“He and Xu Zhiyong were so confident,” said Mr. Ding’s wife, Sophie Luo, who lives in the United States and has campaigned for their release. “That’s their faith and also their weakness, I would say. They think that history is headed toward democracy and freedom.”
By the time that Mr. Xi came to power in late 2012, Mr. Xu had already spent a decade as one of China’s best-known advocates for human rights.
Mr. Xu sometimes noted with a smile that his home county in rural central China is called Minquan, which means “people’s rights.” In 2003, he and two other Peking University law school classmates shot to prominence through a successful campaign to abolish a widely despised detention system used against migrant workers in Chinese cities.
In the following decade, he and other activist lawyers sought to awaken citizen initiative and expand rights by taking up cases that exposed the failings of China’s legal system: farmers whose land had been confiscated, prisoners who claimed torture and concocted testimony by the police, and aggrieved citizens detained in informal jails for trying to take their complaints to officials in Beijing.