Li Guotao / 李国涛

Democracy activist · Shanghai human-rights organizer · China Democracy Party participant · former political prisoner

Li Guotao (李国涛) is a Shanghai democracy and human-rights activist whose documented political history spans the 1989 democracy movement, the unofficial Shanghai Association for Human Rights, and the 1998 China Democracy Party (CDP) organizing effort.

Democracy and human-rights activity

Human Rights Watch identifies Li as one of five signatories of the Shanghai CDP registration petition and describes him as a former president of the unofficial Shanghai Association for Human Rights. His record therefore connects two important strands of mainland Chinese civic organizing in the 1990s: independent human-rights advocacy and efforts to establish an opposition political party through public registration.

Custody and political imprisonment

Li’s custody history must be treated as several distinct episodes rather than one continuous sentence. Source-controlled research records a political case following 1989; a separate three-year reeducation-through-labor disposition in 1994; repeated detentions in 1999–2000; and another three-year reeducation-through-labor disposition in 2000. U.S. government and refugee-board reporting independently document the later detentions and 2000 disposition. The underlying official decision contains an unresolved June 28 / July 4 date discrepancy in secondary reporting, so this profile does not normalize the exact disposition date without the original legal record.

Later reporting places Li in New York by 2011, establishing subsequent overseas advocacy continuity, but the precise exit, arrival and asylum chronology remains an open research question.

Evidence controls

The profile is supported by a completed Free China Movement media baseline drawing on Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, U.S. State Department reporting, Canadian refugee-board material, CECC/SCMP reporting and Radio Free Asia. Still-open primary-source targets include the original 1989 judgment and release record, 1994 Shanghai human-rights association records, the September 18, 1998 Shanghai CDP petition, 1999–2000 police records, and the 2000 reeducation-through-labor decision and release record.

Research safeguard: the 1989, 1994 and 2000 custody episodes are preserved separately. Release or completion dates are not inferred from sentence arithmetic.

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