PEN America champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. The bedrock work of the global PEN network is advocacy and assistance on behalf of individuals persecuted for their use of the written word or other forms of expression. PEN America’s Writers at Risk Database is a searchable catalog of the writers, journalists, academics, public intellectuals and others under threat around the world. The database includes historical cases PEN America has worked on from 1987 onwards; non-active cases are color-coded black. PEN America is grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for support that enabled the establishment of the Writers at Risk Database and to PEN International for their collaboration in assembling this database.
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Xiang is a blogger who created a WeChat group where has been posting politically sensitive commentary and expressing concerns about citizens’ rights since 2017. In 2019, he was stopped at the airport, prevented from leaving the country, and his passport was annulled. Xiang was taken into custody three years later…
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Xiaolong is an activist and online commentator. He was detained by the police for posting an open letter on Twitter to the Shanghai government in August 2022, accusing them of causing the Covid-19 humanitarian crisis in Shanghai. He was indicted by the court for “spreading false information that harms the…
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Xie spent 4.5 years in prison for subverting power after publicly supporting the Umbrella Movement. Released in March 2019, he has since been harassed and was again detained in April 2020 after posting a poem commemorating Lin Zhao, a dissident of the Cultural Revolution. Xie was handed a 4-year-and-a-half sentence…
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Xie is an activist and blogger from Chengdu. In 2018, he was beaten and detained by police for 10 days on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” He was later released with a warning. He was rearrested again in 2019 and 2020. In May 2022, following an article he…
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Xu is a long -time democracy activist who has been arrested multiple times in past years; his latest arrest was on May 26, 2022. After he had been warned by police not to comment ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Xu went to the police station with…
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Xu, an active democracy activist, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 for, according to the court, causing serious public disorder by repeatedly posting “false information” online that insulted national leaders. He was released on September 25, 2020.
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While under house arrest for penning an essay in February 2020 regarding China’s repressive response to COVID-19, Xu was detained on July 6 on spurious charges but released six days later. In 2019, Tsinghua University barred Xu from teaching after he criticized Xi’s mandate.
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Xu was arrested on national security charges after holding a seminar to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. After his conviction, he was imprisoned for four years and released in 2018 upon expiry of his sentence.
Writers at Risk Database Key:
STATUS box that is red: Active case
STATUS box that is black: Inactive case
PEN America is deeply grateful to the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of the Freedom to Write Index and Writers at Risk Database.
PEN America thanks the PEN International Secretariat and the Writers in Prison Committee for their extensive contributions to and collaboration on compiling the cases included in this database.