Feng Zhenghu’s Story: From Scholar within the System to Citizen Rights Defender | Shu Wen

Introduction: A Man Who Took the Law Seriously

In the history of contemporary citizen rights defense in China, Feng Zhenghu is difficult to classify simply. He was not a professional lawyer, yet for years he studied legal provisions, drafted complaints, organized case files, and pursued accountability for procedural failures; he was not a political activist in the traditional sense, yet his insistence that “I want to go home” led the world’s media to follow him for 92 days; he had been a university teacher, researcher, and business operator, as well as a criminal defendant, prisoner, party to administrative disputes, and citizen rights defender struggling to make his way through the gaps in the rule of law.

Feng Zhenghu, born on July 1, 1954, in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, and raised in Shanghai, is Han Chinese, one of the earliest signatories of Charter 08, founder of the “Constitutional Rights Defense Network,” and one of the key initiators of the “I Want to File a Case” citizen right-to-sue movement in Shanghai and across China. From the ivory tower to the front lines of society, from classrooms, studies, and the business world to prisons, airports, courthouse entrances, and the foot of his own home, his life’s trajectory has passed through many of the key settings in which individual lives and public power have intersected during China’s reform era.

If one thread runs throughout his life, it is this: taking the law seriously and demanding that those who wield power take it seriously too. For that reason, his story is not simply the history of one person’s suffering, nor simply the history of one person’s resistance; it is more like a mirror, reflecting the growth of contemporary Chinese citizens’ awareness of their rights, the repeated clashes and fissures between the text of the system and its practice, and how an ordinary Chinese citizen, despite prolonged repression, has continued to try to claim some space for rights for himself and others through rational, lawful, and sustained means.

I. The Ivory Tower and the Storm of the Times (1954–1991)

Solid Academic Training

Feng Zhenghu received a solid academic education. In 1980, he graduated from the Department of Mathematics at East China Normal University; in 1986, he earned a master’s degree in economics from Fudan University’s School of Management. Mathematics gave him a rigorous logical framework, while economics brought him early exposure to real-world institutions, organizational operations, and social governance. Years later, that academic training was clearly reflected both in his detailed analysis of the chronology in court documents and in his statistical analysis of cases of judicial inaction.

A Promising Young Scholar

After graduate school, he joined Shanghai University of Finance and Economics as a teacher, and later served as president of the Shanghai Enterprise Development Research Association and director of the China Enterprise Development Research Institute, among other positions. Against the backdrop of early reform-era enterprise restructuring and the rapid spread of modern management ideas, he chaired the national “China Enterprise Development Symposium” for four consecutive years and edited works including Corporate Strategy and China Enterprise Development Yearbook (1988). In the eyes of the young economics and management academic community at the time, he was a scholarly talent widely regarded as promising.

The First Turning Point in 1989

The political turmoil of 1989 marked the first fundamental turning point in his life. According to currently available public information, Feng Zhenghu, then head of the Shanghai Enterprise Development Research Institute, publicly opposed the use of the military to suppress the student democracy movement and declared that he was willing to take responsibility himself. After the turmoil, he underwent more than a year of political scrutiny and received a major administrative demerit; his probationary membership in the Chinese Communist Party was also not confirmed. At that point, an academic career within the system that had seemed set to unfold was abruptly cut short.

Going East to Japan, While Retaining Chinese Citizenship

In April 1991, with the approval of relevant Shanghai Municipal Party Committee officials, Feng Zhenghu went to Japan to study economic policy at Hitotsubashi University and taught himself computer technology while there. For more than a decade afterward, he traveled between China and Japan. Notably, no matter how long he stayed in Japan, he never took Japanese citizenship. He held a Chinese passport for many years and retained his Chinese citizenship. Later, when he insisted on his “right to return” from outside China’s borders, this fact of his identity became the firmest and most indisputable legal basis: he was not an exile seeking refuge in another country, but a Chinese citizen lawfully demanding to return to his own country.

II. Business Ambitions, a Prison Sentence over Publishing, and an Awakening to the Rule of Law (1998–2003)

Returning to China to Start a Business and Directory of Japanese-Funded Enterprises in Shanghai

In 1998, Feng Zhenghu returned to Shanghai with the ideal of serving the country through business. He founded “Shanghai Tianlun Consulting Co., Ltd.,” specializing in investment consulting for Chinese and Japanese enterprises and database software development, and planned and edited Directory of Japanese-Funded Enterprises in Shanghai, a reference book compiling first-hand trade and economic information. The company’s business began to take off. For someone who had left the university lectern and received training in economic policy in Japan, this should have been a path for turning knowledge into a force for building.

A Publication That Brought a Three-Year Prison Sentence

This path was soon cut short by a publishing dispute. On November 13, 2000, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau criminally detained Feng Zhenghu on suspicion of “illegal business operations,” alleging that his company’s publications had not received the statutory press and publishing approvals. In June 2001, the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him at first instance to three years in prison and fined him 400,000 yuan (of which Feng Zhenghu personally was responsible for 100,000 yuan); the Shanghai Higher People’s Court upheld the original judgment on appeal. In response to the charges, Feng Zhenghu defended himself, maintaining that the book’s content was objective and well organized and had received widespread praise, that the company had paid taxes in accordance with the law, and that freedom of publication was a citizen’s right explicitly protected by Article 35 of the Constitution, so exercising a constitutional right should not be treated as a crime. He later said on many occasions that the judicial authorities had accepted false evidence, causing him not only to lose his freedom but also to suffer long-term financial and reputational harm.

An Awakening in Prison and a Change of Identity

He was then sent to Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison to serve his sentence and was released in 2003 after completing it. The imprisonment, which he regarded as a systemic injustice, did not crush him; instead, it brought about a complete change in identity: from a “scholar within the system” who studied institutions to a “grassroots rights defender” who had directly encountered the system and resolved to use the system’s own rules to constrain it. In prison, he experienced firsthand the gap between “legal provisions” and the “spirit of the rule of law” and gradually developed an outlook centered on “defending the Constitution and rights.” As he left prison, he made a vow:

“After purgatory, I should follow the will of Heaven and work for the people. If poor, cultivate myself alone; if prosperous, help all under Heaven. What a joyful life.”

Founding the “Constitutional Rights Defense Network”

After his release, he did not choose silence or return to a quiet life. He founded the “Constitutional Rights Defense Network” and Supervision Bulletin, systematically collecting, organizing, and exposing typical cases of judicial inaction. He went on to compile a series of collections, including I Want to File a Case: A Compilation of Cases of Judicial Inaction in Shanghai, consistently focusing on citizens’ right to sue, protection of property rights, and channels for administrative remedies. It was also during this period that he put forward the slogan “Defend the Constitution and rights, live happily”: advance the rule of law within the framework of the country’s current Constitution and laws, and serve as a constructive, rational watchdog rather than a destructive opponent.

III. The 2008 Exit Ban: From a Fine to the Border

A Faxed Photocopy at Pudong Airport

On the afternoon of May 22, 2008, Feng Zhenghu completed check-in and checked his luggage at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, preparing to take China Eastern Airlines flight MU271 to Japan to visit family. But at border inspection, he was stopped by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s Exit-Entry Administration and barred from leaving the country.

Staff on the scene could not produce an original exit restriction decision lawfully prepared and formally served. They showed him only a photocopy of a Decision on Restriction of Exit faxed over by the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, bearing the document number “(2008) Hu Er Zhong Zhi Xing Zi No. 44” and the issue date March 20, 2008. Feng Zhenghu had never received the decision before then, nor had the court lawfully informed him of the relevant restriction.

Three Legal Defects

The stated reason was that the 100,000-yuan fine for which he was personally liable in the 2001 illegal business operations case “had not been paid.” In response, Feng Zhenghu offered a fairly rigorous legal analysis, pointing to at least three clear problems.

First, the deadline for compliance was absurd. The court’s Enforcement Notice required him to “pay by March 20, 2008,” while the notice itself was also issued on March 20. In effect, it required payment before service and deprived the party of even the most basic reasonable period for compliance.

Second, the enforcement agency itself had long neglected to enforce the judgment. According to his account, after leaving prison he repeatedly sought to pay the fine by phone, letter, and in person, but the court’s enforcement division did not provide a specific account or practical payment arrangements. It was not until June 26, 2008, that the two sides agreed he would pay 100 yuan per month. In these circumstances, placing all responsibility for the late payment on the party was plainly unfair.

Third, both the legal basis and the procedures for restricting his exit had serious defects. At the time, the law did not clearly provide that an unpaid criminal fine could automatically serve as grounds for restricting a citizen’s exit from the country. Moreover, from 2003 to 2008, Feng Zhenghu had entered and left the country normally 14 times. The sudden interception this time was questionable not only in its substantive basis but also because it appeared clearly unlawful procedurally.

When “Exit Restrictions” Became “Difficulty Filing a Case”

Feng Zhenghu did not treat this incident as a stroke of bad luck, but as an administrative rights violation that had to be seriously pursued. On May 26, 2008, he filed an administrative lawsuit against the Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s Exit-Entry Administration with the Pudong New Area People’s Court, seeking to overturn the administrative action that had blocked his departure and to obtain compensation for financial losses. That July, he filed another administrative lawsuit with the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court and petitioned the Shanghai Higher People’s Court, seeking to overturn the unlawful decision of the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court.

However, the issue soon shifted from “Was the exit restriction lawful?” to “Would the courts agree to docket the case in accordance with the law?” Courts at different levels in Shanghai passed the buck to one another and delayed docketing, making “filing a case” itself a new rights dispute. The theme that would run through his rights-defense efforts for years—the courts’ refusal to accept cases in accordance with the law—landed on him in an especially stark way during this period.

April 2009: The Restriction Was Reversed

On the day he was barred from leaving the country, Feng Zhenghu also wrote an article titled Thanking the Shanghai Authorities for Keeping Me Here to Defend Rights, responding to this interference by the authorities with near-black humor. It was not until April 1, 2009, that the restriction was ultimately reversed on its own and he regained the right to leave the country. He wrote April Fool’s Day: Feng Zhenghu Temporarily Bids Farewell to China and departed for Japan without fuss. The significance of this round lay not only in the outcome of an individual procedural challenge, but also in the fact that it marked Feng Zhenghu’s mature transition from “passively enduring violations” to “actively pursuing public authorities’ accountability through lawful means.”

IV. Ninety-Two Days at Narita Airport: A Chinese Citizen Wants to Go Home (2009–2010)

Thirty-Nine Days of “Disappearance”

The standoff between the two sides soon escalated. On February 15, 2009, Feng Zhenghu was forcibly taken away in Beijing and sent back to Shanghai. He was held first in a guesthouse and then in a hotel, and was not released until March 25, a total of 39 days. The entire process involved no lawful law-enforcement documents, and no one informed him of the reason for his detention. This was the first time he experienced a “disappearance” with no stated reason, no documents, and no time limit. On April 1 that year, he went to Japan to visit family. That year marked the 20th anniversary of “June Fourth,” a highly sensitive period.

Eight Attempts to Return, Eight Times Turned Back

Starting on June 7, 2009, he tried eight times to board flights back to China: four times he was forcibly deported by border police at Shanghai Pudong Airport, and on the other four occasions, airlines prevented him from boarding at the direction of local authorities. The only reason the people stopping him gave was: “This is a decision by the leaders above us.”

Refusing Entry into Japan

On November 3, 2009, Feng Zhenghu flew from Tokyo to Pudong Airport for the eighth time and was again refused entry, then forcibly put on a return flight to Japan. After arriving at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport that evening, confronted with the absurd reality that a citizen was being deprived of the right to return to his own country, he made a decision that shocked people in China and abroad: he refused to enter Japan. He publicly declared: “I am a Chinese citizen. I want to go home.” Citing Article 12(4) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country,” he established his “protest base” in the immigration inspection area of Terminal 1 at Narita International Airport.

Ninety-Two Days in the Transit Hall

Beginning November 3, 2009, Feng Zhenghu spent his nights and days on airport seats in the transit area. He subsisted on food and supplies brought by rights activists and transit passengers, shared his circumstances in real time on Twitter, and was followed continuously by international media. An individual protest quickly became an event attracting worldwide attention. People were astonished to see this scene at a national border in the 21st century: a citizen with a valid passport stranded for months in a transit hall at a foreign airport because of an unwritten ban. He was called the real-life protagonist of The Terminal and received the “2009 Beijing Spring Freedom Pioneer Award” from the magazine Beijing Spring. He later compiled this experience into a book, Narita Airport Diary (Chinese Edition), published in June 2020.

Returning Home, and the Limits of This Victory

Under intense international public pressure, the authorities ultimately made a concession. On January 31, 2010, Feng Zhenghu announced that he was ending his protest at Narita Airport; on February 3, he entered Japan and temporarily stayed at his younger sister’s home in Tokyo. On February 12, 2010, on the eve of the Lunar New Year, he departed Narita on a flight and arrived at Shanghai Pudong Airport that same day. He was allowed to enter and walked through the country’s gates with his head held high. He had not changed his citizenship, given up his passport, or made a home elsewhere. He had come home.

It should be objectively noted that this victory was primarily a concession in an individual case. Based on currently available public information, it did not directly lead to amendments to the relevant laws. Its main significance was that the “right to return,” a fundamental citizen right long overlooked, entered public view in China and abroad for the first time in such a vivid way.

V. After Returning Home: 728 Days of Surveillance, House Arrest, and “I Want to File a Case” (2010–2012)

728 Days of Constant Surveillance

When he returned home, Feng Zhenghu was not met with a peaceful life. The Narita Airport incident had cost the Shanghai authorities face, and the retaliation that followed was almost undisguised.

According to records he compiled himself, during the 728 days from March 1, 2010, to February 26, 2012, Feng Zhenghu was under 24-hour surveillance by police and security guards they hired. Under the law, residential surveillance is a coercive measure directed at criminal suspects; Feng Zhenghu had not been formally placed under criminal investigation, yet those carrying it out could produce no law-enforcement credentials or legal basis. Often, on the strength of a single phone call from a leader, he was forcibly confined to his home and forbidden to go out. By his own count, he was deprived of his personal liberty for as many as 364 days during those two years.

54 Days Taken Away and Six Home Searches

The methods of repression were concrete. When he went out, security guards followed him at close range on orders, keeping him and his family under long-term psychological pressure and disrupting the normal lives of neighbors. From August 3 to 16, 2010, he was confined to his home for 14 consecutive days for initiating a petition to defend citizens’ right to sue; every Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, as well as on so-called “sensitive days,” he also often lost his personal freedom. After returning to China, he was taken away from home six times and held at places including Chongming County Holiday Island Resort, Gongqing National Forest Park Resort, and Hengsha Island Angel Beach Resort, for a total of 54 days. These detentions involved no documents and his family was not told where he had been taken. By isolating him elsewhere, they cut him off from all contact with society, amounting in nature to enforced disappearance. Police also frequently summoned him and held him at the Wujiaochang police station, guarded by two security guards, often for longer than the statutory eight-hour limit. Between April 19, 2010, and June 14, 2011, his home was searched six times, and 12 computers and large quantities of personal property were seized and have still not been returned.

The defining feature of these 728 days was the alternation between “everyday restrictions” and “sudden detention”: on most days, he could still go out, meet friends, and take care of daily life, but plainclothes officers followed and questioned him; when a sensitive date approached, his freedom suddenly dropped to zero. His freedom was curtailed but not yet entirely taken away—a stark contrast with the 267 days that followed.

“I Want to File a Case”: From Personal Suffering to a Public Issue

If these numbers are seen only as a list of rights violations, a more important fact will be missed: Feng Zhenghu had not been driven back into silence. Precisely during the same period in which he was surveilled, confined, and taken away, he devoted most of his energy to an action of greater public significance: “I Want to File a Case.”

He launched the “I Want to File a Case—Defend Citizens’ Right to Sue” campaign, going to the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court every day for a month to request that it docket cases in accordance with the law. He also wrote 27 installments of I Want to File a Case Diary, documenting the court’s refusal to accept complaints. He called out the slogan “I want to file a case, uphold the law, and give me back my right to sue,” and persisted alongside many ordinary people who, like him, had nowhere to turn with their complaints. Every Wednesday, he held public gatherings at Raffles City, received petitioners, and provided legal advice. This unremarkable site became the place where many marginalized people first heard the words “docket cases in accordance with the law.”

Speaking with Data

He was accustomed to speaking with data. Statistics in volumes 1 through 4 of I Want to File a Case: A Compilation of Cases of Judicial Inaction in Shanghai, which he edited, showed that by December 31, 2011, 190 litigants in Shanghai had suffered harm from judicial inaction, involving 430 cases and a cumulative 272,577 days of rights violations; by December 23, 2011, because local courts had neither docketed cases nor issued rulings, Shanghai residents had filed 313 first-instance administrative lawsuits directly with the Supreme People’s Court through the legally prescribed successive levels. Under Article 112 of the then-effective Civil Procedure Law and Article 42 of the Administrative Litigation Law, courts were required to docket cases or issue a ruling declining acceptance within seven days. Failure to docket a case or issue a ruling within the statutory period effectively deprived citizens of their right to sue.

VI. A Prison inside His Home: 267 Days of De Facto Detention and 44 Criminal Summonses (2012–2020)

The Spark: 1,060 Signatures

On New Year’s Day 2012, Feng Zhenghu did not make a wish for himself. Instead, he issued a Citizens’ Petition to Defend Citizens’ Right to Sue on behalf of the countless ordinary people unable to enter the doors of the courts. The petition pointed to the same judicial failing he had repeatedly documented over the previous ten years on the “Constitutional Rights Defense Network” and in Supervision Bulletin: courts delayed docketing citizens’ lawsuits, neither docketing nor issuing rulings, and neither issuing rulings nor responding, causing the right to sue granted to citizens by the Constitution and procedural laws to quietly vanish at the filing counter.

Within ten days, 1,060 Shanghai residents signed the petition under their real names (see the next chapter for details). For Feng Zhenghu, this was a natural extension of his principle of “defending the Constitution and rights, living happily”—supervising public power rationally, openly, and constructively within the current legal framework. But in the eyes of certain departments, more than a thousand real-name signatures touched a different nerve.

Fifty-eight days later, on February 27, 2012, Feng Zhenghu’s home in Renheyuan, Zhengtong Road, Yangpu District, was turned into a prison.

267 Days: A Prison Called “Home”

During the preceding 728 days, Feng Zhenghu’s freedom had been curtailed but had not yet dropped entirely to zero. Beginning on February 27, 2012, however, the nature of the controls changed dramatically: “intermittent detention elsewhere” was abandoned entirely and replaced with a complete lockdown of a private residence.

From that day until November 20, 2012, for a full 267 days, Feng Zhenghu was absolutely forbidden to step outside his home. The most basic autonomy over daily life—going downstairs to buy groceries or leaving home to seek medical care—was taken away as well. His connections with the outside world were cut off by a series of physical barriers: directional surveillance cameras were placed all around the residence, and even public road cameras were manually turned toward his balcony and windows; below the windows, a ring of iron railings topped with pointed forks was forcibly welded into place to prevent any possible contact with people; a cordon was set up at the entrance to the building, with three checkpoints stretching from the building’s corridor and the residential compound’s security office to the compound gate. Guards packed the corridor, with dozens of people taking shifts around the clock.

Residents and friends who came to visit were all stopped and driven away. Even the case-handling judge from the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court had to pass through multiple layers of police approval before entering and could do so only under close surveillance. A judge still performing judicial duties had to ask the guards for permission to enter a citizen’s home—a detail that more plainly than any legal argument reveals the true nature of those 267 days.

“Residential Surveillance” without a Decision

The case handlers’ verbal explanation for the lockdown was “residential surveillance,” or, more bluntly, “carrying out the leaders’ instructions.” But throughout the full 267 days, no lawful written decision or law-enforcement document was ever served on Feng Zhenghu.

What distinguishes criminal coercive measures from private punishment is first and foremost that they must meet statutory formal requirements: a legally authorized agency must make a written decision in accordance with legal procedures, inform the person concerned of the reason and their rights, and comply with statutory time limits. Under the law, residential surveillance should be carried out at the person’s home. Its purpose is to allow the person under surveillance to await legal proceedings under relatively lenient conditions, not to turn the home into a more airtight cage than a detention center. When a person is forbidden even to go downstairs for medical care, and a judge’s visit requires the guards’ approval, the words “residential surveillance” are left with only a thin veneer of meaning.

For this reason, in his article On the Infringements of Personal Liberty and Criminal Framing during the Previous 728 Days and Subsequent 267 Days, Feng Zhenghu described this period as “de facto detention in the style of a black jail” and stressed that the actual level of confinement exceeded that of ordinary criminal detention. The preceding 728 days and the subsequent 267 days must be strictly distinguished: the former alternated between “limited restrictions on freedom and intermittent detention,” while the latter involved absolute deprivation without any gap. This distinction is not a matter of wordplay; it is a core legal basis for accurately assessing the degree of violation, pursuing the case handlers’ accountability, and seeking state compensation.

Reopening Old Accounts: A Manufactured “Refusal to Comply”

To cloak this extralegal detention in an appearance of “legality,” a charge was needed. The public security authorities found one in an old account from 11 years earlier—the fine attached to the “illegal business operations” case of 2001. Feng Zhenghu had long since completed his prison sentence, and the fine was being paid monthly in installments as agreed with the court in 2008. He held a complete, continuous set of judicial payment receipts. Yet this fine, not fully paid off, was used to open a criminal investigation against him on suspicion of “refusing to comply with a judgment or ruling.”

Even more astonishingly, the public authorities’ actions after the case was opened formed a tightly sealed loop. On the one hand, beginning in December 2012, Yangpu police seized and impounded property unrelated to the case after opening the investigation, and froze two Alipay accounts and eight bank accounts in Feng Zhenghu’s name. These freezes were arbitrarily extended every six months, lasting until December 2020—a full eight years. A person whose accounts were all frozen naturally lost the ability to manage day-to-day funds and raise money from others. On the other hand, starting in 2015, Feng Zhenghu repeatedly brought cash to the court and asked to pay the remaining balance in full to the enforcement judge, who refused to accept it.

The police froze his accounts, leaving him unable to raise funds; the court refused cash, leaving him unable to comply; then he was accused of suspected refusal to comply on the grounds that he “had not paid the fine.” This coordination between agencies upstream and downstream to “deliberately create the fact of inability to comply” cannot be explained as mishandling a case; it was a deliberate criminal framing.

44 Summons Notices: Torment Administered in Lawful Form

The lockdown was lifted on November 20, 2012. But the public security authorities had no intention of stopping; they simply replaced extralegal detention with a more “compliant” form of attrition.

From 2012 to 2017, in connection with this factually very simple old case, whose outcome had long been settled, police issued as many as 44 Criminal Summons Notices. From May 30 to June 3, 2012, they summoned him for five consecutive days; after the lockdown had just been lifted in November, they summoned him for three consecutive days, from December 7 to 9. Feng Zhenghu appeared for questioning on many occasions despite being ill, until he became physically unable to continue and was taken to the hospital for emergency treatment.

The form of these summonses alone was enough to reveal their real purpose. Most interrogation records were less than five minutes long; in the later stages, investigators even asked and answered their own questions, going through the motions. Yet Feng Zhenghu was held in the interrogation room, forced to sit for more than ten hours, under the watch of security guards with no law-enforcement authority. The interrogation was a formality; the waiting was the punishment.

The carelessness in the paperwork was equally glaring: as many as 23 of the 44 summons documents openly cited old legal provisions that had been amended or repealed. A case whose legal basis the authorities could not even be bothered to update remained in the public security investigation phase for a full eight years—neither closed, nor transferred for prosecution, nor corrected. Its function was not to find out the truth, but to leave a citizen suspended for years in the humiliation and pressure of being an “undecided criminal suspect.”

A Complete Chain of Abuse of Power

Put everything back on a timeline and the pattern becomes clear: the thousand-person petition on New Year’s Day 2012 was the starting point; the home lockdown on February 27 was retaliation; opening a case that year for “refusing to comply with a judgment or ruling” provided a pretext for the retaliation; the eight years of account freezes and the judge’s refusal to accept cash beginning in December created the “facts” for that pretext; the 44 summonses and the eight-year unresolved case continued and normalized the retaliation. The 267 days of de facto detention and the 44 criminal summonses were not two isolated matters, but two links in the same chain of abuse of power.

From the forcible removal on the streets of Beijing in 2009 and 39 days of secret detention, to 728 days of daily surveillance and six forced disappearances at resorts from 2010 to 2012, then the home turned into a prison for 267 days in 2012, followed by 44 criminal summonses and eight years of framing—this trajectory clearly shows how public power crossed the boundaries of legal procedure step by step, evolving from the administrative practice of “intercepting petitioners” into criminal framing that systematically violated citizens’ personal liberty.

All Feng Zhenghu did was exercise his right to supervise and to criticize and make suggestions within the framework of Articles 37 and 41 of the Constitution. All he asked was that courts docket cases and adjudicate them in accordance with the law. In response, iron railings were welded onto his front door, his accounts were frozen for eight years, and he was made to walk into the interrogation room 44 times. Every receipt, every record, and every unlawful document he left behind during those 267 days and 44 summonses is a silent but powerful witness for the day when accountability comes.

VII. Two Thousand-Person Petitions: From Calling for Reform to Supervising Implementation (2012–2016)

From 189 People to 1,060

In 2011, a proposal co-signed by Feng Zhenghu and 189 residents went nowhere, so he and the residents decided to expand the number of signatories. On New Year’s Day 2012, he initiated and drafted the Citizens’ Petition to Defend Citizens’ Right to Sue; by January 11, 1,060 Shanghai residents had signed in support. The petition was addressed to all delegates to the Fifth Session of the 13th Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress and the Standing Committee of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress. Before the session opened, it was mailed to more than 800 Shanghai people’s congress delegates and more than 500 leaders of central and local Party and government departments, people’s congresses, courts, and procuratorates. Copies of the original signatures were also submitted to the Standing Committee of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and its Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee, and the State Council, and were published online.

A Petition and Its Three Requests

The petition stated at the outset: “We are Shanghai residents and citizens of the People’s Republic of China, not slaves whom officials may oppress at will and judges may arbitrarily deprive of the right to sue.” It cited Premier Wen Jiabao’s words—“Without procedural justice, it is difficult to ensure substantive justice and fair outcomes”—and made three basic requests: restore citizens’ right to sue and completely eradicate the habit of judicial inaction; ensure judges adjudicate independently in accordance with the law, without interference from administrative organs, social organizations, or individuals; and hold the presidents of Shanghai’s municipal, intermediate, and district courts accountable for judicial inaction, removing judges who infringe citizens’ right to sue. From 189 people to 1,060, and from proposing the removal of one court president to calling for accountability from the presidents of courts at three levels, the expansion of this movement to defend the right to sue over the course of a year is clear. Less than two months after the petition was sent, the initiator’s home was fenced off with iron railings—the starting point of the 267 days described in the previous chapter.

From Grassroots Petitioning to Case-Filing Registration

Together with many ordinary people, Feng Zhenghu sustained the “Defend Chinese Citizens’ Right to Sue” campaign for more than four years despite the pressure, and wrote materials including Making “Difficulty Filing a Case” a Real Issue: An Investigative Report on Obstacles to Case-Filing Reform in Shanghai Courts. On October 23, 2014, the Fourth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party adopted the Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Several Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Advancing the Rule of Law, explicitly calling to “reform the system for courts to accept cases, changing from case-filing review to case-filing registration,” so that “every case is docketed and every lawsuit is heard, safeguarding the parties’ right to sue.” On May 1, 2015, the case-filing registration system formally took effect.

It must be stated accurately that a national judicial reform could not have been brought about by a single case or one grassroots individual alone; attributing all complex institutional changes to Feng Zhenghu would be inaccurate and inconsistent with the rigor he himself advocates. A fairer account is this: the thousand-person petition in early 2012 came first, followed by the Fourth Plenum decision in autumn 2014; grassroots demands and top-level reform echoed one another and were closely aligned in direction. In a measured yet hard-to-ignore way, he turned the hidden procedural loophole of “courts refusing to accept complaints” into a public issue and provided sustained grassroots impetus for the reform.

2016: Supervising the New System’s Implementation

The new system encountered considerable resistance in implementation at the local level, and Feng Zhenghu immediately shifted from “calling for reform” to “supervising implementation.” On February 19, 2016, he joined 1,016 Shanghai residents in writing to President Xi Jinping and issued Uphold the Law, Support Judicial Reform, Safeguard the Right to Sue: An Open Letter to President Xi Jinping Co-Signed by Feng Zhenghu and 1,016 Shanghai Residents, expressing support for judicial reform while reporting ongoing problems with Shanghai courts’ implementation of the case-filing registration system and calling for effective protection of citizens’ right to sue. According to him, the letter later received a written response from the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration. For a grassroots petition with a thousand signatories, this was a clear response through official channels. From “Give Me Back My Right to Sue” in 2012 to “Defend the Case-Filing Registration System” in 2016, the two petitions record the full trajectory of Shanghai ordinary residents’ efforts to secure the right to sue: first calling for the system to be established, then supervising its actual implementation.

VIII. From Voter to Candidate: The 2016 Yangpu District People’s Congress Election

Why 2016?

In 2016, in addition to co-signing the letter, Feng Zhenghu did something he had never done before: he ran personally for a grassroots people’s congress seat.

This was not a sudden impulse. When the Yangpu District People’s Congress election took place in November 2011, he was in the middle of the 728 days of surveillance; his personal liberty was repeatedly taken away, and his right to sue was nowhere to be found. That year he did not run; he cast a vote as an ordinary voter and later wrote Election Record, documenting that the candidates had only a one-page résumé, made no policy proposals, and that the election was a mere formality. His assessment at the time was that, in an environment where one had to petition just to get a case docketed, the path of advancing democracy by running for office was “temporarily impassable.” Five years later, with the case-filing registration system in effect, he decided to test the system in another way: instead of merely demanding that those in power obey the law, he would enter the procedure set out in law himself and see how far it could go at the grassroots level.

Eight Words and Six Commitments

In mid-October 2016, he registered as a voter with the Zhengmin Neighborhood Committee in Wujiaochang Subdistrict, Yangpu District, and was assigned to Electoral District 115. He then publicly announced that he would lawfully run for the 16th Yangpu District People’s Congress. The legal basis he cited was clear: citizens’ rights to vote and stand for election under the Constitution, and the Election Law provision that “ten or more voters or representatives may jointly recommend a representative candidate.”

His campaign slogan was still the same eight words: “Defend the Constitution and rights, live happily.” He printed Joint Letter Recommending Feng Zhenghu as a Candidate for Yangpu District People’s Congress Representative and Letter to Voters Seeking Their Support, introducing his experience as a Fudan University master’s graduate in economics, a scholar who studied in Japan, an entrepreneur, and an initiator of the “I Want to File a Case” campaign. He also made six commitments: defend the Constitution and rights, ensure national laws and regulations are implemented in the district, and protect voters’ rights in accordance with the law; participate in government on behalf of the people, stay in contact with the public and speak for them, abolish harmful regulations, and supervise the “one government, two courts”; create a better home, support homeowners’ committees in accordance with the law, and protect homeowners’ property rights; enjoy life in old age, improve older people’s living security, medical care, and opportunities for social participation; assist the vulnerable, care for groups whose rights have been infringed, and direct petition-related disputes onto the track of the rule of law; and live happily, put the values of freedom, equality, justice, and the rule of law into practice, and let everyone live free from fear. Not one of these six went beyond the current Constitution and laws, and all used language recognized by the authorities. He also made his phone number, email address, WeChat, and home address public, inviting voters to contact and supervise him directly. Compared with the 2011 election, when only résumés were posted, this was an attempt at a modern campaign, with a platform, contact details, and public commitments.

The First Procedural Hurdle

The real test came in the procedures. At a meeting of the 55th voter group in Electoral District 115, only about 15 of the 41 voters attended. The group leader nevertheless announced that the group could recommend only three candidates and called for a show-of-hands vote on the spot. Feng Zhenghu believed this had substituted a “preliminary election” for “voter recommendation”—voters who did not attend were effectively stripped of their right to recommend candidates. He filed a complaint with the subdistrict election office and eventually obtained an official Registration Form for a Joint Recommendation by Ten or More Voters of a Candidate for People’s Congress Representative. He saw this as a small procedural concession by the authorities.

“Write In Someone Else” and 24 Hours of Questioning

But he could not make progress on the next step. He took the registration form door to door to collect signatures, while neighborhood committee staff, subdistrict safety office staff, and police followed and obstructed him at people’s homes. By the nomination deadline of midnight on October 29, he had not collected signatures from ten voters. To avoid causing trouble for neighbors willing to sign, he announced that day that he was withdrawing from the candidate recommendation process. Instead, he relied on the Election Law provision that voters “may write in any other voter” and ran as a write-in candidate, asking voters to handwrite the three characters of “Feng Zhenghu” in the “write in another person” column on their ballots. On November 14, he handed out campaign leaflets in his residential compound and was again stopped. After police arrived, they took him away and questioned him for 24 hours. He then filed a report with the public security authorities, accusing those who obstructed the election of possibly violating Article 256 of the Criminal Law on the crime of disrupting elections and relevant provisions of the Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security. He also cited the authorities’ public statement at the time that they had “zero tolerance for election violations.” Election day was November 16, 2016.

Significance Beyond Winning or Losing

The result was unsurprising: he did not become an official candidate and was not elected. It should be noted that the public materials currently available contain no final vote count; and in conditions without free campaigning, where voters do not know one another well and the transparency of counting and monitoring is limited, scattered “write in someone else” votes were almost certain to fall short of the majority needed to be elected—something Feng Zhenghu himself knew beforehand.

The significance of this candidacy, therefore, did not lie in winning or losing. It was like a complete procedural experiment: he went through each stage of the Election Law—voter registration, joint recommendation, nomination deadline, campaigning, and voting—and documented the gaps between the legal text and real-world practice at each stage: how the joint-recommendation right was nullified by a group’s “preliminary election,” how the space for campaign advocacy was compressed by grid-based stability-maintenance forces, and the limits of the statutory write-in remedy in practice. For many voters in Electoral District 115, this was also the first time they received a campaign letter from a candidate and the first time they were told that the ballot had a “write in someone else” column. From “temporarily impassable” in 2011 to “proceeding in accordance with the law” in 2016, Feng Zhenghu still used the same method: take the law seriously, then demand that those in power take it equally seriously.

IX. The “Three-No” Ban and the Blank Slip at Hongqiao Airport in 2026

2015: A “Three-No” Ban with No Documents

After Narita Airport, leaving the country once again became a protracted battle.

Beginning in 2015, Feng Zhenghu again frequently encountered exit restrictions. On October 5, 2015, he was stopped at Pudong Airport, not long after the “709 crackdown on lawyers.” Border inspection staff only told him verbally that “leaving the country may endanger national security and interests,” again producing no written legal document. Thereafter, this “three-no” verbal ban—with no formal document, no clear time limit, and no factual basis—became a routine method of preventing him from leaving to visit family.

2026: A Blank Slip at Hongqiao Airport

The most recent incident took place in 2026. On March 17, 71-year-old Feng Zhenghu and his wife came to Shanghai Hongqiao Airport to take Japan Airlines flight JL082 to Japan to visit family. His ticket had been confirmed, his luggage checked, and customs inspection completed, but he was stopped again at the final border inspection gate. Border inspection staff said verbally that, under Article 12(5) of the Exit and Entry Administration Law of the People’s Republic of China, the decision to restrict him from leaving had come from “relevant departments under the State Council.” In response to his questions, the staff on the scene could not produce any written decision bearing an official seal, or say how long the ban would last or what facts it was based on. Finally, they handed Feng Zhenghu only a handwritten slip with no seal or signature, containing just the mobile phone number of a “Officer Zhou.”

Eighteen Years, the Same Question

In Feng Zhenghu’s view, this blank slip was an outright violation of modern administrative law. He did not compromise, refused on the spot to accept this unexplained interception, and soon afterward initiated government information disclosure and administrative reconsideration procedures, determined to use legal procedures to expose the gray area behind the “verbal ban.” From the faxed photocopy in 2008 to the handwritten slip in 2026, 18 years had passed, but the question he faced had barely changed: can public power restrict a citizen’s freedom without showing any legal basis? His response had barely changed either: demand to see the basis, then complete every legally prescribed procedure.

X. From “Petitioning” to “Trusting the Law”: The Theory and Practice of Administrative Remedies

Displaced Farmers in Xinzhuang and “Sleeping” Complaints

Entering the 2020s, and now in his sixties, Feng Zhenghu devoted more of his energy to a more constructive task: drawing a practical, verifiable, and accountable legal path for ordinary people who had spent half their lives trapped in the cycle of “petitioning—interception—petitioning again.”

In 2011, representatives of displaced farmers in Shanghai’s Xinzhuang Industrial Zone met Feng Zhenghu, who had returned from Japan, and invited him to serve as their legal adviser. According to him, these farmers held lawful homestead-use certificates issued in 1991. Seeking relocation compensation, they asked the courts to docket their cases. Over the years, they had held talks with 35 district people’s congress representatives, petitioned the district people’s congress standing committee ten times, petitioned Shanghai’s three levels of courts 486 times, and made more than 100 collective visits to the municipal people’s congress standing committee, yet their civil complaints had remained “asleep” in the courts for years. Their experience was a typical example of the two kinds of “inaction” Feng Zhenghu repeatedly pointed to—administrative inaction and judicial inaction—passing responsibility back and forth.

“Application for Performance of Duties—Administrative Reconsideration—Administrative Litigation—Compulsory Enforcement”

On July 15, 2025, Feng Zhenghu published Research on Administrative Remedies to Protect Chinese Citizens’ Property and Personal Rights and, on that basis, compiled the book Research and Cases on Administrative Remedies to Protect Citizens’ Property and Personal Rights. Centered on the connection among the 2022 Regulations on Letters and Visits, the new Administrative Reconsideration Law that took effect in 2024, and the current Administrative Litigation Law, the book proposes a complete remedial loop consisting of “application for performance of duties—administrative reconsideration—administrative litigation—compulsory enforcement.” It aims to direct petitioners away from endless cycles of petitioning and toward statutory procedures, making the transition from “petitioning” to “trusting the law.” The book uses two cases in which displaced farmers in Xinzhuang and Pudong applied for the government to perform its duties to examine the actual application of the new law at successive stages: administrative reconsideration, first and second instance, and review of applications for retrial by the Supreme People’s Court (the case numbers are (2025) Zui Gao Fa Xing Shen No. 9501 and (2025) Zui Gao Fa Xing Shen No. 9077, respectively). On this basis, he plans to request procuratorial supervision from the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.

The “AI Zhenghu Case Review Team”

This work also has a distinctly contemporary aspect: Feng Zhenghu assembled the “AI Zhenghu Case Review Team.” When drafting comprehensive legal analysis reports, it uses multiple large language models simultaneously to analyze adjudication documents independently, after which he himself edits and reviews the final text. He believes artificial intelligence can find a new balance between conserving judicial resources and promoting judicial fairness, and can help ordinary citizens with limited legal resources understand and use the law more equally. For a scholar trained in mathematics who studied computer technology in Japan as early as the early 1990s, this is less about following a trend than a continuation of his practical approach to tools.

XI. “Defend the Constitution and Rights, Live Happily”: A Citizen’s Stance

Legality: Finding Tools Only within Current Law

Looking back on Feng Zhenghu’s more than two decades of rights-defense efforts, three features run throughout. The first is legality. He never seeks tools outside the current Constitution and laws. In each act of resistance—whether an administrative lawsuit against an exit ban, a thousand-person petition over difficulty filing cases, or a procedural experiment in grassroots elections—he cites current legal provisions, including the Constitution, Administrative Litigation Law, and Election Law, and repeatedly demands that public authorities act in accordance with the law as well. What he advocates is not overturning the rules, but making them take effect in practice.

Publicity: Putting Everything in Writing

The second is openness. He has written down every incident he encountered, preserved the documents, and made them public: 27 installments of I Want to File a Case Diary, Narita Airport Diary, Election Record, records and receipts from each time he was stopped, and 44 summons notices. Publicity is both a form of self-protection and a form of civic education.

Persistence: “Living Happily” Is Not a Slogan

The third is persistence. In the face of detention, house arrest, home searches, unlawful confinement, and repeated restrictions on travel, he did not go into exile, give up, or turn his rights-defense efforts into a tale of tragedy. The words “living happily” are not a slogan, but a way of living that preserves rationality and dignity under pressure.

Together, these three traits form a stance that is difficult to define in a single phrase: it is neither revolution nor submission, but sustained oversight in the name of legality. In specific cases, he has not spoken only for himself. He has focused on petitioners, ordinary people whose cases were refused by courts, and typical cases exposing the entanglement of administrative and judicial power, helping vulnerable groups organize materials and find avenues for remedies. The retaliation against him was often not because he had overthrown anything, but because he insisted on completing the procedures that should have been public in the first place.

Conclusion

From a young scholar amid the turmoil of 1989 to a defendant imprisoned in the 2001 publishing case; from being stopped at the country’s gates in 2008 by a faxed photocopy to spending 92 days in the transit hall at Narita Airport in 2009 merely to exercise a Chinese citizen’s right to return home; from the long surveillance during the first 728 days beginning in 2010 and the personal liberty violations and risk of criminal framing during the subsequent 267 days, to his continued exposure of judicial inaction through the “I Want to File a Case” movement; from the thousand-person petition that pushed for case-filing reform to going through the entire Election Law procedure in Electoral District 115 of Yangpu District in 2016; and then, years later, continuing to demand the basis and accountability for exit restrictions in the face of a “three-no ban,” and building a complete administrative remedy process for displaced farmers—Feng Zhenghu’s personal fate is like a mirror, reflecting the awakening of Chinese citizens’ awareness of their rights during a period of transition and the long, complex struggle with local public authorities’ failure to observe limits on their power.

Perhaps his significance lies not in how many large structures he has already changed, but in his repeated reminder that the rule of law is never an abstract slogan; it is whether the state is willing to take the rights, procedures, and dignity of an ordinary citizen seriously when that person stands at a courthouse entrance, an airport border inspection gate, or before an electoral district register.

In the face of many powerful structures, one person’s strength is indeed limited. But precisely because it is limited, the fact that one person continues to persevere is all the more valuable. Feng Zhenghu is not perfect, nor could he end all injustice by himself; yet through his life he has repeatedly shown that as long as someone in a society is willing to take the Constitution, procedures, and citizens’ rights seriously, the rule of law has not yet been extinguished completely.