Washington, D.C. — October 20, 2026
Xu Weiping is a citizen of Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, whose lawful home was forcibly demolished nineteen years ago. She has never received the resettlement or compensation the law provides, and for nineteen years she has petitioned — while, by her account, the Changzhou authorities answered her petitions not by resolving her case but by repeatedly intercepting her.
On the morning of October 15, Xu traveled to Nanjing, the provincial capital, intending to present her case to the Jiangsu Provincial Petition Bureau and the Provincial Public Security Department. At the Route 56 bus stop beside Nanjing Railway Station, she recorded and posted several videos: Changzhou police vehicles and officers were on the scene, and she questioned, on camera, why her home-jurisdiction police had followed her to another city to intercept a petitioner. Officers of the Changzhou Economic Development Zone Public Security Bureau then forced her into a vehicle and drove her back to her local subdistrict in Changzhou. Both monitors that reported the incident — the Rights Defense Network （维权网， October 16) and Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch （民生观察， October 17) — describe the seizure in the same terms. Since October 15, Xu Weiping has been out of contact. Her family states it has received no information from any government department — no notice of detention, no legal document, no word of where she is or how she is.
The Free China Movement states the following:
- We condemn this seizure and the silence that has followed it. A citizen who used the state’s own petition channels, traveling openly to the provincial capital and speaking on camera in a public place, was taken by force by police from her home jurisdiction and has not been heard from in five days. Whatever paperwork is later produced cannot retroactively make that lawful or humane.
- The Changzhou and Jiangsu authorities must immediately disclose where Xu Weiping is. We call on the Changzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau and the Jiangsu Provincial Public Security Department to state publicly, without delay: where she is being held, her physical condition, and the legal basis and authorizing documents for taking her — and to permit her family and a lawyer of her family’s choosing immediate access to her. Notification of family is not a courtesy; it is a duty the PRC’s own laws impose, and five days of silence is a violation of them.
- The underlying case must finally be answered. Xu Weiping’s grievance is nineteen years old: a demolished home, no resettlement, no compensation. In her own account, the government chose to deal with the person who raised the problem rather than the problem. We call on the Jiangsu provincial authorities to take up the underlying demolition case on its merits, and to end the practice of intercepting petitioners — a practice that serves no lawful purpose and exists only to silence complaints the authorities do not wish to hear.
We will continue to follow Xu Weiping’s case, and we ask news organizations and human rights bodies to do the same, until her whereabouts are disclosed and she is free to speak again.
The Free China Movement (FCM) is a coalition of Chinese democracy and human rights advocates founded in 1998, working for a free, democratic, and constitutional China.
This statement is also being prepared in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, German, and Spanish editions.