The Shanghai Citizen Who Took the Constitution Seriously: Feng Zhenghu’s “Procedural War”

Author: Shu Wen

Introduction: A Bench at Narita Airport

In the depths of winter in 2009, several rows of dark blue benches stood neatly arranged along the southern corridor of the south wing of Terminal 1 at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.

In this “legal enclave” between the bustling international duty-free area and the immigration inspection counters, cameras from media outlets around the world gathered: the BBC, NHK, CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters. At the center of the flashes was a middle-aged man with a calm expression. He wore a T-shirt he had made himself, with the words “Chinese citizen has been refused to return to China eight times” on the front—and on the back: “Chinese Human Right 中国人権, 回国 帰国 Return to China.” At night he wrapped himself in a sleeping bag; by day he sat on a bench. He stayed there for a full ninety-two days.

He did not seek political asylum in any Western country, nor did he make tearful political accusations. In his luggage were neatly stacked a thick sheaf of legal materials on human rights protections, multiple copies of administrative appeals, and a dark red passport of the People’s Republic of China.

Facing foreign reporters who crowded around him, he simply repeated an extremely basic legal question that left everyone speechless:

“I am a Chinese citizen, hold a valid Chinese passport, have not been stripped of my nationality, and have not been deprived of my personal liberty in accordance with the law. Returning home is a citizen’s most basic natural right. So why can’t I return to my own country?”

From a young scholar in the ivory tower, to an entrepreneur in the business world, to an inmate in Tilanqiao Prison, and then to the “airport detainee” who shocked the world and the initiator of the “I Want to File a Case” campaign—Feng Zhenghu’s later life has almost amounted to a rare “procedural tug-of-war” between an individual and a vast state apparatus.

He set himself an eight-character credo: “Defend the Constitution and rights; live happily.”

In an era when people were generally retreating into silence or extreme confrontation, he took the narrowest, hardest path, yet the one that struck most directly at the heart of the matter: he did not resort to violence or shout slogans; he simply stubbornly took the laws and Constitution that public authorities had written in black and white entirely at their word.

I. A Career Diverted: When a Scholar Encountered Turmoil

China’s academic world in the 1980s was in a golden age of intellectual emancipation and reformist energy. Feng Zhenghu’s starting point followed the typical trajectory of an elite intellectual.

He was born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, in 1954 and grew up in Shanghai. He graduated from the Mathematics Department of East China Normal University in 1980, then entered the School of Management at Fudan University, where he received a master’s degree in economics in 1986. Mathematics gave him an almost rigid logical rigor, while economics and modern management made him deeply curious about how real-world institutions operated.

After completing his graduate studies, Feng Zhenghu joined Shanghai University of Finance and Economics as a teacher. At the time, a nationwide wave of enterprise system reform was underway, and the young Feng quickly became an active figure in Shanghai’s academic circles. He successively served concurrently as director of the Graduate Students Committee of the Shanghai Students’ Federation, chairman of the Shanghai Graduate Students’ Science, Technology and Economics Center, and president of the Shanghai Enterprise Development Research Association. He also founded and headed the China Enterprise Development Research Institute, and organized the national “China Enterprise Development Symposium” for four consecutive years.

Back then, he wrote about “corporate strategy,” compiled the China Enterprise Development Yearbook, and moved between academic lecture halls and government economic advisory meetings. The path to advancement within the system was wide open to this promising young economist.

The turning point came in the spring and summer of 1989.

Faced with the decision to use the military to suppress the student movement in Beijing, Feng Zhenghu, then director of the China Enterprise Development Research Institute, issued a public statement opposing it and declared that he was willing to assume all legal and political responsibility. After the turmoil subsided, more than a year of political investigation followed: he received a formal administrative demerit, his candidacy for Party membership was not confirmed, and all his academic and administrative positions were taken away.

The door within the system that led to rapid advancement slammed shut in the year he turned thirty-five.

But Feng Zhenghu did not go into exile. In 1991, with the approval of relevant Shanghai Municipal Party Committee leaders, he went to Hitotsubashi University in Japan to study economic policy and taught himself computer technology. During more than a decade in Japan, he studied information technology in depth, traveled frequently between China and Japan, and engaged in academic and business exchanges. His contemporaries gradually took Japanese citizenship or moved to Europe and the United States. Feng alone, no matter how long he lived in Japan, firmly retained his Chinese citizenship and passport.

He once said: “I am Chinese. Citizenship is not just a household registration or a passport; it is also a set of legal rights and a political compact. I will never give it up voluntarily.”

This seemingly ordinary choice became his strongest legal shield when he struck back more than a decade later.

II. The Ordeal at Tilanqiao: The Awakening to the Rule of Law Behind “Illegal Business Operations”

In the late 1990s, the wave of marketization swept across the country, and intellectuals “going into business” became common. In 1998, Feng Zhenghu returned to Shanghai and founded Shanghai Tianlun Consulting Co., Ltd. He planned to combine the modern database technology and business consulting experience he had acquired in Japan to compile and develop a series of reference books: Shanghai Directory of Japanese-Invested Enterprises (2001 edition) (Chinese edition, ISBN 7-900609-33-4, published by Tongji University Press) and Directory of Japanese-Affiliated Enterprises in China (2001 edition) (Japanese edition, ISBN 4-931548-98-9, published by Japan-China Outlook Press).

This was a practical business directory intended to promote cross-border trade and investment. The company paid taxes in accordance with the law and operated according to ordinary commercial rules. But against the backdrop of a publishing system that had not yet fully opened to market access, these books, which had not obtained the traditional press and publication approval quota, suddenly brought disaster down on him.

On November 13, 2000, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau criminally detained Feng Zhenghu on suspicion of “illegal business operations.” In June 2001, the Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him at first instance to three years in prison and fined him 100,000 yuan (the company was fined an additional 300,000 yuan); the Shanghai Higher People’s Court rejected his appeal at second instance and upheld the original judgment.

In an instant, he went from a university lecturer at the podium and a technology entrepreneur in the business world to an inmate in Shanghai’s Tilanqiao Prison.

Behind Tilanqiao’s high walls, most people who suffered wrongful imprisonment or sudden calamity were either completely subdued by the system’s coldness and slid into cynicism, or were consumed by hatred and turned to extreme political venting. But Feng Zhenghu, trained in the sciences and deeply influenced by the rule of law, took a rarely traveled third path: an awakening to procedural rationality.

He did not blame fate; instead, he studied China’s Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, and Constitution day and night in prison. He found that when the judicial authorities determined that he had engaged in “illegal business operations,” they not only committed procedural errors at every turn, but also seriously blurred, in substantive law, the line between publishing commercial information and disrupting market order, openly violating the rights to freedom of speech and publication granted to citizens by Article 35 of the Constitution.

“Prison is an excellent wake-up call,” he wrote after his release. “After purgatory, one should follow the mandate of Heaven and work for the people. In poverty, cultivate oneself; when prosperous, benefit the whole world. What a joyful life.”

In November 2003, Feng Zhenghu completed his three-year sentence and was released. From the moment he walked out of the prison gates, the former scholar and businessman Feng Zhenghu had died; a “citizen Feng Zhenghu,” who took current legal provisions as a scalpel and vowed to dissect through procedure the judiciary’s failure to act in the face of public power, was born.

III. The Airport Tug-of-War: A Struggle for the “Right to Return Home” Written into Modern History

After his release, Feng Zhenghu did not choose to keep silent and make a living. He set up a website, founded the “Constitutional Rights Defense Network,” and published the Supervision Bulletin, systematically collecting cases of judicial inaction experienced by Shanghai residents in the form of highly rigorous academic reports. This quickly made him “the biggest thorn in the side” of local stability-maintenance departments.

In May 2008, Feng Zhenghu was stopped by border inspectors at Pudong Airport as he prepared to travel to Japan to visit family. They could not produce any original statutory document and showed only a copy of a Decision on Restricting Exit faxed over by the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court. The stated reason was that the 100,000-yuan criminal fine from an old case had “not yet been paid in full.”

This was purely procedural harassment amounting to a frame-up. The decision was issued on March 20, yet absurdly required the person concerned to “pay before March 20.” Moreover, in the five years since his release, Feng Zhenghu had repeatedly contacted the court on his own initiative to pay, but the enforcement division had long put him off and refused to provide an account number; and between 2003 and 2008, he had already legally entered and exited the country fourteen times.

Feng Zhenghu did not make a scene. He filed administrative lawsuits, methodically suing the exit-entry administration and the court.

But the absurdity reached its peak in 2009. That year, when Feng Zhenghu prepared to return home after visiting family in Japan, he encountered the inexplicable “closing of the national gate.” From June to November 2009, he bought plane tickets at his own expense eight times and flew to Shanghai or Beijing, only to be forcibly barred from entering China by Chinese border inspectors each time. He was even shoved violently and put aboard flights back to Japan.

Keeping one’s own lawful citizens outside the national border is nearly incomprehensible under modern international law and the practices of civilized countries.

On November 3, 2009, after being forcibly returned to Narita Airport for the eighth time, Feng Zhenghu made an unexpected decision: he would not enter Japan or fly on to any third country. He sat down on a bench in front of the immigration inspection counters at Narita Airport.

This began the ninety-two-day “airport protest” that shocked the world.

This was not only a test of physical endurance, but also a highly civilized, exceptionally astute public relations and legal campaign.

● He followed the rules: Although he held a Japanese entry visa, he refused to enter Japan, did not step outside the airport’s restricted area, and strictly complied with Japanese airport security and health regulations;

● He maintained his dignity: Every day he washed and tidied his clothes on the bench, folded his bedding neatly, displayed appeal slogans, and set up a small computer to keep a diary;

● He occupied the legal high ground: Facing Chinese and foreign media, he never steered the issue toward ideological abuse, but instead repeatedly cited Article 13, Paragraph 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and China’s Exit and Entry Administration Law, accusing the Shanghai authorities of “abusing administrative power and depriving Chinese citizens of the right to return home.”

● Emerging social networks such as Twitter and traditional international mainstream media resonated powerfully. Chinese students studying abroad and overseas Chinese from around the world, and even European and American travelers in transit, came to the bench at Narita Airport to bring him water, snacks, and warm clothing. An ordinary plastic airport bench was, through Feng Zhenghu’s persistence, turned into a global public stage showcasing the realities of human rights and the rule of law in contemporary China.

Faced with mounting international public opinion pressure that was getting out of control, the authorities were forced to compromise on February 12, 2010, on the eve of Chinese New Year. Holding his Chinese passport, Feng Zhenghu walked off the plane with his head held high and returned openly and properly to Shanghai Pudong Airport.

In this battle, Feng Zhenghu not only won back his right to return home, but also showed the world what “nonviolent, lawful procedural dignity” means.

IV. “I Want to File a Case”: Turning Personal Suffering into a Weapon for Society

If Feng Zhenghu’s resistance had stopped at Narita Airport, he might have been no more than a protest hero with international renown. But what he did after returning home truly demonstrated the depth and sense of responsibility of a public intellectual.

After returning home, Feng Zhenghu was immediately placed under constant close surveillance. House arrest, home searches, summonses, and internet cutoffs during sensitive periods became almost routine. But he did not sink into resentment. Instead, he turned his attention to one of the most hidden, yet most widespread, festering wounds in China’s judiciary: the difficulty of getting a case accepted for filing.

In grassroots judicial practice in China, what is most despairing for countless ordinary petitioners facing demolition, administrative rights violations, or labor disputes is not losing a case, but the court simply “refusing to file it.” Courts neither accept the case for filing nor issue a lawful ruling refusing to file it (which amounts to depriving the parties of the opportunity to appeal). With a slip of paper bearing no official seal, or even a verbal refusal, they completely shut off the only institutional channel through which ordinary people can lawfully defend their rights.

Feng Zhenghu identified this key issue.

He did not mobilize people to petition and cry out for justice, and he opposed blind, excessive actions. He guided thousands of Shanghai petitioners and rights-defending residents to:

1. Draft standard complaints strictly in accordance with the provisions of the Civil Procedure Law and the Administrative Procedure Law;

2. Send them to the court filing division by express postal service (EMS) in accordance with the law, and retain proof of judicial receipt;

3. If the court failed to file the case or respond within the statutory time limit, immediately initiate reports and complaints about procedural violations in accordance with the law.

Starting in 2011, Feng Zhenghu spearheaded the large-scale “I Want to File a Case—Defend Citizens’ Right to Sue” campaign. He systematically compiled nearly a thousand cases of Shanghai residents facing unlawful refusals by courts to file their cases, published them in a series of “I Want to File a Case” volumes several hundred pages thick, and mailed them directly to National People’s Congress deputies, the Supreme People’s Court, and political and legal authorities at all levels in Shanghai.

He elevated scattered rights-defense cases that had been passed around from one party to another into an issue of “judicial procedural fairness” that society as a whole could no longer avoid. The Supreme People’s Court later implemented the “reform of the case-filing registration system” nationwide (claiming that “every case must be filed and every lawsuit must be heard”), and clear traces remain of the years of persistent procedural challenges by Feng Zhenghu and countless grassroots legal advocates.

V. Conclusion: A Man Who Refused to Pretend the Law Was Unclear

Today, Feng Zhenghu, now over seventy, still lives in the old apartment in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, where people once often stood guard downstairs.

Many people have asked him: After being disciplined so many times, serving three years in prison for a wrongful conviction, being kept out at a cold airport for three months, and enduring years of surveillance and home searches, why have you never been seen in a hysterical rage? Why can you still say, “Defend the Constitution and rights; live happily”?

Feng Zhenghu’s answer was calm and clear:

“If public power unlawfully violates your rights, and you spend all day consumed by hatred, pain, and resentment, then in spirit you have already lost to it. Upholding the Constitution and the law is a lofty and honorable duty of citizens. I am on the side of justice, helping the country build the rule of law. Why should I live in sorrow?”

For a long time, people have been accustomed to reducing divisions in Chinese society to two poles: either conformists within the system who go with the flow, or uncompromising radicals outside it.

Through decades of lived practice, Feng Zhenghu created an exceptionally precious third example: an unwavering modern citizen standing entirely on the foundation of the current Constitution and laws.

He does not pin his hopes on the favor of a strongman, wallow in empty anger, or believe in hollow promises. With an almost scientist’s rigor and Sisyphus-like perseverance, he simply takes the legal provisions written by public authorities themselves and uses them to knock again and again on the tightly closed door of the rule of law.

He is like a mirror, reflecting the unease and guilty conscience of certain public authorities when confronted with procedural justice; he is also like a lamp, illuminating the path by which ordinary people, lost amid judicial injustice, can awaken to their rights.

This story has no myth and no dramatic happy ending. But as long as there remains even a sliver of possibility for the rule of law in China to progress toward civilization, future generations will surely remember: there was once a Chinese citizen named Feng Zhenghu who, when the state apparatus tried to make people accustomed to power prevailing over law, spent his whole life stubbornly and happily treating the Constitution as the truth.

Author: Shu Wen  October 18, 2026