When Conscience Is a Crime: The Long-Buried Trial That China Tried to Forget

When the long-buried courtroom video of Xu Qinxian suddenly surfaced more than three decades later, it felt as if someone had pried open a sealed chamber in the middle of the night and let a forgotten truth slip out. There was no dramatic flourish, no fanfare—just a cold reminder that what authoritarian power fears most is not rebellion, but memory. Watching a general stand trial for refusing to fire on unarmed civilians is not simply a glimpse into history; it is a mirror held up to a political system that cannot tolerate conscience.

The footage is eerily quiet. No shouting, no theatrics—just the steady, suffocating machinery of a system demanding obedience at all costs. Xu was not a dissident, nor a would-be revolutionary. He was a career military officer who, at a critical moment, refused to turn soldiers into executioners. In any society governed by basic moral instincts, such a refusal would require no explanation. But in that moment of Chinese history, adhering to humanity became a punishable offense, while blind obedience was elevated as virtue. The absurdity speaks for itself: legality and morality had been inverted so completely that mercy turned into a crime.

Some people like to say, “It’s been decades—why dig this up again?” But this resurfaced recording proves that political darkness does not fade with time simply because people grow older. Authoritarian governments have a consistent instinct: force the public to forget, reduce complex historical events into slogans, strip away the nuance, and shame anyone who asks for more details. The more complicated the truth, the more aggressively it is flattened, sanitized, and repeated until it becomes “official history.” The goal isn’t clarity; the goal is control. Simpler stories are easier to weaponize emotionally, and once emotions are ignited, reason becomes irrelevant.

We see the same tactic again and again. Social unrest? Label it as “rioters.” Criticism? Blame “foreign interference.” Ordinary people with legitimate grievances? Dismiss them as “manipulated masses.” Every individual fear, doubt, or moral struggle is erased until only a neat, politically convenient category remains. Governments love this. Complexity is dangerous; context is destabilizing. The moment you allow nuance, responsibility shifts from “the unruly public” to the structure of power itself.

In public debate, another familiar phrase often shows up—“judge the act, not the intention.”
Supporters of the regime argue: it doesn’t matter what Xu intended; he disobeyed a direct order, therefore he was wrong. It sounds legalistic, even principled, but it’s actually a convenient escape hatch for anyone trying to avoid an ethical discussion. If a system forbids examination of motives, then any atrocity can be justified. Under that logic, a soldier who carries out an immoral command is “just following orders,” while someone who refuses to kill civilians is “violating discipline.” It reduces morality to a liability and turns human judgment into a threat.

This supposed neutrality—“just analyze the action”—is profoundly dishonest. It pretends to strip away intention, yet it implicitly endorses one overriding intention: obedience. It denies individuals the right to moral judgment while granting the government an automatic presumption of righteousness. In any real legal tradition—not the political theater of a military tribunal—intent matters. Otherwise, the person who refuses to take part in atrocities is judged by the same standard as the one who commits them. That is not justice; it is the destruction of justice.

Xu’s refusal did not stem from rebellion or political ambition. It came from a simple, unquestionable line: the military should not be used to kill its own people. His intention is so clear that it requires no defense. Which is why those who insist on ignoring intention are essentially acting as shields for state power, pushing morality back into the shadows so that everything becomes a matter of obedience or disobedience. They refuse to admit an obvious truth: if stability depends on suppressing individual conscience, the problem lies not with the soldiers—but with the orders.

The resurfaced video unsettles people because it exposes a longstanding structure of deception. Authoritarian regimes do not fear the public’s ignorance; they fear the public becoming accustomed to asking questions. They fear the realization that history is not a single narrative, that events are not reducible to propaganda-approved categories, that a general who refused to fire was not a deviant but a man standing on the morally correct side of history.

This footage reminds us that history does not automatically settle into truth. It is contested, shaped, edited, and weaponized. Without those willing to drag hidden facts back into the light, the erased parts of the past will never re-enter collective memory. And the greatest danger is not the buried truth itself, but the moment when people begin to believe that truth no longer matters.