Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government. By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protests or nonviolent resistance.
Chinese law is one of the oldest legal traditions in the world. The core of modern Chinese law is based on Germanic-style civil law, socialist law, and traditional Chinese approaches.
The Open Constitution Initiative (OCI), sometimes referred to in English as Gongmeng, was an organization consisting of lawyers and academics in the People's Republic of China that advocated for the rule of law and greater constitutional protections. It was established by Peking University Law School scholars Xu Zhiyong, Teng Biao, Yu Jiang, and Zhang Xingshui in 2003, and was shut down by the Chinese government in 2009.
The sovereign citizen movement is a loose grouping of litigants, activists, tax protesters, financial scheme promoters and conspiracy theorists, who claim to be answerable only to their particular interpretations of the common law and to not be subject to any government statutes or proceedings, unless they consent to them. The movement, which appeared in the early 1970s, is American in origin and exists primarily in the United States, though it has expanded to other countries. Notably, the freeman on the land movement, an offshoot of the sovereign citizen movement with similar doctrines, emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries. However, sovereign citizens as such have also appeared in these countries and others. The sovereign citizen phenomenon is one of the main contemporary sources of pseudolaw: adherents to its ideology notably believe that courts have no actual jurisdiction over people and that the use of certain procedures and loopholes can make one immune from government laws and regulations. They also regard most forms of taxation as illegitimate. Sovereign citizen arguments have no basis in law and have never been successful in court.
In political philosophy, the right of revolution is the right or duty of a people to "alter or abolish" a government that acts against their common interests or threatens the safety of the people without cause. Stated throughout history in one form or another, the belief in this right has been used to justify various revolutions, including the American Revolution, French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Iranian Revolution.
The redemption movement is a debt-resistance movement and fraud scheme which is primarily active in the United States and Canada. Participants allege that a secret fund is created for every citizen at birth, and that a procedure exists to "redeem" or reclaim this fund to pay bills. Common redemption schemes include acceptance for value (A4V), Treasury Direct Accounts (TDA) and secured party creditor kits. Such tactics are sometimes called "money for nothing" schemes, as their aim is ultimately to extract money from the government by using secret methods. The name of the A4V scheme is also commonly used to refer to the movement as a whole.
The Weiquan movement is a non-centralized group of lawyers, legal experts, and intellectuals in China who seek to protect and defend the civil rights of the citizenry through litigation and legal activism. The movement, which began in the early 2000s, has organized demonstrations, sought reform via the legal system and media, defended victims of human rights abuses, and written appeal letters, despite opposition from Communist Party authorities. Among the issues adopted by Weiquan lawyers are property and housing rights, protection for AIDS victims, environmental damage, religious freedom, freedom of speech and the press, and defending the rights of other lawyers facing disbarment or imprisonment.
Black jails are a network of extralegal detention centers established by Chinese security forces and private security companies across the People's Republic of China. They are used mainly to detain, without trial, petitioners, who travel to seek redress for grievances unresolved at the local level. The right to petition was available in ancient China, and was later revived by the communists, with important differences.
In spite of restrictions on freedom of association, particularly in the decades since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, there have been incidents of protest and dissent in China. Among the most notable of these were the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which were put down with brutal military force, the 25 April 1999 demonstration by 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners at Zhongnanhai, and the 2022 protests against COVID-19 lockdowns. Protesters and dissidents in China espouse a wide variety of grievances, including corruption, forced evictions, unpaid wages, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, ethnic protests, petitioning for religious freedom and civil liberties, protests against one-party rule, as well as nationalist protests against foreign countries.
The freeman on the land movement, also known as the freemen of the land, the freemen movement, or simply freemen, is a loose group of individuals who believe that they are bound by statute laws only if they consent to those laws. They believe that they can therefore declare themselves independent of the government and the rule of law, holding that the only "true" law is their own idiosyncratic interpretation of "common law". The name "freeman on the land" describes a person who is literally a "free man" on the land where they live. The freeman on the land movement also advocates schemes to avoid taxes which it considers to be illegitimate.
Forced eviction in the People's Republic of China refers to the practice of involuntary land requisitions from the citizenry, typically in order to make room for development projects. In some instances, government authorities work with private developers to seize land from villagers, with compensation below the market price. In many cases, they are also offered alternative housing instead of or on top of monetary compensation. Forced evictions are particularly common in rural areas, and are a major source of unrest and public protest. By some estimates, up to 65 percent of the 180,000 annual mass conflicts in China stem from grievances over forced evictions. Some citizens who resist or protest the evictions have reportedly been subjected to harassment, beatings, or detention.
A barefoot lawyer is a self-taught legal activist in China. Many barefoot lawyers are peasants who have taught themselves enough law to file civil complaints, engage in litigation, and educate fellow citizens about their rights. The term is a variation of the "barefoot doctor"—farmers with minimal formal training who nonetheless provided essential medical services in rural China during the Mao era. Barefoot lawyers provide free legal services, and in many instances take on controversial or politically sensitive cases—such as tackling corruption by local authorities—that more established legal professionals may be reluctant to pursue. Notable examples of barefoot lawyers include the blind self-taught activist Chen Guangcheng, and Guo Feixiong.
Zhou Decai is a civil rights and democracy activist from Gushi county in Henan province, China. Zhou was a farmer-turned-businessman who became active in advocating for civil rights. As a young activist, Zhou attempted to mobilize a number of protests in his hometown against excessive taxes being levied on the citizenry. After several unsuccessful attempts to galvanize protests, he moved to the southern Guangdong province as a migrant worker, but continued writing political essays on calling for multiparty democracy. In 2002, he attempted to organize a pro-democracy demonstration on Tiananmen Square.
Weiquan lawyers, or rights protection lawyers, refer to a small but influential movement of lawyers, legal practitioners, scholars and activists who help Chinese citizens to assert their constitutional, civil rights and/or public interest through litigation and legal activism. Weiquan lawyers represents many cases regarding labour rights, land rights, official corruption, victims of torture, migrants' rights.
Anti-statism is any approach to social, economic or political philosophy that rejects statism. An anti-statist is one who opposes intervention by the state into personal, social and economic affairs. In anarchism, this is characterized by a complete rejection of all involuntary hierarchical rulership.
Pseudolaw consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be based on accepted law or legal doctrine, but which deviate significantly from most conventional understandings of law and jurisprudence, or which originate from non-existent statutes or legal principles the advocate or adherent incorrectly believes exist. Pseudolaw often purports to base itself on "common law", though it has no relation to contemporary or historical examples of common law.
Strawman theory is a pseudolegal conspiracy theory originating in the redemption/A4V movement and prevalent in antigovernment and tax protester movements such as sovereign citizens and freemen on the land. The theory holds that an individual has two personas, one of flesh and blood and the other a separate legal personality.
Tax resistance in the United States has been practiced at least since colonial times, and has played important parts in American history.
The right to resist is a nearly universally acknowledged human right, although its scope and content are controversial. The right to resist, depending on how it is defined, can take the form of civil disobedience or armed resistance against a tyrannical government or foreign occupation; whether it also extends to non-tyrannical governments is disputed. Although Hersch Lauterpacht, one of the most distinguished jurists, called the right to resist the supreme human right, this right's position in international human rights law is tenuous and rarely discussed. Forty-two countries explicitly recognize a constitutional right to resist, as does the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights.
