In another era, Pu Zhiqiang might have live-tweeted the Tiananmen massacre. Instead, as the bloodbath unfolded around him on that pre-smartphone night in the early summer of 1989, the student leader took a solemn vow: if he made it out with his life he would use it to give voice to those who had died.

“That was unquestionably a pivotal moment for him,” said William J Dobson, an American writer who spent time with the Tiananmen survivor while writing a book on 21st century dictatorships. “I don’t think that it is necessarily guilt as much as it is a real commitment to see through what had motivated students and workers and so many others to gather there in 1989.”

Pu, now 50, went on to become China’s most admired and rambunctious advocate of free speech; an internet-savvy civil rights lawyer and Communist party critic whose withering and often witty online critiques of the party earned him tens of thousands of online followers but also made him an avowed enemy of the Chinese state.

In May 2014, shortly after attending a Tiananmen memorial event in Beijing, he was seized by police and hauled into custody.



Protesters holding pictures of human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang march to the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong in May 2014 asking for his release after his arrest in Beijing. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

On Monday, after 19 months behind bars, Pu will go on trial in Beijing in what will be one of the most controversial and closely watched cases of President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on dissent.



Perry Link, an American academic whose wife stood alongside Pu during the 1989 democracy protests, said Chinese leaders were determined to silence a man who had become an expert in “punching the Communist party in the nose in indiscreet ways”. “He has irritated people at the top and they have decided they need to stop him,” said Link, a veteran China expert from the University of California, Riverside.

Pu’s lawyers say he will face two separate charges at Monday’s trial – “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and “inciting ethnic hatred” – and faces up to eight years in jail. Both accusations relate to seven tweets he allegedly posted on Weibo, China’s Twitter, between 2011 and 2014, the year he was detained.

In one of the supposedly unlawful messages, Pu attacks a government official following the deadly high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou in 2011. In another, he mocks Mao Xinyu, Mao Zedong’s grandson, and an elderly member of China’s party-controlled parliament who once admitted to having never voted against Communist party policy during her 60 years in politics.

In a third post, Pu questions the state’s responsibility for a spate of terror attacks linked to the violence-stricken western region of Xinjiang. “This is a result, not just a cause,” he writes of a deadly machete attack on a Chinese train station in the city of Kunming.



The decision to try Pu on the basis of seven sarcastic tweets has appalled freedom of speech activists and those close to the lawyer. “The idea that those tweets were actually going to somehow incite unrest or violence is rather absurd,” said Dobson, the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve. “I haven’t asked Pu Zhiqiang but I highly doubt that he suspected those tweets were going to land him in trouble in the first place.”

On Friday, Human Rights Watch urged 36 Beijing-based ambassadors to protest Pu’s treatment by turning up at the Beijing courthouse where he is to be tried at 9am on Monday. “It would be an extraordinary gesture of solidarity and support for human rights to see these ambassadors at the courthouse,” Sophie Richardson, the group’s China director, said.

Link, whose criticism of Beijing has seen him banned from entering China, said Chinese authorities had tried – but failed – to uncover more serious offences to justify Pu’s politically motivated jailing. “They were trying to find that he was sexually promiscuous, or that he had avoided taxes or was corrupt [or] a traitor,” he said. “But I think what we learn now when we see that there is only seven tweets as the evidence, is that they essentially came up empty on all of that.”

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei with Pu Zhiqiang, his lawyer, as he leaves for court in Beijing in 2012. Photograph: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

Link said he suspected there was considerable embarrassment, even within the Communist party itself, “at the prospect of putting a man away for tweeting”.

Pu, a 6ft 1in hulk whose physical stature and baritone voice earned him the nickname the “giant lawyer”, was raised in the countryside of eastern China and went on to study history at university. When the Tiananmen protests broke out in April 1989, he was a 24-year-old law student at Beijing’s elite China University of Political Science and Law.

Pu had mapped out a future in academia but Communist party officials blocked those plans after he refused to renounce his involvement in the historic demonstrations.

“This is someone with an incredibly far-ranging and impressive intellect that could have been applied in a million ways,” said Dobson. “And in some ways the Chinese Communist party determined his future by closing those doors and really not giving him any recourse but to become an enemy of the state.”

Friends describe Pu as an irreverent but intensely loyal fighter who revels in classical Chinese poetry and curse words. “I feel very, very guilty about what has happened to him,” said Hao Jian, a film critic and friend who hosted the 2014 Tiananmen seminar after which Pu was detained.

Asked what had driven Pu to take on the system, Hao pointed to the massacre of 4 June 1989 in which hundreds, possibly thousands died. “Our generation all suffers from the ‘4 June complex’,” he said. “Once, in the 80s, we breathed some fresh air. But on 4 June our minds received an electric shock. [That day] is central to our mental condition.”

On the eve of Pu’s long-awaited trial, friends and observers have speculated anxiously about his likely fate.

“Pu Zhiqiang is influential in the Beijing legal world, he has many friends, and that might help him,” Zhang Xuezhong, a fellow lawyer, told the New York Times. “I’m not a fortune teller, but there is the possibility of a lighter verdict.”

Others fear Beijing will impose a harsh punishment in order to intimidate and silence Pu’s many thousands of supporters. “He is an advocate of free speech – that’s exactly his issue,” said Link. “And if all of these followers can see that our hero of free speech can be put away for exactly the crime of exercising his free speech that is a terrible blow, to internet expression especially.”

“If he gets put away for a longish term it will have a huge chilling effect on the internet in China and that is serious.”



Dobson said he saw little hope that the “persecution and pursuit” of Communist party foes would abate while Xi Jinping was in power. “This does not strike me as a regime that is prepared to give an inch to people like Pu Zhiqiang,” he said.

Additional reporting by Christy Yao

