A Beautiful China

Xu Zhiyong is one of the top activists in China, but he is strangely not well known outside his home country. This book of essays should contribute to changing that, giving English-language readers a deep sense of Xu's life story, his political convictions, and his fundamental belief that Chinese citizens themselves can successfully push for democracy and the rule of law, even against a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that seems ever more dead set against those goals.

A Beautiful China is not a memoir. Instead, it is a book of essays, many of them composed under unusual circumstances. Two of them, "Whither China?" and "For Freedom, Justice, and Love," were composed behind bars, and are all the more remarkable for their depth and incisiveness, given the circumstances of their creation. Nonetheless, these essays do give us a sense of Xu's life story, and his many contributions to human rights and civic participation in China.