What does it mean to be a Chinese human rights advocate in 2026?
Yaqiu Wang has worked at Freedom House, Human Rights Watch, and the Committee to Protect Journalists, and is currently a fellow at the University of Chicago. She watched DOGE cuts gut reporting on political prisoners, refugee assistance networks, and labor rights work abroad, and argued in ChinaFile that the human rights community must urgently diversify away from U.S. government money.
ChinaFile’s Jeremy Goldkorn recently chatted with Wang about the future of human rights work in China and how it will be funded, politics in the Chinese diaspora, women’s rights progress in China that is not captured by indicators, and how the internet and AI are challenging our notions of free speech. Wang exemplifies how being a Chinese person of conscience right now means navigating between two forces that both want to define you—and finding agency in refusing both definitions.
Below is an excerpt from the interview, edited for clarity.
Jeremy Goldkorn: Your recent piece for ChinaFile argues that the China human rights community needs to seek new sources of funding and new ways of networking. Can you talk about what you see as the way forward? In your article, you discuss both private funding and also the possibility of tapping the diaspora community.
Yaqiu Wang: Let’s talk about private funding first. There are three types of private funding. One is just very rich individuals. One silver lining—maybe it’s not a silver lining—one outcome of the incredible inequality within the United States is that some people are so rich. They have their family office that handles their philanthropic work.
It’s hard to get access to them, but you can find ways to access them to get them interested in your work, to try to persuade them. I think this is a growth area just because, you know, wealth is growing that is so concentrated.
The billionaire class is growing!
It’s not most of us, but yeah.
Secondly, there are institutional funders, private foundations. They have program officers, you have to get to know their goals, their agendas, how to get connected with those institutions. This is a more established way of getting funding that I feel the community really needs to try out.
The other potential source is the diaspora itself. This is my hope, because when you get money from the diaspora itself it’s no longer just you write your application, you persuade some people who care about human rights to give you money to do good work.
Of course you’re still doing that. But you’re also mobilizing the diaspora itself. When people are giving you money to care about their own cause, they’re much more invested. And then the community, the funders themselves, become part of the activism. I don’t think this has ever been systematically tried out. For decades, the [China human rights] community has so relied on U.S. government funding. They haven’t tried. And I do think that in order to try, you really have to fundamentally shift your projects, your focus.
The ideal person I would think would be a potential donor is someone who, let’s say, has studied in China, gotten their undergrad degree in China, and then got a Ph.D. in the U.S., now works at Google, and their wife works at Facebook. So those people are actually pretty rich as a Chinese couple.
Viewpoint
03.03.26
To Ensure a More Sustainable Future, Human Rights Work on China Should Move Away from U.S. Government Funding
I have friends who are like those people and they do care about human rights. They didn’t like Xi Jinping’s crazy COVID policy. They have family who were locked down in Shanghai for months. They really don’t like Xi Jinping, but they’re not so into U.S. geopolitical politics either, right? They just—who cares about great power competition? They genuinely care about human rights, but they’re also a little bit worried about, you know, if I donate to a human rights organization, or to some human rights individuals, maybe the Chinese government will find out. I don’t want to be in this situation. I don’t want to go back to China and have the Chinese government harass me, or ask “why did you give money to this group?”
But that kind of person is my ideal funder for the Chinese human rights community going forward: Chinese people who are liberal, who are pro-human rights, who are not into great power competition, who are just part of the community. And I don’t think we’ve ever tried it. And I do think there’s huge potential. I mean, within the Chinese diaspora, a lot of people do have money and they do care. They just don’t like the current human rights community. So we need to build a new one that is very much real-human-rights-focused and doesn’t attach the human rights issue to the national security issue.