A Study Group Is Crushed in China's Grip

This account is based on interviews with the four members of the study group who escaped arrest, relatives and friends of those imprisoned, and others who attended the group's meetings, as well as documents presented in court in the case.

A Forum Is Born

Lu Kun remembers standing over a stove in the alley outside her one-room house, making dinner as she lectured her husband, Yang Zili. He was inside, sitting in front of the computer they had purchased as a wedding present for themselves, tinkering with an essay on democracy he planned to post on the Internet.

"You don't have to do all this," she recalled admonishing him, her voice carrying through the open doorway. "With your education, you could have a better future. You should think of your parents, your family, our economic situation. We don't even have a real apartment!"

But Yang brushed aside the complaint. "He told me that someone had to stand up and work for social progress, and he had decided to stand up," Lu said.

"I knew he was right," she added. "But I was worried."

A slim, outgoing computer whiz with a youthful, angular face, Yang developed his political views at Beijing University, where he earned a master's degree in mechanics but was inspired by reading Vaclav Havel, Friedrich Hayek and Samuel P. Huntington. As the eldest son of farmers so poor they gave his brothers up for adoption, he was especially interested in rural poverty and often traveled to the countryside to investigate the abuse of power by local officials.

After graduating in 1998, Yang found work as a programmer and set up a popular Web site, "Yangzi's Home of Ideas," where he posted forceful essays condemning communism and arguing for democratic reform. "I am a liberal," he wrote, "and what I care about are human rights, freedom and democracy."

Lu, a magazine editor with long, straight hair and sad eyes, never read her husband's essays and poems. She wanted a quiet life and urged him to be more like classmates who were chasing riches and settling into China's new middle class. Yang refused.

Instead, he found a circle of friends who shared his concern about those left behind by the booming economy. They were college kids and recent graduates, people like himself who had come to Beijing from the provinces for an education and who enjoyed arguing about what could be done to change China and help its less fortunate.

Yang signed up immediately when a few of his friends proposed setting up a club to provide structure to their discussions. They named it the New Youth Study Group after an influential journal published during China's celebrated May 4th Movement, when students and intellectuals passionately debated the country's future after the fall of the last emperor in 1911.

"We didn't want to be ordinary people. We wanted to do something for society," recalled Zhang Yanhua, a soft-spoken graduate who took a civil service job in the nearby city of Tianjin but made the two-hour trip back to Beijing for the group's meetings. They met on different college campuses, in dorm rooms, classrooms or just outside, and they welcomed friends and classmates to join them. Sometimes, they had tea or shared a meal, but usually they would just sit and talk, for hours at a time, about government corruption, the plight of laid-off factory workers or the tax burden on peasant families.

"We talked a lot about the indifference of our generation," said Fan Erjun, a short, spiky-haired graduate of Beihang University who was working as a tutor there. "We felt other young people were too materialistic and didn't worry about the right things."