Recently, the Beijing police took my brother sightseeing again. Nine days, two guards, chauffeured tours through a national park that’s a World Heritage site, visits to Taoist temples and to the Three Gorges, expenses fully covered, all courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security. The point was to get him out of town during the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, held in early September. The capital had to be in a state of perfect order; no trace of trouble was permissible. And Zha Jianguo, a veteran democracy activist, is considered a professional troublemaker.

While President Xi Jinping played host to African dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People, the police played host to my big brother at various scenic spots in the province of Hubei, about a thousand kilometres away. A number of other Beijing activists and civil-rights lawyers, including several whom Jianguo knows well, were treated to similar trips. Pu Zhiqiang headed for Sichuan, Hu Jia to the port city of Tianjin, He Depu to the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and Zhang Baocheng to Sanya, a beach resort on Hainan Island. Kept busy in the midst of natural beauty and attended to closely, they had no chance to speak to members of the foreign media or post provocative remarks online.

This practice is known as bei lüyou, “to be touristed.” The term is one of those sly inventions favored by Chinese netizens: whenever law enforcement frames people, or otherwise conscripts them into an activity, the prefix bei is used to indicate the passive tense. Hence: bei loushui (to be tax-evaded), bei zisha (to be suicided), bei piaochang (to be johned), and so on. In the past few years, the bei list has been growing longer, the acts more imaginative and colorful. “To be touristed” is no doubt the most appealing of these scenarios, and it is available only to a select number of troublemakers. In Beijing, perhaps dozens of people a year are whisked off on these exotic trips, typically diehard dissidents who have served time and are on the radar of Western human-rights organizations and media outlets. Outside the capital, the list includes not just activists but also petitioners (fangmin)—ordinary people from rural villages or small towns who travel to voice their grievances to high government officials about local malfeasances they have suffered from.

Jianguo became a tourist only in recent years, but he has been a target of governmental attention for more than two decades. In 1999, he was given a nine-year prison sentence for helping to found a small opposition group, the Democracy Party of China, the year before. Since his release, in 2008, he has lived under constant police surveillance, which is ratcheted up during “sensitive” periods. For three months surrounding the Beijing Summer Olympics that year, the police parked in front of his apartment building night and day. Officers periodically knocked on his door to search his home, and followed him everywhere he went. Just as polluting factories were shut down and a barrage of rain-dispelling rockets were launched to insure clear skies during the Games, political irritants were vigorously contained.

China has grown wealthier and more powerful in the ensuing years, and, as it hosts more global forums, there are more sensitive dates on the state’s calendar—Party congresses, trade summits, multinational meetings. Old imperial powers, with deep pockets and grand ambitions, tend to be fastidious about their image as host and benefactor, and China has always set great store by ceremony. Each occasion is vulnerable to disruption by protesters, so care is taken to sweep them out of sight. All major state functions have so far run without a hitch: perfect weather, perfect banquets, and perfect citizens waving glow sticks. Since 2011, China’s annual spending on domestic weiwen, or “stability maintenance,” has, according to some reports, surpassed defense spending.

But how serious is the threat of a disruption? After Jianguo and his comrades launched the Democracy Party, all its leaders were swiftly sent to prison, and, for the past ten years, Jianguo has been a solitary critic, with no party affiliation, no N.G.O. membership, no local or foreign patron. Now sixty-seven years old, he lives alone, having moved to a ground-floor apartment because he tires when climbing stairs. He eats and drinks modestly: mostly vegetables, a light beer or two. Having lost a lot of hair during his prison years, he shaves his head. He used to hold forth at meals; now he listens more than he talks. His smile is serene, as if to convey that all under Heaven is forgiven. Someone remarked to me once, “Your brother looks like a Buddha now.”

Yet, in recent years, the Chinese government has come to see him as more, not less, of a security threat. The authorities monitor his phone, block some of his messages, and bar him from certain gatherings. During sensitive periods, he is watched and followed around the clock. On bei lüyou trips, three officers usually accompany him, often including one who sleeps in his hotel room.

Why do they think he is so dangerous? My brother may no longer operate a party cell, but—like more than a billion other Chinese citizens—he does have a cell phone. He regularly posts his analyses of current events in online groups, and he has become an increasingly prominent pundit on the Chinese Internet. Since 2012, Jianguo has trained his criticism chiefly on one target: the Global Times (Huanqiu Shibao), a pro-government, strongly nationalistic, and influential tabloid daily, which is distributed widely under the auspices of the People’s Daily. In a series labelled “Debating the Global Times,” Jianguo took up editorials and scrutinized them point by point.

Looking at his posts, I used to marvel at his bullheadedness, but the whole thing seemed to me like playing a game of solitaire; the posts appeared to go unnoticed. Gradually, however, I saw that Jianguo was honing a new voice, and gaining a following. From 2012 to 2017, he produced, with accelerating frequency, a total of four hundred and fifty-six “Debating the Global Times” posts. He was helped by the explosive growth of WeChat, the messaging and social-media app: by 2015, Jianguo was sending a new post every other day to between fifty and seventy WeChat groups, reaching tens of thousands of readers.

He’s part of a broader trend. Since organized opposition is impossible, protest and resistance have increasingly shifted to the Internet. Spotlighting abuse and corruption, online critics and bloggers have often succeeded in rallying public opinion and pressuring authorities to act. Online platforms like WeChat and Weibo, in their fragmented immensity, can still provide badly needed public spaces for critical exchange, as well as bonding and camaraderie, all with the advantage of speed and influence.

Back in the late nineteen-nineties, the Democracy Party of China was a fringe group of radicals whom the government could easily quarantine. Reformist intellectuals, who supported a path of incremental change, viewed men like Jianguo as politically naïve and their mission as suicidal. Few people even knew that his party existed. But now, using social media, Jianguo has accomplished something that his old comrades never could. He has reached the much larger camp of Chinese liberals—educated urbanites who generally embrace Western ideas of democracy, want the rule of law, and are critical of the party-state. Although they have flourished in China’s “reform era”—decades of fast growth that have brought them apartments, cars, holiday travels, study abroad for their children—they are mostly convinced of the superior vitality of the multiparty system. In a joke they liked about the 2016 U.S. election, a bunch of eunuchs are so appalled by the bawdy quarrels among the married folk that they congratulate themselves: “How fortunate we are to be castrated!” Yet many Chinese liberals doubt that the Western system is feasible in their country. They fret about the burden of history, about the prospect of chaos and mob rule. In their own lives, they avoid radicals and former political prisoners, for fear that such association might jeopardize their personal freedom. They shun the sort of political action that could put their comfortable life style at risk.