Chang Ping

In March 2016, Chang Ping's two younger brothers and a younger sister were allegedly "abducted by the Chinese police" after he wrote an article for Deutsche Welle related to a "public letter", which was posted online demanding that Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping's resign.

On 15 November 2014, Chang Ping lectured at the 33rd anniversary of the PEN International's Day of the Imprisoned Writer to highlight the fate of Tibetan writers imprisoned by Chinese authorities in Dharamsala, India, "Where’s our home? It lies in the words that we speak. How many words have been spoken? That shall determine our emotional connection to home."

Chang Ping joined Hong Kong-based magazine, iSun Affairs, in 2011, as chief editor but was denied a visa and has not been allowed into the former British colony. Late in 2011, Chang Ping was invited to live in Germany at the former country home of the Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, which has been converted into a refuge for persecuted writers.

Chang Ping has repeatedly been punished for tackling sensitive issues and was banned from writing columns and publishing books in China. He was removed as news director of Southern Weekend, then a daring weekly that had won readers across the country in 2001. He became deputy editor of Southern Metropolis Weekly, but was removed in 2008, due to a commentary that carried the headline "Tibet: Nationalist Sentiment and the Truth” enraged Chinese nationalists who supported a crackdown on what the government called separatist activities in Tibet. In 2010, he was finally fired by the newspaper, with an editor saying his work was“inappropriate.” But he said to New York Times, “I will keep writing, I won’t stop.”

Chang Ping (simplified Chinese: 长平; traditional Chinese: 長平, born 22 June 1968), whose real name is Zhang Ping, is a Chinese writer and Curator of June 4th Museum of Memory and Human Rights. He won the Human Rights Press Awards in Hong Kong in 2014 and the CJFE 2016 International Press Freedom Award in Canada.