IN DECEMBER 2005 Asia Weekly, a Chinese-language magazine in Hong Kong, put 14 Chinese civil-rights advocates on its cover. It hailed them and their brethren in the cause of weiquan, or rights protection, as “men of the year” for their brave efforts to advance the rule of law in China. The cover might as well have been a “most wanted” poster. Since then authorities have turned the lawyers into a gang of “criminals” and fugitives.

All of the activists pictured on the magazine’s cover have since been imprisoned, detained, beaten or threatened, except for one lawyer who had already fled the country into exile in Canada. The most vocal among them were, as their sympathisers like to put it, “disappeared” by party-hired thugs in extralegal abductions.

It has been a long and hard fall that says much about the Communist Party’s chosen path of evolution. Activists seeking to protect the legal rights of ordinary citizens rose to prominence in the early 2000s. At the time the party was trying to professionalise its legal system, to encourage people to seek redress through the courts and to reassure them that their land, their homes or the wealth they were fast accumulating would be safe from local officials who often had scant regard for the sanctity of private property. At first the party tolerated the activists’ emergence. It soon lost patience.

Since Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012, he has tightened the noose on them further. The remaining outspoken weiquan activists have been jailed or silenced. On May 15th prosecutors in Beijing formally charged Pu Zhiqiang, a 50-year-old lawyer who had been in custody for more than a year, with “inciting ethnic hatred or discrimination” and “picking quarrels and provoking troubles”. Mr Pu (pictured above, talking in 2012 outside a court in south-west China) is a giant of the weiquan movement; his trial, which is likely to take place in a few weeks, will cast an even deeper chill over like-minded lawyers.

The evidence against Mr Pu includes tweets in which he ridicules Chinese propaganda, calls China’s ethnic policies “absurd” and appears to question the legitimacy of party rule. The charges are ironic: Mr Pu made his name defending the free-speech rights of journalists and writers. He can expect to spend several years in jail, a fate already being suffered by other prominent activists such as Xu Zhiyong, a moderate advocate for legal rights, who was sentenced last year to four years in prison for disrupting public order. Gao Zhisheng, a fierce critic of the party who took on politically sensitive clients, has been repeatedly abducted, tortured and imprisoned over the last several years. He was finally released from prison in August but little has been heard of him since.

Mr Xi’s apparent determination to crush what little remains of the weiquan movement may seem odd. He has been talking up the virtues of the “rule of law”, even suggesting that courts should “lock power in a cage”. But it is clear that he does not want activists to use this as an excuse to embarrass the party. Lawyers who help citizens stand up to land grabs have a tendency to be liberals with strong misgivings about party rule—even though many, unlike Mr Pu, prefer not to tweet about them.

The party was not always so worried. In 2001 Jiang Zemin, who was then China’s leader, made a speech about the rule of law that had the opposite effect of Mr Xi’s utterances on the topic: it heralded a more relaxed era for lawyers. That year the Ministry of Justice described Mr Gao as one of the top ten lawyers in China. In 2003 weiquan activists felt triumphant after the scrapping of regulations allowing the detention of migrants from the countryside for not having the right papers (one such migrant had been beaten to death in custody). The lawyers’ own petition against the regulations may not have been decisive in securing their repeal, but the case inspired the weiquan movement. Its lawyers became frequent participants in cases against the bureaucracy filed by aggrieved citizens, and sometimes helped them win.

In the end, however, the lawyers fell victim to their own success. The party became suspicious of their networks, and their rapid deployment at scenes of confrontation with officialdom, such as protests by residents enraged at the bulldozing of their houses by government-backed developers. In 2006 Luo Gan, then China’s security chief, urged that “forceful measures” be used against saboteurs of the system who operate “under the guise of weiquan”. That is when the men on the cover of Asia Weekly, already by then under intense official scrutiny, became China’s most wanted. President Xi is now finishing the job of locking them away.