I cannot Remain Silent

Liu Jiming · Posted on Bohuozhe (The Fire-Bearers), October 11, 2026

All I know is that if even recording injustice must be done with fear and trembling, and can even be made a crime, then what may be left in the end is a society that is very clean, very quiet, and very empty of people. Such quiet is the silence of death, and a tolling bell. I cannot remain silent about this. For silence is complicity.

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

He is better known as “Xiaowu,” and he ran a WeChat public account called “Chiapas East Wind Television.”[2] What the account did was simple: it recorded the conditions of working people (unpaid wages, layoffs, workplace injuries, excessive overtime) and for several years running 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” road. According to Southern Window, he went to Picun and worked at the Workers’ Home.[3] “Of course his parents didn’t want him to. They hoped he would be like everyone else. But he felt his interests lay in subjects like workers and peasants.”

He compiled the labor-rights review for five years in a row. The 2025 edition ran to about a hundred thousand characters and cited 589 different sources, nearly 40 of them government websites and more than seventy official and state-owned media outlets.

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

A recorder who hoped to put himself “out of work.” Because that would mean there was no more injustice to record.

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

But as a writer, I cannot remain silent.

If we all choose silence, the next one to be stuffed into the sack labeled “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” could be anyone at all.

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 (wantonly assaulting others; chasing, intercepting, abusing, or intimidating others; forcibly taking or wilfully damaging property; and causing a disturbance in a public place) all concern direct harm to persons, to property, or to order in public places.

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 of the 2013 judicial interpretation by the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, which covers “fabricating false information,” or spreading information known to be fabricated, on the internet in order to stir up trouble.[4] But the precondition is “fabrication,” and “knowing it to be fabricated.” Feng Rui’s review cited nearly six hundred sources, a great many of them official channels. If this information is false, who did the faking: the National Bureau of Statistics, or CCTV?

The official exposition of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate states plainly that the core of the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble is that it “endangers the public’s stable expectations of social order,” and that what it protects is “the supra-individual legal interest of social order.” A labor-rights review published on a personal WeChat account: which public place did it bring to a standstill? Which public activity did it interrupt? Whom did it leave thinking they “might be beaten if they went out”?

A worker whose wages are owed does not get paid because no one talks about it. A worker maliciously laid off does not get his job back because no article records it. Injustice does not vanish through 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 see. A worker owed several months’ wages; a delivery rider running all day in the rain for a pittance per order; a young person suddenly told he has been laid off: when these things happen, they are real lives. But once they are past, they usually disappear very quickly.

Feng Rui was willing to keep them, so that others would at least know they had happened. That is the simplest meaning of recording labor rights. It does not “manufacture” conflict. Many conflicts existed long before they were recorded. The recorder simply carries them out of one person’s misfortune and into public view.

On this ground alone, he deserves to be called a brave man.

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

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

The sorrow of these lines is that he had already foreseen his fate, yet still held on to a heartfelt wish.

Eight years ago, I wrote an essay, “A Remembrance That Must Not Be Forgotten,” for several young people who had been placed under criminal detention.[5] Today I must write these words for another young man who has met the same fate, and my heart cannot help aching.

I do not know what Feng Rui is thinking at this moment. All I know is that if even recording injustice must be done with fear and trembling, and can even be made a crime, then what may be left in the end is a society that is very clean, very quiet, and very empty of people.

Such quiet is the silence of death, and a tolling bell.

I cannot remain silent about this. For silence is complicity.

October 11, 2026

Notes

[1] “Picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (寻衅滋事) is the standard English rendering of the offense in Article 293 of China’s Criminal Law. Its vagueness has made it a catch-all charge against petitioners, activists, and online critics.

[2] The account’s name joins Chiapas, the Mexican state where the Zapatista uprising began in 1994, with the “East Wind” of Mao’s saying “the East Wind prevails over the West Wind.”

[3] Southern Window (南风窗) is a Guangzhou-based current-affairs magazine. Picun, a village on the outskirts of Beijing, is home to the Workers’ Home (工友之家), a well-known center for migrant workers’ culture and education.

[4] The interpretation of September 2013 on criminal cases of defamation and related offenses committed through information networks.

[5] The title echoes Lu Xun’s famous essay “Remembrance for the Sake of Forgetting” (为了忘却的记念, 1933), written for five young left-wing writers executed by the Nationalist government in 1931.