Xu Zhangrun Archive

千里冰封，萬里雪飄

 

On 4 November 2025, Jingzhou Tao 陶景洲 told his online followers that he had met up with his old friend, Xu Zhangrun, one of China’s most famous ‘internal exiles’, a man sequestered both by the state and his former colleagues and friends for having spoken out against Xi Jinping’s autocracy.

Tao, a Beijing law graduate, is an international arbitrator and avocat à la Cour de Paris. He is also one of a handful of people who remains in contact with Xu Zhangrun.

Writing in his account on X, Tao said that:

This was the first time I’d seen the wire-portrait of Xu Zhangrun — formerly a professor in the Law Faculty of Tsinghua University — hanging in his home. In this photo you can see both a realistic bust of Jiang Ping and Ai Song’s portrait of Xu Zhangrun.

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Ai Song 艾松 had included the portrait of Professor Xu in his Wall of Ice 封凍之牆, an installation that he created during the winter of 2020. In an elegiac work inspired by Ai Song’s wall, Xu Zhangrun wrote:

This Ice Wall is a solitary citadel erupting upwards from this vacant enormity. Its foundations are the truth of what was; its material made from ribs cemented together with the still-warm lifeblood of the victims. The structure reaches upwards, yearning for an apex of Justice and Love. The souls of those struggling for freedom seek a republic that is a true home. Now, though, that citadel has fallen and its inhabitants are scattered. Nothing remains but overgrown ruins, hope itself marches in serried ranks into exile, a universe of experience naught but a sigh of desolation. All is reduced to bleakness and silent mourning.

它是兀立荒漠的一座孤城，用真相奠基，拆肋骨作磚，引熱血為漿，指向公義與愛的天頂，砌築自由魂靈輾轉反側的共和家園。如今城破人亡，廢墟荒蕪，只剩下流亡的肺，浩浩蕩蕩，吞吐涵詠，把這荒涼讚歎，爲此荒涼默哀。

— from Shrouds of Ice on a River Incarnadine

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Ai Song presented Xu Zhangrun with the framed barbed-wire portrait from his ice sculpture shortly before the Lunar New Year festivities of 2024, see A Day for Humanity — Ai Song the artist & the poet Xu Zhangrun.

Here, with his permission, we reproduce two recent photographs of Professor Xu. They are followed by a Chinese-language commentary on the foresight and abiding relevance of Xu Zhangrun’s famous jeremiad — Imminent Fears, Immediate Hopes — posted on YouTube in October 2025.

Readers may be familiar with 千里冰封，萬里雪飄, the Chinese rubric of this entry in the Xu Zhangrun Archive — it is from the opening lines of Mao Zedong’s poem Snow 雪. The official translation of these lines reads:

A hundred leagues locked in ice,
A thousand leagues of whirling snow.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
8 November 2025

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Related Material:

• Cyclopes on My Doorstep
• ‘So it Begins, with the Written Word’ — Xu Zhangrun Accepts a Human Rights Award
• Dies Irae — June Fourth 2025
• Xu Zhangrun Mourns Jerome Cohen
• Xu Zhangrun Archive

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Xu Zhangrun’s Four Fears

— a prediction of what was coming

許章潤的驚人預言，讀懂中國當下的絕望：從“動態清零“到“白紙運動”，許章潤的8大恐懼全應驗/一篇檄文如何“精准命中”中國數年來的所有危機？

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