(Photo: VOA) Gao Yu, a veteran Chinese journalist and political activist, is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for allegedly leaking state secrets. In 1988, after less than 10 years in journalism, Gao became the deputy editor of Economics Weekly, a publication edited by dissidents and scholars. Her involvement in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests led

Liu Xianbin, who uses the pen name Wan Xianming, is a human rights activist, China Democracy Party organizer, and writer and signer of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for reform of China’s human rights, is serving a 10-year prison term. Liu was first arrested on April 5, 1991, for his involvement in the June 4,

Wang Bingzhang, a permanent resident of the United States and a Christian, is a veteran of China’s pro-democracy movement currently serving a life sentence on charges of espionage and terrorism. Wang’s political activism dates back to 1982 when he received a Ph.D. in medicine from McGill University in Canada and founded China Spring, a pro-democracy

Guo Feixiong is the pen name of Yang Maodong, a writer, activist, self-taught legal defender. He has been held since Aug. 8, 2013 in a local detention center in Guangzhou, south China’s Guangdong province for “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.” Guo was allowed his first meeting with a lawyer in

Alimujiang Yimiti, a Uyghur Christian house church leader, was criminally detained on Jan. 12, 2008, for “inciting separatism” and “unlawfully providing state secrets to overseas organizations” and formally arrested on Feb. 20. The detainment followed an accusation of “engaging in illegal religious infiltration activities in Kashgar, spearding Christianity among the Uyghurs, and distributing religious propaganda

Writer, renowned literary critic, one of China’s leading political activists, and the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo is perhaps China’s most well-known political prisoner currently behind bars. He is in prison in northeast China’s Liaoning province serving an 11-year sentence for subversion. Liu first gained attention in the mid-1980s for the radical opinions

Peng Ming, a veteran pro-democracy and human rights activist and a Christian, has been serving a life sentence in his native Hubei province since 2005 and is in poor health. Peng’s activism dates back to 1998, when he founded the China Development Union (also sometimes called the China Development Federation in English). In April that

Tang Jingling is a human rights lawyer whose clients have included villagers fighting government corruption and victims of illegal land appropriation. In 2006, Tang’s license to practice law in China was suspended, after which he became involved in a non-violent civil disobedience movement in China. Over the years, Tang experienced frequent police harassment and interrogation.

Liu Ping, a grassroots civil rights activist in China and member of the New Citizens’ Movement, is currently serving a 6 1/2 year prison sentence for several charges. Liu first gained attention when she campaigned to be a local delegate in the National People’s Congress without government backing in 2011. In 2013, Liu was arrested

Pastor Zhang Shaojie, of Nanle County Christian Church in China’s central Henan, is currently serving a 12-year prison term for “gathering a crowd to disrupt the public order” and a fabricated fraud charge. He was initially detained on Nov. 16, 2013, when authorities asked to meet with him at his church. Instead, authorities bound Zhang,