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aw lecturer Yu Jianrong regularly quarrels with his students. One recent clash was over China’s controversial petition system, which Yu believes requires immediate and far-reaching reform. “If China’s petition system were abolished, the courts’ workloads would be too excessive to handle,” the student remarked. “If the rule of law can not be fully established in China, you will likely be the next victim,” Yu replied, with typical wry assurance. While such exchanges are a common aspect of academic life, Yu’s students are unique, in that most of them are government officials working at different levels across the country. On the above occasion, it was a director of a lower-level People’s Court who disagreed with Yu. “I am always trying to argue with them even before a quarrel starts,” Yu told NewsChina. As the director of the Rural Development Institute with the the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Yu has given lectures to some of the largest gatherings of government officials in an academic setting in Chinese history. Understandably, his outspoken views have raised eyebrows.
Opinionated
More than 10 years ago, Yu became a household name both in academia and the media for his studies of rural reform and grassroots rights protection. In 2011, he became well known after launching the Baobeihuijia, or “Baby Back Home” project, on the social media platform Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent. Baobeihuijia was a nationwide initiative to help child beggars in China return home to their families. As head of the project, Yu, an outspoken and apparent champion of disadvantaged groups, became an overnight opinion leader, at least online. One afternoon in late April 2015, Yu arrived at the School of International Studies at Peking University to train 50 government officials from Zigong, Sichuan Province. The 53-year-old sported black-framed glasses and
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a pair of grease-stained pants, with his hair left uncombed. This unkempt scholar had chosen to speak to his well-groomed audience about public protests, officially referred to as “mass incidents,” relating to forced demolition. In a strong Hunanese accent, Yu described a number of case studies, analyzing their causes and explaining what recent progress had been made in resolving such disputes. “Do not resort to force to pull down people’s homes. Otherwise, you will pay for it,” Yu remarked to NewsChina, repeating one of the many “pet phrases” he has deployed in classrooms over the years. Another line that is remembered by many of his former students is: “I hate two things; one is the forced demolitions carried out at night by thugs, and the other is the excessive drive to maintain social stability at the expense of the public’s right to know.” “I just want to remind [officials] that if the public’s rights are not protected, [they] will also suffer in the end.” When talking about the participants in “mass incidents,” Yu reminds officials to take measures to address the problems faced by second-generation migrant workers living in China’s cities. Yu believes that as these groups grow up in the city, with little sense of their families’ rural roots, many of them nurse a deeply held feeling of social inferiority, which is detrimental to social stability. Before every lecture, Yu has to make comprehensive preparations because he knows that, in his own words, he “will influence some officials.” He is also a firsthand witness to the changes in Chinese officialdom in recent years. For example, Yu told NewsChina that on one occasion, he was invited by a newly installed provincial chief of police to give a lecture to all the department officials in that province. In his lecture, Yu lambasted the excessive use of police force in China over the years, attributing the plight of overworked officers to “pressure from higher authorities.” After that, Yu received many letters from police officers thanking him for giving voice
to their difficulties. But for Yu, it was the provincial chief of police who was most deserving of their admiration. “He knew that I would not repeat a vacuous mantra, but still insisted on inviting me to give the lecture,” Yu said. “It indicated to me that some officials want to make a change.” After another lecture that Yu delivered to a group of officials in an unnamed city, Yu claims the mayor fished out a cell phone and ordered that all demolition work be immediately suspended. On a separate occasion, when speaking to judges from an intermediate court in a city in Shandong Province, a court head pledged to Yu that “no matter who asks us for a favor when passing judgment, as long as a suspect has violated the law, we will show no mercy.” Yu responded by asking, “You dare to sentence a county chief to jail, but what about a mayor?” “We will stick to the bottom line,” the official replied. Yu said the declaration itself marks significant progress, adding that not long ago, he criticized a higher-ranking official by name in a number of articles, only to be invited to give a lecture by that same official. “He pretended not to have read my article and I pretended not to have written it,” Yu told NewsChina.
Challenges
Although Yu is a major advocate for the rule of law when in the classroom, he sometimes resorts to his own way of addressing problems, and in a number of cases he has taken matters into his own hands. In one example, he describes an elderly woman left homeless after her son and daughter passed away following the forced demolition of their home. This woman and her grandson came to Yu for help, and he posted an account of their story online. Only days later, the woman’s local police chief, who had previously attended a lecture by Yu, came to Beijing to assist with the negotiations. Yu hired a lawyer to negotiate on the woman’s behalf, NEWSCHINA I August 2015