Human rights watchers in China condemned the arrest, mostly because he was already under house arrest when the charge was made against him.
On the evening of July 16, Mr. Xu’s wife, Cui Zheng, came home from work to find her husband, who had already been under house arrest for three months, missing. The police officers who had stood outside the door, enforcing the house arrest, were also gone. Their home had been searched: books were in disarray, computers seized, the lunch she’d prepared for her husband untouched.
At midnight, two police officers delivered a notice: Mr. Xu had been detained on suspicion of “assembling a crowd to create disorder in a public place.” For more than 90 days of his house arrest, no one except Mr. Xu’s family had been allowed to pass through the door of their home. So how could he have committed the crime he was accused of?
His arrest was one of the first in a wave of arrests, detentions and other miscellaneous harassment of human right activists in China. That Mr. Xu is one of the more moderate lawyers who have called for more government transparency was a telling portent of the hard line the new CCP administration would take against those who speak out against it.
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