A Study Group Is Crushed in China's Grip

A few weeks later, the Ministry of Public Security, China's main police agency, began to harass one of the study group's members, Jin Haike. They detained him for questioning several times, asking about the New Youth Study Group and its ties with the China Democracy Party. They also informed his employer that he was under investigation and tried to persuade him to spy on his friends.

Instead, Jin told the others what happened. Li was surprised police were investigating the group, but not alarmed, and he informed his superiors in the Ministry of State Security. The others were more concerned.

Jin "told us he had given our names to the police," recalled Zhang Yanhua, the study group member in Tianjin. "We weren't angry; we knew he was trying to protect us. But we were nervous."

In January, Jin lost his job, apparently because of the police pressure. His friends agreed to shut down the New Youth Study Group.

Two months later, Jin visited his high school classmate, Fan Erjun. He was agitated, Fan recalled, and wanted to call an urgent meeting of the study group because he believed police were preparing a wave of arrests.

Fan said the conversation left him shaken. Instead of going to the meeting, he hesitated, then sought advice from a party official at his university whom he considered a mentor. That night, the man summoned Fan to his office. Three agents from the Ministry of State Security were waiting for him.

"I tried to explain everything to them, but I couldn't remember a lot, and they weren't satisfied," Fan said. At 3 a.m., the agents let him go home. But they told him they'd be back.

Four days later, on March 13, 2001, state security agents detained five study group members: Jin Haike, Yang Zili, Xu Wei, Zhang Honghai and Zhang Yanhua. A group of agents also grabbed Yang's wife, Lu Kun, forced her into a small car and took her to one of the ministry's detention houses with her head covered by a cloth bag.

Lu said the agents interrogated her for three days, demanding information about her husband's friends and their activities. When she refused to give them any names, the agents scoffed, she said. "You're in trouble today because of your friends," she quoted one of them as saying. "Your friends betrayed you. They told us everything."

Zhang Yanhua said he was questioned for about 10 hours per day for almost 30 days, and was released. He was held in Tianjin, where he lived and worked, and because the agents focused their questions on whether the group had done anything in that city, he managed to answer without harming his friends.

Huang Haixia was not detained, but she was summoned by university officials to meet with state security agents. She was questioned in three long sessions, and she signed a statement after each. She said the agents repeatedly raised the possibility of a long prison sentence and urged her to consider her academic future.

In her first statement, Huang wrote that the New Youth Study Group wanted to "change China into a better country." But in the second, she said she regretted "staying with these young men who always thought they were right" and "using radical words to attack our nation's leaders." She thanked state security agents "for helping me recognize my mistakes."

In her last statement, signed after six hours of questioning, she wrote: "The New Youth Study Group is an organization that opposes the current socialist system and the rule of the Chinese Communist Party. . . . This organization is illegal. It tried to overthrow the party's rule and shake the leadership and prestige of the party."

State security agents also questioned Fan repeatedly, twice in March and twice in April. The last meeting took place in a city detention center, he said.

"They showed me a transcript of my answers and asked me to sign it," he recalled. "I saw that I had said Yang wanted to change China into a capitalist country and that Zhang Honghai favored a revolution. I did say something like that, but those were just my impressions and I didn't think they should use it as evidence."

He said the transcript also included statements he did not make, such as a line that stated, "Our organization's final goal is to overthrow the Chinese government."

But Fan said he was too afraid to object. "I was in a detention center, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. It felt like they were threatening me," he said. "They kept saying they were a state organ, and that I must cooperate with them or face the consequences."

So he signed the paper.

Facing the Consequences

Li Yuzhou recalled he felt sick when he heard his friends had been arrested. He dialed their numbers, one after another, but couldn't get through to any of them. A day later, he called his supervisor at the Ministry of State Security.

The official confirmed the arrests, and told him to go into hiding for a few days.

"I think he wanted me to know that I had made an important contribution," Li said. "He also tried to comfort me. He said that if we hadn't arrested them, someone else would have. Then he said they would be jailed 15 to 20 years, and when they were released, they wouldn't recognize me anymore. But that only made me feel worse."

Li said he was too confused to argue. That night, he told his girlfriend what had happened and wept in his dorm room. In a moment of rage, he burned his arm with a cigarette, leaving a scar to remind him of the pain and guilt he felt.

Within a few days, Li said, he began using a pen name to post appeals on behalf of his friends on the Internet.

But he did not disclose his role in the arrests. Nor did he break off his relationship with the Ministry of State Security. He may have felt guilty, but not enough to join his friends in prison. He said he wanted to find another way to help them.

"It wasn't so simple," Li said, adding that he was frightened of the agents. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to graduate. They could have arrested me for any reason."

Three weeks later, Li's supervisors at the Ministry of State Security invited him to lunch. During the meal, Li shared a smoke with the agents and didn't challenge their decision to detain his friends. Afterward, they asked him to sign a written statement that was supposed to represent his answers when questioned formally about the case.

"I think the New Youth Study Group was an illegal organization and a political organization," the statement said. "First, it wasn't registered. Second, it had a strong political inclination, which I believe was to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party and replace it with a multi-party system and Western capitalism."

Li signed. He said he didn't study it closely.

A Verdict Is Issued

Six months later, when prosecutors presented their case in court, they relied heavily on the statements signed by Huang Haixia, Fan Erjun and Li Yuzhou.

The four young men spoke in their own defense, according to notes taken by relatives who attended the one-day trial. Dressed in the clothes they wore when they were arrested -- sweatshirts, mostly -- each stood and addressed a panel of three judges.

Zhang Honghai asked how the study group could have overthrown the party when it couldn't even raise enough money to set up a Web site. Xu Wei noted that Communist Party members made up half of the study group. When prosecutors accused Jin Haike of advocating "an end to old man politics," he retorted that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had used the same phrase.

And Yang Zili argued that "liberalization of the social system," which prosecutors had accused them of promoting, did not amount to subversion. "Liberalization means expanding the level of freedom in society through reform," he said. "The reforms of the past 20 years, isn't that just a process of liberalization?"

Li Yuzhou had graduated by then. The Ministry of State Security was preparing the paperwork to hire him and had asked him to begin investigating and infiltrating other suspected dissident groups. But he was no longer interested in working for them.

Instead, he embarked on a course of action suggesting how torn he felt about what he had done. Li seemed desperate to help his friends, but also unwilling to accept full responsibility for betraying them, or to sacrifice his own freedom on their behalf.

First, Li wrote a letter to the judge defending his four friends and renouncing his signed statement. But he did not disclose his relationship with the ministry, and he told his supervisor about the letter in advance, arguing that he needed to send it to enhance his credibility in the dissident community, he said.

Later, he contacted Yang's wife, Lu Kun, and met with her at a McDonald's restaurant. He showed her the scar caused by the cigarette burn, but couldn't bring himself to confess his role in her husband's arrest.

He also tried going to China's highest court to seek help for Yang and the others. Again, he did not tell officials about his relationship with the Ministry of State Security. But the ministry quickly discovered what he was doing. While he was at the court, his supervisor called his cell phone and told him to "get back here or you'll be arrested," Li said.

Later that day, a department chief in the ministry took Li to a teahouse and gently warned him not to go too far. "He said, 'We know you feel terrible because your friends have been arrested. Go home and rest,' " Li recalled. "But he also said I was an adult and must be responsible for my actions. . . . He said, 'Don't think we can't catch spies without you.' "

Li refused to do any more work for the ministry. Instead, he began posting essays on the Internet about his four friends using the name of a fake organization, the China Human Rights Party. In May 2002, his supervisor called and asked if he had heard of the group. Li said no. Two days later, the agent called again and recited a phone number. It was his girlfriend's number, the one he had been using to sign on to the Internet.

"He said if I had written those essays, there was nothing he could do to help me," Li recalled. "I knew I was in trouble."

The next month, Li obtained a passport, and with the help of a friend who works at a travel agency, he flew to Thailand on July 8 and applied for refugee status at an office of the United Nations.

On April 20, 2003, more than two years after Yang and the others were first arrested, the judge convened a second hearing to examine new evidence in the case. For the first time, prosecutors presented four handwritten reports submitted by Li Yuzhou while he was working for the Ministry of State Security.

On May 18, 2003, the four defendants were led into a courtroom to hear the verdict. Two security officers stood behind each of them. But before the judge could announce the decision, Xu Wei leaped forward and threw himself on the ground.

"I protest!" witnesses quoted him as shouting. "Beijing State Security beat me! But I won't admit any crime! I won't falsely accuse anyone!"

He grabbed the leg of a table, and it took five or six officers to pry him loose and carry him out of the room. The judge then announced the conviction of all four defendants on subversion charges.

Xu and Jin Haike were sentenced to 10 years in prison. Yang Zili and Zhang Honghai received eight-year sentences. The security officers rushed the three remaining defendants out of the room before they could say anything.

A World of Regret

Several months later, Li Yuzhou studied the reports that had been presented in court. He was wearing a white T-shirt with elephants on front and sitting in a hotel lobby in Bangkok. It appeared he had not shaved in several days.

"I wrote these," he said finally, looking up from the papers. His forehead was creased in a slight frown, but his face betrayed no other emotion. "I have some impression of them."

The first report was the longest. It focused on Xu Wei. It said he had been busy planning a secret organization and believed violence could not be ruled out as an option for political change. It also said that he had concluded Li was "totally trustworthy."

"I can't remember why I wrote this," Li said, his deep voice trailing off. "I didn't know the purpose of the investigation was to arrest these people. . . ."

The second report was shorter. It described a meeting in which six members of the New Youth Study Group were present. The report offered a statement from each one criticizing the Communist Party.

Li dismissed the report as harmless. "Any Chinese citizen can say these things," he said. "Teachers in class say these things, too."

The third report described the first meeting of the New Youth Study Group. It was even shorter, with few details about what was said, though it divided the participants into two groups -- five members who endorsed "violent methods" and two who supported "peaceful methods."

"The Ministry of State Security wasn't satisfied with this report," Li said. "They said it was a big event, and I should add more details. But I never did it because I was lazy. I always tried to write as little as possible."

The fourth report described a meeting in Li's dorm room in which Jin Haike told him the police had been harassing him. Zhang Honghai was there, too, and it quoted him as arguing that they must try to expand their organization.

"I was working for the Ministry of State Security at the time. I had to write these," Li said. Asked if he was deceiving his friends, he said he was only doing his job but added that the ministry had misused the reports. "It would have been okay to use my reports to analyze society, but not as evidence to convict people. . . . What if I was making up the stories?"

Li said personal ambition appeared to drive the Ministry of State Security's decision to arrest his friends. His supervisors wanted to break a big case, justify their budget and win promotions, and no doubt their superiors wanted the same. As a result, Li said, bureaucrats at each level exaggerated his friends' activities, perhaps all the way to the top of the party. When a rival agency, the Ministry of Public Security, began poking around, state security officials decided to move to make sure they got the credit, Li said.

But Li denied his own ambition had driven him to inform on his friends and exaggerate in his reports. Later, asked what he would say to his friends now, he paused before answering. "I never imagined it would hurt them," he said quietly. "I don't want to shift responsibility. I do regret writing these reports. . . . They were used as evidence, and it hurt them, and I'm very sorry."

One More Reunion

They had not seen one another since the arrests. But last October, after months of silence, the three other study group members who escaped arrest mustered the courage to testify at an appeal hearing on their friends' behalf.

Zhang Yanhua was still living in Tianjin. His words had not been used against Yang and the others, but he had done little to stand up for them afterward. He became interested in Christianity, prayed for his friends every day, and agreed to testify when Yang's wife, Lu Kun, tracked him down.

Huang Haixia knew her signed statements had hurt her friends, but had tried to forget them. After the first trial, she wrote a careful letter to the judge at the request of Xu Wei's girlfriend indicating her answers had been "distorted to some extent" by state security officers. Then she moved to Shanghai. Zhang found her there and persuaded her to return to Beijing for the hearing.

Fan Erjun was still a tutor at Beihang University and for months he had been too scared even to ask around about what had happened to his friends. Once, Lu Kun asked to see him, and he put her off, saying he needed time to think. But weeks before the appeal hearing, Yang's lawyer called him and reminded him of the statements he had signed. He was surprised by the harshness of his words, and felt so terrible he agreed to testify, too.

But the court refused to let any of them in. The three sat on the curb and wrote a statement defending their friends and denying the New Youth Study Group ever intended to overthrow the government. The court refused to accept it.

Later, Lu said she had forgiven all three of them. "They're young," she said, "and they were pressured to do what they did."

But she would not forgive Li Yuzhou. She said his actions had been voluntary. "He lied and betrayed his friends, then left the country instead of staying to help them," she said. "He doesn't deserve political asylum. . . . He should come back, even if it means going to jail, because that's where he deserves to be. He should accept responsibility for what he's done."

Once, Li called her from Bangkok and asked her to send him copies of court papers so he could try to help her husband. She replied: "I hate you."

In November 2003, the court rejected the four defendants' appeals.

Lu was allowed to visit her husband for the first time last month, almost exactly three years after he was arrested. His head had been shaved, and he was thin and pale, she said. The couple sat on opposite sides of a glass panel and spoke through telephone handsets, but it was difficult to hear each other because the room was full of other prisoners and visitors.

Lu said she wept, telling her husband that she had finally read his essays, that she understood now why he had insisted on writing them. But Yang did most of the talking. He spoke slowly, expressing sadness about letting his family down. He asked her to visit his parents, and to take good care of herself in his absence.

"He said he had been falsely convicted," Lu said. "And he told me to prepare myself. He said he wouldn't admit he was guilty to get parole."

After only 20 minutes, the telephone line went dead. Their time was up.