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In February 2015, a group of about 15 people met at a restaurant in the Chaoyang District of Beijing. This past August, four of the attendees were convicted by the Tianjin Second Intermediate People's Court of"subversion of state power," and details from their conversation were used as evidence against them.
In the last three decades, China has made the world marvel at an economic miracle that has brought hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty. The quality of life for millions of Chinese people has skyrocketed in just a generation.
All along, China's leaders have had an implicit pact with the people: We'll leave you alone if you leave us alone. Get as rich as you'd like, and you'll have a lot of personal freedom, but steer clear of politics. For many older Chinese who lived through the Mao years, the expansion of personal freedoms has felt revolutionary.
The convictions of the four men in the Tianjin court are another sign that the terms of the pact are changing. The government of President Xi Jinping is hypersensitive to criticism and will no longer stay out of our personal lives. Private conversations are fair game for punishment.
The four men Zhou Shifeng, Hu Shigen, Gou Hongguo and Zhai Yanmin were not apolitical. They were all rights activists; some were affiliated with"illegal" Christian churches. Their discussion at the restaurant in 2015 was apparently provocative.
The main piece of evidence used against them was a recording of their conversation. According to the trial transcripts, the men discussed how lawyers could get involved in sensitive political cases. Hu Shigen proposed three necessary elements for the transformation of the Chinese state: a strengthened citizenry, a break within the ruling elite and international intervention.
The prosecutors highlighted a damning quote from Hu, who reportedly said that the men's goal was to start protests leading to"even bigger clashes producing bloodshed, causing social turmoil that will give the international community an excuse to become involved."
The Chinese government has always monitored the personal communications of its perceived enemies, but rarely, if ever, has it used private conversations as evidence in court. Its preferred cudgels for critics have been trumped-up charges for crimes like prostitution and illegal business or tax practices.
The artist and vocal dissident Ai Weiwei was accused of tax fraud in 2011. Last year, the octogenarian writer Tie Liu, a critic of Mao and other party leaders, was found guilty of"illegal business" practices.
The use of private conversations in court was a disturbing turn, showing that the government feels so confident in its authoritarian ways that it admits publicly to spying on citizens. The activists may have discussed how to change the government, but the authorities crossed a line in obtaining their evidence.
Since Xi took power in 2012, the government's methods of punishing perceived enemies have become increasingly alarming. Government critics have been abducted and placed in solitary confinement and tortured. Their families and friends are often punished.
While Beijing likes to give the impression to the outside world that the legal system is being reformed, there is no respect for the legal process when it comes to government critics. In the past few years, the justice system has devolved into a form of street-gang justice. In one recent egregious example, five employees of a Hong Kong-based bookseller known for selling books that needle the Beijing leadership disappeared, only to resurface later in the mainland, where they faced harsh interrogations and public humiliation.
What distresses us is the feeling that Xi is resurrecting totalitarianism and bringing us back to the Mao era. In Mao's time, people lacked the freedom to publicly express themselves, and even private talk, or sentences written in a diary, could bring harsh punishment.
The political climate is unlikely to change soon even government officials are being more closely directed on what they can say.
Earlier this year, the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province published a list of the 44 things that Communist Party officials should not say. The banned topics included complaints about personal treatment and the government's anticorruption campaign.
If a few remarks in private, even by a party official, can be a crime, then all of society lives in dread.
(Murong Xuecun is an author whose latest novel published in English is 'Dancing Through Red Dust.' This article was translated by The New York Times from the Chinese.)
