Hu Ping is the editor of the pro-democracy journal Beijing Spring, based in New York. But in 1975, he was 28 and living in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, a recently returned “educated youth” who had been sent down to labor in the countryside during theCultural Revolution. While waiting to be assigned to a new workplace, he wrote an essay that would become a classic of modern Chinese liberalism. The essay, “On Freedom of Speech,” could at first be circulated only through handwritten posters on the city’s streets. In 1979 it appeared in the underground magazine Fertile Soil, and it went on to influence a generation of democracy advocates. Read more
