About Yibao

Yibao

Yibao is a Chinese- and English-language online news and commentary publication based in the United States, with its headquarters in Washington, DC. Founded in 2001 by the dissident Yang Jianli, it began as a publication of the 21st Century China Foundation and was originally named Gongmin Yibao, or Citizens' E-Weekly — it is also known in English as China E-Weekly and Yibao magazine. Since 2008 it has been run by the non-governmental organisation Citizens Power, known in Chinese as Gongmin Liliang and in English as Citizen Power Initiatives for China. Yibao publishes news articles and columns on human rights and rule-of-law conditions inside China, written from an openly pro-democracy standpoint by contributors inside and outside the country.

Founding and Early History

Yibao was founded in 2001 by Yang Jianli as an online magazine of ideas, issues and commentary on contemporary China. Its original Chinese name, Gongmin Yibao, translates roughly as Citizens' E-Paper, and its founding publisher was the Foundation for China in the 21st Century, the organisation Yang had formed in the United States. The publication's early history was shaped by its founder's fate: in 2002 Yang returned to China to investigate labour unrest in the northeast and was arrested, then sentenced to five years in prison on charges of spying. He was released in 2007. During his imprisonment, the historian Song Yongyi served as editor of the publication. Song, a United States-based librarian and historian of the Cultural Revolution, had himself been detained in China in 1999 for six months on suspicion of stealing state secrets while collecting Red Guard-era materials for a documentary database, a case that drew protests from American academics and diplomats before his release.

Founder Yang Jianli

Yang Jianli's biography explains much of Yibao's editorial direction. Born in Shandong Province, he graduated from Beijing Normal University and later earned doctorates in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and in political economy at Harvard University. He supported the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and witnessed the military crackdown that ended them, an experience his biographies identify as the start of his political activism. After his release from prison in 2007 he formed Citizen Power Initiatives for China, a grassroots movement dedicated to a peaceful transition to democracy in China, created the Interethnic and Interfaith Leadership Conferences that bring together Han Chinese, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols and others, and co-authored a draft constitution for a democratic China. He is a signatory of Charter 08, the 2008 manifesto by Chinese intellectuals calling for political reform, and his commentary has appeared in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy. The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization commended his work in 2016, and he remains Yibao's publisher.

Citizens Power and the Publication Since 2008

Since 2008 Yibao has been run by Citizens Power (Gongmin Liliang), the movement Yang founded on the conviction, as he has put it, that the path to democracy in China lies through the awakening of a unified citizen power among all the peoples under Chinese government rule. The publication therefore operates as the media arm of an advocacy organisation rather than as a commercial news business: its purpose is to document conditions inside China, give a platform to writers who cannot publish such material at home, and address an international audience on questions such as China's candidacy for the United Nations Human Rights Council, which Citizens Power has consistently opposed. Yibao articles are republished and promoted through the Citizens Power website and network, and its writers include activists and scholars associated with the movement as well as independent contributors.

Editor Cai Xia

In 2022 the former Central Party School professor Cai Xia became Yibao's chief editor, one of the most striking appointments in the Chinese exile media world. Cai had taught democratic politics and party ideology at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party, the elite academy that trains officials destined for promotion, for many years before retiring in 2012. In 2020, after a leaked recording in which she called the party a "political zombie" and its leader a "mafia boss" circulated online, the school expelled her from the party and stripped her of her pension for remarks it said had serious political problems and damaged the country's reputation. Cai, who was by then in the United States, responded that she was glad to leave the party, and she went on to publish widely read analyses of Chinese politics, including a 2021 Hoover Institution report describing the party system as neo-totalitarian and a 2022 Foreign Affairs essay on the weaknesses of Xi Jinping's rule. Her move to Yibao brought an insider's knowledge of the party's own training system to the publication's editorship.

Content and Editorial Focus

Yibao publishes a mixture of news reporting and signed commentary in Chinese and English. Its recurring subjects are the human rights situation inside China — political prisoners, detained lawyers and journalists, religious believers, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet — and the condition of the rule of law, alongside analysis of Chinese Communist Party politics and China's foreign relations. A representative English-language piece, Yang Jianli's June 2022 essay "Political Change in China Is Not Implausible," argued from developments including dissent within the party itself that political change in China should not be dismissed as impossible. Citizens Power's October 2023 Yibao article on China's bid for re-election to the UN Human Rights Council listed individual prisoners and persecuted groups and urged member states to vote against China's candidacy, as the movement had done for years. The tone is openly oppositional: Yibao does not present itself as a neutral wire service, but as a publication of record for a democratic alternative view of China.

Contributors and Community

The publication's contributors are drawn from the Chinese pro-democracy movement in exile and from sympathetic scholars and writers. Yang Jianli is its most frequent public voice, writing on subjects from party politics to international institutions. Cai Xia's editorship added the perspective of a scholar formed inside the party school system. Around the publication sits the wider Citizens Power community: the annual Interethnic and Interfaith Leadership Conferences, described by the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization as a leading forum for the united pursuit of peaceful transition, connect Yibao's readership to Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongol, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwanese representatives as well as to human rights organisations and officials. Yibao's articles feed into that advocacy ecosystem, supplying the documented cases and arguments that the movement presents to governments and international bodies.

Audience and Language

Yibao publishes in both Chinese and English, and the bilingual format defines its audience. Chinese-language material addresses readers in the diaspora and, where it can reach them, readers interested in uncensored discussion of Chinese politics; the English-language output, published at yibao.net, addresses policymakers, journalists, scholars and human rights organisations following China from outside. Because its subject is conditions inside China, and because its writers and editors are based in the United States and barred in practice from returning, Yibao is an example of exile media: it depends on information flowing out of China, on the testimony of those who have left, and on open sources, rather than on correspondents reporting freely inside the country.

Significance

Yibao's significance lies less in its size than in its continuity and its personnel. Founded in 2001, it has published through its founder's five-year imprisonment, a change of publisher, and the tightening of Chinese controls on information, and it remains one of the longest-running Chinese pro-democracy publications on the internet. The arrival of a former Central Party School professor as chief editor in 2022 underlined its role as a meeting point for two generations and two kinds of dissent: the student movement veterans of 1989 around Yang Jianli, and the party insiders who broke with the system decades later. For researchers of Chinese politics and human rights, Yibao serves both as a news source on abuses and repression and as a primary source in its own right — a record of how the organised Chinese democracy movement understands and presents events inside China.