Yu Jie is also active in the Chinese dissident movement, and was arrested and allegedly tortured in 2010 for his friendship with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and a critical biography of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao titled China's Best Actor.

In the same year, he met and befriended democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, and became active in the Chinese dissident movement.

As part of his work with Liu, he read and commented on drafts of the democracy manifesto Charter 08[4] and helped found the Independent PEN Center.

[6][9] The book argued that Wen's warm, empathic public persona was simply a facade, and that he shared the same goals of other Chinese leaders.

[10] On October 8, 2010, Yu's good friend Liu Xiaobo was named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

On October 13, Yu was placed under house arrest, allegedly for his plans to write a biography of Liu as well as for having proceeded with the publication of China's Best Actor.

[9] Following his emigration, he submitted a nine-page report detailing his alleged torture to the US State Department and the United Nations Human Rights Council.

However, Yu Jie said that he "can't help laughing up to the sky", and called her "the worst enemy of the United States".

[16] In November 2023, he wrote an article on Facebook saying that if China had been colonized by Japan in World War 2, it would have been at least half as good as Taiwan.

[18][19][20] Chinese Weiquan lawyers Gao Zhisheng revealed in the book "2017, Rise Up China" that Secretary of the Party Committee of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice, the first political commissar of the Beijing Prison Administration Bureau and member of the Political and Legal Committee of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee Yu Hong Yuan (Chinese:于泓源) once persuaded him to surrender, and mentioned that Yu Jie had been bribed by the Chinese government: "Recently I had a personal talk with Yu Jie, and the result was very good.

He wrote an article called "Don't Treat Criminals as Heroes", describing Yang Jia as Hitler.

The attitudes of Yu Jie and Liu Xiaobo towards Yang Jia at that time were very controversial in the pro-democracy circles.

Cao Chang Qing stated This practice of narrowing the meeting with Bush is to reduce the weight of the US President and the US government's attention to China's human rights.

If We have all lost the memory of suffering, crime, and responsibility like Mr. Yu Qiuyu, so the happiness and peaceful life we expect will never be guaranteed."

[24][25][26][27][28] In 2022, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Yu Jie wrote an article on Facebook, claiming that Hong Kong people called the Queen a "wife of affairs"(Chinese:事頭婆) (localized nicknames by Hong Kong), which reflected the "ignorance" of the Chinese about the British political order which caused criticism from many netizens, some netizens accused him of deleting other people's messages and some netizens posted on Instagram to refute Yu Jie's statement that "wife of affairs" is just a friendly approach in Hong Kong, and everyone knows that the Queen has no actual power based on the constitutional monarchy.