In 2015, a nationwide campaign rounded up hundreds of rights advocates. Since then, suppression has become more systematic and less visible, lawyers say

A decade on from China’s biggest crackdown on human rights lawyers in modern history, lawyers and activists say that the Chinese Communist party’s control over the legal profession has tightened, making rights defence work next to impossible.

The environment for human rights law has “steadily regressed, especially after the pandemic”, said Ren Quanniu, a disbarred human rights lawyer. “Right now, the rule of law in China – especially in terms of protecting human rights – has deteriorated to a point where it’s almost comparable to the Cultural Revolution era.” The Cultural Revolution was a decade of mass chaos unleashed by China’s former leader Mao Zedong in 1966. During that time judicial organs were attacked as “bourgeois” and the nascent court system was largely suspended.