Human rights activist Charles recalls a time when civil society was thriving in China and he was able to devote his time to improving the lives of people struggling in blue-collar jobs.

Now, 10 years into President Xi Jinping’s rule, community organizations like Charles’s have been dissolved and hopes for rebirth dashed.

Charles has fled China and several of his activist friends are in prison.

“After 2015, the whole civil society started to collapse and fragment,” he told AFP, using a pseudonym for security reasons.

Xi, who is about to secure a third term at the helm of the world’s most populous country, has overseen a decade in which civil society movements, burgeoning independent media and academic freedoms have been all but destroyed.

As Xi tried to eliminate all threats to the Communist Party, many NGO workers, lawyers and activists were threatened, imprisoned or exiled.

AFP interviewed eight Chinese activists and intellectuals who described the collapse of civil society under Xi, though some remain determined to keep working despite the risks.

Some are harassed by security officers who summon them for questioning on a weekly basis, while others are unable to publish under their own names.

“My colleagues and I have frequently experienced interrogations that lasted over 24 hours,” an LGBTQ rights NGO worker told AFP on condition of anonymity, adding that psychological trauma from the repeated interrogations had aggravated his suffering .

“We are becoming increasingly inept, whether financially, operationally or personally.”

The collapse of Chinese civil society has been a long process full of obstacles for activists.

In 2015, more than 300 lawyers and defense attorneys were arrested in a raid dubbed the “709 Raid” after it began on July 9.

Many lawyers remained behind bars or under surveillance for years, while others were disbarred, according to rights groups.

Another turning point was the passage of the so-called Foreign NGOs Law in 2016, which imposed restrictions and gave the police sweeping powers over foreign NGOs operating in the country.

“In 2014, we were able to unfurl protest banners, conduct scientific field research and work with Chinese media to expose environmental abuses,” an environmental NGO worker told AFP on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“Now we have to report to the police before we do anything. Every project has to work with a government agency that feels more like an oversight body.”

Today’s landscape is markedly different from just a few years ago, when civil society groups were able to operate in the relatively permissive climate that began under former President Hu Jintao.

“Several LGBTQ and gender-sensitive groups have sprung up in campuses around 2015,” said Carl, a member of the LGBTQ youth group, though he felt “increasing pressure.”

By 2018, the government’s zero tolerance for activism came to a head when authorities cracked down on a burgeoning feminist #MeToo movement and arrested dozens of student activists.

“Activities that were previously tacitly permitted were banned, ideological work such as political education courses were ramped up,” said Carl.

In July 2022, Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University handed two students official warnings for distributing rainbow flags, while dozens of LGBTQ student groups were banned from social media.

Another harbinger of regression was an internal party communiqué from 2013, which banned advocacy for Western liberal values ??such as democracy based on the rule of law and freedom of the press.

“She treated these ideologies as hostile while we could discuss them and publish books about them in the 1980s,” said Gao Yu, a Beijing-based independent journalist who was either in prison or under house arrest between 2014 and 2020 for allegedly documenting the ideologies had published.

“In a normal society, intellectuals can question government mistakes. Otherwise…isn’t that the same as in the Mao era?” he asked, referring to the founder of communist China, Mao Zedong.

Now 78-year-old Gao is monitored by social media, has virtually no income and is barred from making international calls or meeting with friends.

“We are all like grains of corn being ground by the village millstone,” she said.

Gao and her colleagues are replaced by prominent academics who parrot the hawks’ nationalist ideology, while others have been forced out of their positions or endure classroom surveillance by students.

“A kind of gossip story has developed in China’s intellectual world over the past decade,” said Wu Qiang, a former Tsinghua professor of political science and party critic.

“Students have become censors, checking their professor’s every sentence instead of learning through mutual discussions.”

Faced with the increasingly harsh climate, many activists have either fled China or put their work on hold.

Only a handful are holding out, despite growing hostility, including online bullying.

“We may be at the end of a valley right now… but people are still speaking out tirelessly,” said Feng Yuan, founder of equality group Equity.

For others, like an environmental organization worker, it’s an “unwinnable war” against nationalist trolls who claim all NGO workers are “brainwashed against China and by the West.”

“I feel like all my efforts have been in vain,” they said.

Charles’ friends, #MeToo advocate Huang Xueqin and labor activist Wang Jianbing, have been jailed without trial on subversion charges for over a year.

He believes the authorities see their gatherings of young activists as a threat – and the threshold for prosecution is getting lower and lower.

“The government is now targeting individuals who engage in small, subtle, low-key activism,” he said.

“They made sure that there is no new generation of activists.”