寻衅滋事 (xúnxìn zīshì): commonly rendered "picking quarrels and provoking trouble," Article 293 of the PRC Criminal Law. It is widely criticized for its elastic scope and frequent use against activists, petitioners, and online critics.

[2] 恰帕斯东风电视机: Chiapas alludes to the Mexican state where the Zapatista movement arose in 1994. East Wind (东风) evokes Mao's famous line "the East Wind prevails over the West Wind," a Cold War image of revolutionary forces overtaking imperialism.

[3] Picun (皮村) and the Workers' Home (工友之家): Picun is a migrant-worker village on the eastern outskirts of Beijing. The Workers' Home is a grassroots NGO based there, known for its migrant workers' museum, night school, and the New Workers Art Troupe.

[4] "Catch-all sack" (口袋): this plays on the legal term 口袋罪 ("pocket crime"), Chinese shorthand for a vaguely defined offense into which almost any conduct can be "pocketed."

[5] The 2013 judicial interpretation: the joint interpretation by the Supreme People's Court and Supreme People's Procuratorate (the "Two Highs," 两高) on using information networks to commit defamation and related crimes. It extended "picking quarrels" to online speech.

[6] "A Remembrance That Must Not Be Forgotten" (《不能忘却的记念》): this title deliberately echoes Lu Xun's 1933 essay 《为了忘却的记念》, usually translated "Written for the Sake of Forgetting" or "In Memory of the Forgotten." Lu Xun wrote it to mourn five young leftist writers executed by the Nationalist government in 1931. Liu inverts the title: Lu Xun's ironic "for the sake of forgetting" becomes "must not be forgotten."

A few choices you may want to adjust:

• The opening and closing quotation. In the original, the closing passage is repeated after the date as a pull-quote. I placed it once, at the top as an epigraph, to avoid the repetition in English. If you want to mirror the web layout exactly, I can restore it at the end.

• 非常没有人的社会. I rendered this as "very empty of people" to keep the author's triple "非常" rhythm (clean, quiet, empty). A freer option is "a society scrubbed clean of human beings."

• 死寂与丧钟. I used "a deathly stillness, a tolling bell" for cadence. "The silence of the grave, and a death knell" is more explicit if you prefer.