Last month, a Chinese court sentenced the civil rights activists and lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi to fourteen and twelve years in prison for “subverting state power,” a charge arising from an informal gathering of fellow activists the two had put together in 2019 in the southern coastal city of Xiamen. The following conversation, excerpted and translated, comes from an
During meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev or other top Soviet Union officials, President Reagan often pulled out a card from his pocket and recited the names of the country’s jailed dissidents and pressed for their freedom.