One might ask why Southern Weekly’s notion of dignity cannot simply be inserted into Xi Jinping’s China dream. Why should it conflict with either material improvement or national strength? The problem — and Southern Weekly editors wrote the point plainly — is that personal dignity depends on personal rights, and such rights can be secure only under a constitutional system of government.

“Constitutional government is the basis for the entire beautiful dream,” they wrote. “Only when we have established constitutional government, only when the powers of government have been limited and separated, will citizens be able to voice their criticisms of authority with confidence and be able to live in freedom, in accordance with their inner convictions. Only then will we have a free country and a country that is truly strong . . . . The real ‘China dream’ is a dream for freedom and constitutional government.”

[…] After officials of the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department “revised” the Southern Weekly statement, all of the lines quoted above had been removed and were replaced with words from Xi Jinping’s speeches about materialism and state power. It was announced that the editors had made these changes, and the result was published as “Message for 2013: We Are Closer to Our Dream than Ever Before.”

Propaganda officials’ actions sparked popular outrage in Guangdong and online. At the same time, the strong-arm tactics show the weakness of the party’s position. China’s rulers are well aware that something is missing in their version of the dream. Charter 08 and the original Southern Weekly statement both put “individual dignity” at the dream’s center. If it were true, as the regime often maintains, that such ideas are “Western” and stirred up only by “external hostile forces,” then there would be no reason to censor them or to jail their proponents. Authorities could simply publish the ideas and then watch the Chinese people inoculate themselves by rejecting them as “un-Chinese.” But no one is clearer than China’s rulers that this would not be the case.

See more on China’s constitutionalist movement and Xiao Qiang and Perry Link’s previous collaboration on subversively coded online slang, via CDT.

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Post tags: Charter 08, Chinese Dream, constitution, perry link, propaganda department, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013, universal values, Xi Jinping, Xiao Qiang
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Seasoned at playing the provocateur, Mr Li moved from reporting on sport to writing essays on politics and society soon after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which killed more than 80,000 people. His writing on the struggles of common people after the disaster brought his work to a whole new audience of internet-savvy young Chinese. He went on to publish a novel in 2011, “Li Kele Protests Demolitions”. Mr Li’s “Li Kele” was an immediate hit; the descriptions of ordinary people who united together to fight faceless forces and venality propelled the writer into the arms of a more organized new audience: China’s advocates for social reform.

Later that year Mr Li announced that he would be running for public office in Chengdu as an independent. Although his election campaign was never allowed to get under way (candidates for office are carefully screened by the Communist Party and eventually Mr Li failed his background check), he gained a new degree of credibility. Here, it seemed, was a man who would back up his words with actions.

At the book launch in Chengdu, an elderly man named Liu Shahe sat behind Mr Li. Mr Liu is one of the signatories of Charter 08, the document demanding a list political reforms that Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate, was jailed for drafting. Mr Li tweeted Mr Liu’s words to him—“You man of words, just keep writing”—and said the encouragement from the older man had reduced him to tears.

Li has answered questions about the silent signing in Chengdu on Sina Weibo, explaining why he opted to go through with the event, and why a book published through official channels had encountered such opposition. Introducing his partial translation at China Media Project, David Bandurski commented that the disruptions have only made Li’s voice louder.

In Guangzhou, the final leg of Li’s tour, the signing was cancelled at the last minute because the building where it was being hosted was closed for fire safety inspections.

Li Chengpeng apologized to his readers for the Guangzhou cancellation with a tongue-in-cheek post to his Sina Weibo account playing on the title of his book [Everybody in the World Knows]: “Once again I apologize to everyone: Because fire safety inspections are happening at the Tianya Building, outsiders cannot go in, and therefore my book signing for readers is cancelled. I’m accepting this fact, because this place is really in need of a fire safety inspection. Everybody in the world knows, fire safety is really important.”

For all of its hitches and hijinks, Li Chengpeng’s book tour illustrates the limitations of control in the era of social media. Li’s “silent” signing in Chengdu was anything but silent — it was broadcast loudly across the internet. Every leg of his tour became the subject of fevered discussion online, pitting the values of speech and openness against controls that appeared foolish and anachronistic.

See more about and by Li Chengpeng via CDT.

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Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, books, Charter 08, Chengdu, corruption, David Bandurski, Guangzhou, Li Chengpeng, Liu Xiaobo, local elections, sina weibo, soccer, social media
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The letter, signed by 71 people and posted on the blog of Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan, calls for the party to end its oversight of government personnel decisions, leave court decisions to judges and lawyers, and allow people to speak and assemble freely.

[…] “I don’t think society should simply wait passively for whatever comes up but we should express our ideas and try to build a social consensus,” Zhang, who helped draft the letter, said in a phone interview. “Now is a good time to do something new and if we miss such a chance then our social problems will become more serious.”

[…] “None of this is new and it’s not something that’s really against the Party’s will,” Zhang said. “They already expressed their will in the constitution or in the charter of the party itself.”

Zhang’s calculation that a gentle approach may be more productive—and less dangerous—is not universally accepted, with critics arguing that the resulting text is too watered down. From Didi Tang and Gillian Wong at the Associated Press:

The document echoes some of the requests made in Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto that made an unusually direct call for an end to single-party rule and other democratic reforms. The manifesto landed its lead architect, dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, in prison for inciting subversion — an 11-year term he is still serving.

The petition, released on Christmas Day, adopts a milder tone, asking the party leadership to rule within existing laws.

[…] Hong Kong-based Chinese free-speech activist Wen Yunchao said the requests made in the petition were sound but the style in which it was written was “too subservient.”

“It’s like they are slaves, kneeling there and writing it,” Wen said. He said the proposed changes should have been stated more directly.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, constitution, freedom of expression, judicial system, Liu Xiaobo, Peking University, political reform, reform, Wen Yunchao, Xi Jinping
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Pu has a powerful presence. With a crew cut and a strong jaw, this rights lawyer is large, and solidly built. His shoulders and limbs seemed to occupy his entire side of the booth. With a cigarette and a wry grin, he speaks in short declarative bursts, with more of a growl than a voice. Of course, the secret police know we are meeting, he told me straight away …. Knowing that they had listened in on the phone call, Pu informed them of our meeting a day earlier, although he tried to allay their concerns. “I told them we set this appointment a long time ago, that it has nothing to do with the thing you care about, the jasmines,” says Pu. “If you try to stop me from meeting someone, that’s illegal. You can do your job, but you cannot stop me from doing what I’m doing. If you disagree, detain me, take me away.”

I had never met Pu, so I was surprised to hear how brazenly he addressed the security officers who tailed him everywhere. What did they say?, I asked. “They didn’t say anything,” Pu replied, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “I told them without asking them. I meet my friends with their permission? Bullshit.”

[…] What struck me most as Pu talked into the night about how he worked the seams of his country’s authoritarian system was the way he dealt with the people he knew best: the secret police dispatched to monitor his every move. His tactic, as much as anything, seemed to be to humanize them. They may be on opposite ends of a fundamental disagreement—whether the rule of the Chinese Communist Party is legitimate or not—but that did not erase his interest in dealing with them as people. When I raised this with him, his brawny frame rose in its seat. “I respect them, I respect them. I constantly tell them what the procedures are,” Pu replied, stubbing out his fourth cigarette to emphasize the point. “If you come to my office and you want to detain me, OK, then there’s a procedure to go through. You need a certificate to do that. They can’t provide it, so the result is we have dinner, we drink, we talk with each other. We need to face the secret police. Why not try to change them, if you have the chance to do that?”

This approach of Pu’s, similar to Ai Weiwei’s, is illustrated by his tweeted account of his three-day detention in October 2010, after the announcement of Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize. Pu concludes by saying of his interrogator (from CDT’s translation):

Actually [Dong Yansheng, the local Deputy Director in the Domestic Security Department] is not a bad man. He is from the background of criminal police and good at what he does, and basically kind to his buddies and even enemies like me. It is not easy to be in the domestic security police force. He is just in the role of a police officer, so he and I always clash. Once he overcomes his own mental block, I believe we eventually will be friends.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Charter 08, June 4th, lawyers, legal rights, Liu Xiaobo, pu zhiqiang, rights defenders, Tan Zuoren
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… He began thinking about leaving last spring, and got permission last month, he said. Officials probably believed it would be better to have him outside China in this transition year, Mr. Yu said. Officers accompanied him, his wife, Liu Min, and their son, Yu Guangyi, to the Beijing airport boarding gate and took their picture.

And how will he remain relevant while outside China? Mr. Yu said he believed the Internet would help. He has a Twitter account, @yujie89, with nearly [now over] 30,000 followers. (He said he preferred not to use Chinese microblogs because of censorship.)

Mr. Yu said his immediate goals were to apply for asylum and finish the two books due this year. Then he plans to work on a book about the history of Christianity in China.

“Maybe in a couple years I’ll have a green card, and maybe I’ll become an American citizen,” he said. “But I see my career and lifelong goal as achieving democracy and freedom in China. And so my goal is to eventually return to China.”

See more on Yu Jie via CDT, including his 2010 account of “drinking tea” with State Security, news of his move to the US, and a Global Times response insisting that “[Yu's] personal feelings do not conform with the overwhelming majority of people in China.”

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Post tags: Charter 08, Christianity, exile, Liao Yiwu, liu xia, Liu Xiaobo, Twitter, United States, writers, yu jie
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Chen, 42, was one of hundreds of dissidents, rights activists and protest organizers swept up in a crackdown on dissent from earlier this year, when the ruling Communist Party sought to stifle potential protests inspired by anti-authoritarian uprisings across the Arab world …. Chen’s defense lawyer, Liang Xiaojun, confirmed that Chen is accused of “inciting subversion of state power” for 26 essays he published online and for an overseas magazine …. Chen, who was detained February, signed the “Charter 08″ manifesto for democratic reform that was co-written by Liu Xiaobo, the jailed dissident who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Two other dissidents from Sichuan detained at about the same as Chen — Ran Yunfei and Ding Mao — have been released.

Human Rights in China has more details and background:

The procuratorate charged in its indictment that, between March 2009 and January 2011, Chen published “inciting articles” on overseas websites, including Democratic China (民主中国), Human Rights in China (中国人权), and China E-Weekly (议报), to subvert state power. The articles cited in the indictment include “The Illness of the System and the Antidote of Constitutional Democracy” (制度之疾与宪政民主之药), “The Growth of the Civil Opposition Is the Key to China’s Democratization” (民间反对派的成长是中国民主化的关键要素), “The Traps of Harmony and the Absence of Equality” (和谐的陷阱与公平的缺席), and “Sentiments from a Hunger Striker on International Human Rights Day” (人权日绝食的感悟) …. Chen has not been permitted to see his family since being detained. His wife, Wang Xiaoyan (王晓燕), and other family members have been repeatedly summoned and harassed by the police, who warned their employers to “watch out for these people.” Authorities also attempted to keep Wang from hiring Liang Xiaojun as defense counsel and then set various obstacles to prevent Chen from meeting with his lawyers—to date, Chen has been able to meet with Zheng Jianwei only twice and with Liang Xiaojun once. Chen’s wife, brother, and sister have also not yet received permits to attend Chen’s trial.

See also news of Chen’s formal charging in March, via CDT.

Update: Chen received a sentence of nine years’ imprisonment, according to The Associated Press:

Liang [Xiaojun] said the trial at a court in the city of Suining in southwestern China lasted about two and a half hours and that the sentence was handed down 30 minutes after the trial concluded.

“We pleaded not guilty. He only wrote a few essays. We presented a full defense of the case, but we were interrupted often, and none of what we said was accepted by the court,” Liang said.

Liang said that after the sentence was handed down, Chen said: “I protest, I am innocent. The governance of democracy must win, autocracy must die.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, freedom of expression, jasmine revolution, legal rights, Liu Xiaobo, online activism, Ran Yunfei, subversion, trials, writers
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Leading the Chinese contingent at #10, China’s chief banker Zhou Xiaochuan was tied with his European and American counterparts, Jean-Claude Trichet and Ben Bernanke.

People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, whose country owns a whopping $1.14 trillion in U.S. debt, has been forced to cope with the unpleasant fact that China’s entanglement with U.S. and European markets makes it dependent on the health of Western economies. To that end, he has pursued a course of letting the yuan gradually appreciate, in a bid to slowly build up domestic consumption and decrease China’s reliance on foreign markets.

Following his victory in ArtReview’s parade of “the dancers who’ve spent the past 12 months gyrating around contemporary art’s greasy pole of power”, Ai Weiwei reached a more modest #18 in the Foreign Policy list, “for standing up to the Chinese Communist Party — even after it threw him in jail”:

Throwing Ai in jail put a famous face on a worrying trend: Since this spring, the number of human rights activists, lawyers, artists, and other dissidents vanishing into government custody without explanation has quietly but sharply spiked in China. Now Ai has taken up their cause, railing against this state of affairs — in open violation of the terms of his release. “[T]here are many hidden spots where they put people without identity,” he wrote in a searing Newsweek essay. “With no name, just a number.… Only your family is crying out that you’re missing.”

Accompanying his entry is a set of photos taken in Ai’s studio during a visit by Foreign Policy contributing editor Christina Larson earlier this year. Ai is also currently ranked at #12 in TIME’s Person of the Year poll, a comfortable ten places and 5,607 votes ahead of Kim Kardashian.

Immediately behind the artist at #19 in the Foreign Policy list are Yu Keping and He Weifang, nominated for their contrasting approaches to political change in China:

One surprising advocate from inside the system is Yu Keping, a bureaucrat and head of the government-advising China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics, whom the New York Times has described as a “mild-mannered policy wonk” and a proponent of slow but steady change. His straightforwardly titled essay, “Democracy Is a Good Thing,” insists that China can transition into a democracy that works for the Chinese. In a China Daily op-ed this summer titled “Reform Must Be Incremental,” Yu wrote that though the go-slow approach has been on balance good for China, “The country still lacks a mechanism to counter the selfish behavior of the bureaucracy, corruption is still rampant and public service rendered by the government is far from enough.”

He Weifang, meanwhile, is an outspoken critic of the Chinese legal system who was sent to internal exile in Xinjiang for signing the Charter 08 manifesto against the government in 2008 and then was told last year that he couldn’t leave the country. For He, a Peking University law professor and longtime writer on judicial abuses who says he sees China growing more repressive over time, reform cannot come fast enough. And if the Communist Party doesn’t adapt, he has warned, “then that process of transformation will not occur peacefully, and if the extreme violence comes, then there will be no Communist Party. It is a case of adapt or die.” So will it be Yu’s way or He’s?

Aside from the Chinese nationals, the list included “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua, a second-generation Chinese-American, who came in at #35. Economist Arvind Subramanian, known for arguing that China’s rise is both further advanced and greater in scale than most suspect, was #97.

Among the questions submitted to nominees was simply “America or China?” China fared poorly, with only six unqualified picks (from Nouriel Roubini, Sherry Rehman, Andrew Sullivan, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Pervez Hoodbhoy) to America’s thirty. 29 respondents declined to choose one or the other, opting for “both” or “neither”, or giving some other indirect answer. Among these, Human Rights Watch’s Kenneth Roth (#69) replied that:

China’s model of repressive development is enormously attractive to authoritarian regimes around the world. The United States (and other friends of human rights) must do a better job of making the case for accountable government as the best way to improve the lot of the most needy, impoverished segments of society.

Oxford Economist Paul Collier (#56) picked China with the disclaimer “rocky not rocket,” while controversial environmental researcher Bjorn Lomborg (#76) answered “America for what the future should be, China for what the future will be.”

Read more on Zhou Xiaochuan, Ai Weiwei, Yu Keping, He Weifang, Amy Chua and Arvind Subramanian via CDT.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Amy Chua, Charter 08, China's rise, He Weifang, United States, Yu Keping, zhou xiaochuan
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Liu Xiaobo, whose name means “morning wave,” is known to his friends as Xiaobo or Liubo. He recently got a nickname as “Wavy” on the Internet thanks to the censors, as his name was blocked and people had to come up with something new. After his arrest, since “Charter 08” sounds like “county chief” in Chinese, people often refer to him as “Chief Liu.” When we happen to talk about his wife Liu Xia over a meal, then, we are more likely than not to call her “Madame Chief.” Nothing beats the name a used-books website conferred on him. The author listed under his titles, including The Fog of Metaphysics and Aesthetics and Human Freedom, is none other than “Big Stutter,” a reference to Xiaobo’s well-known speech defect. Incidentally, copies of Metaphysics from 1988 have gone from 50 cents to $20, while Aesthetics has shot up to $120. It’s rather amusing how demand for his work is growing, “so that paper becomes dear in the capital,” as the ancients would say.

Liu Xiaobo is a good man. And a good friend.

The first time I found out about Liu Xiaobo was in September 1986. The Literature Research Institute at the Academy of Social Sciences held a seminar on “Reform Decade’s Literature,” and my classmate at the Film Institute, Yu Ji, was invited. When he came home that night, he re-broadcast the lively if somewhat chaotic event, mimicking Liu Xiaobo’s Northeast accent with a slight stammer: “Contemp-porary Chinese lit-terature is only a shoddy imi-ta-tation of our classical literature.” After this talk, Liu became known as a “Black Stallion” in the literary circle, as his fame was both sudden and impressive, and could be chalked up in part to a rebellious streak. It was a time swept along by sudden turbulence, and “perceptive subjectivity” was much encouraged, as a tentative answer to Marxist dogma. The passion of Liu’s critique, and his daring candor, impressed us, and one critic gave him credit for his “tenacity of viewpoint and anxious sincerity.” Liu became friends with many known figures in cultural circles.

I attended his lectures at Beijing Normal University several times when we still did not know each other. He was a very effective lecturer. Even though the course was on literary theory, he always started out by copying some classical poetry on the blackboard and savoring it with his students. His writing and thought were rather popular during the 1980′s. A friend told me that when film director Zhang Yimou was shooting his “Red Sorghum,” the entire core team pored over Liu’s Critique of Choices in between scenes. In retrospect, it was a time which belonged properly to the last century.

My next sighting of him was on television, when he had already become, according to authorities, “the black hand behind the chaos” during the protests of 1989. Soon after, many famous people decided they had to help him, even if they had to fight their way to it. Others, equally famous, thought it no longer entirely convenient to keep such company. It is a “sensitive” matter to be friends with Liu Xiaobo in China. Much later, when I picked him up for a meal or for getting out of the city, he would often tell me, “today we’ll have a car following us.”

I can’t recall exactly when I became friends with Liu Xiaobo. It may have been in the mid-90′s during one of the periods when he was out of prison. He was planning to edit a collection of interviews of cultural figures, and wanted me to contribute and maybe to help put it together. Liu’s writing really gets to me. He has his finger on the pulse whether it be cinema, literature, or philosophy, and he never misses out on the pleasure of each text. Later on, when I brought up “The Pornographic Imagination” of Susan Sontag with him, we both felt that she was on to something. We both prime ourselves to be alert to the texture, structure and intertextuality in literary works, and to focus on taking pleasure in them. He has a solid foundation in Chinese and foreign literature and philosophy, and always adds his own particular views to his mastery of the subject. Xiaobo is always upfront about his own confusion and fear. Once, he described his arrest after June Fourth. He was walking on the street, when a car pulled up, several men jumped him, and shoved him in. He told me that his knees were shaking the entire time.

Even later, he wrote better and better. With all his erudition and intellectual training, he never veered from what is sensible, right and human, and always told things as they actually were. This honesty is to become a clear hallmark of his political and social commentary. Rather strangely, he, like his writing, became more mild, supple, and sturdy over time. He stayed in place despite the jolting of outside events. At the same time, he kept his warmth, precision, and edge. I can count very few among my acquaintances who have gone through such a radical personality change. When his friends talked over this change amongst ourselves, we all agreed that this was thanks to his wife’s influence. Liu Xia is by nature calm and steady. In the middle of the 90′s, in order to guarantee jail visits to Xiaobo, Liu Xia insisted on marrying him there, and succeeded in getting the government to agree.

We have our complaints about her, though. She often turned down our invites for some chow time together, or to top off a mountain hike to Changping with grilled fish, preferring to paint oils or shoot photos by herself off somewhere. The colors of her oils feel good. Her rather simple palette tends toward more neutral colors, holding back a bit, while her design favors breaking with the rules. After Xiaobo’s arrest and the award of the Nobel prize, all photos of him used in the major media were taken by his wife. That must be a record of some sort. In 2006, en route to planning a film festival in Brazil, I asked Xiaobo what I could bring him. All he wanted was a few ugly dolls; Liu Xia could use them in her photos. I brought back several comely rag dolls. Xiaobo said that I was off and they were not nearly ugly enough. It was only when I saw Liu Xia’s photo ensemble of dolls that it dawned on me she has what it takes to take on ugliness. Liu Xia likes wine, while I happen to be allergic to alcohol. Whatever wine friends bring me almost all end up at the Lius’.

As I write this, I find myself suddenly splashing into stream-of-consciousness. One time, while driving to the mountains in Changping County to have grilled fish, we realized that the maximum-security prison Qincheng was only two kilometers away. We drove there and parked out front. Since Xiaobo and Liu Di had both been kept there, they went over its interior setup and the rules. After Xiaobo’s arrest for Charter 08 work, friends cooked up a lame joke about our organizing a house-flipping tour that day to keep Xiaobo company while he viewed the real estate. The fact is, Xiaobo never stayed there during this arrest.

Four or five days before Xiaobo’s arrest we had dinner together, and he showed the rest of us the Charter. I raised a few issues over wording, and he made some minor changes with a few casual pen strokes. Then I signed my name, quite deliberately, in black marker. That day, all of us at the table thought this was a most rational and constructive text, and did not have the slightest inkling that this was something dangerous enough to send him to a dark prison cell for eleven years.

I remember this day well. On December 10, 2008, I got the news that Xiaobo was arrested. I called Liu Xia. I had no words to comfort her with. My colleague Cui Weiping called to ask my opinion of the sentence Xiaobo received. My response: “I am his most abject groupie when it comes to his writing. I am in complete agreement with the Charter, and wouldn’t so much as nudge one word out of place. It would seem that he himself did not expect to go to prison for the sake of the Charter. I also did not expect that his trial should have become a powerful way to de-sensitize certain issues, with many people speaking up against the government’s cruelty and folly.” Not unlike those midnight calls from the Dark Side in certain supernatural thrillers, Cui’s on-the-record calls struck terror into many a heart during this time. Many cultural figures left the imprint of their voices on history.

What was even less expected was how the peace-loving international community did come through with some support for Chinese people’s fight for freedom, some praise for the spirit of peace and reason. On October 8, 2010, I was unfit for writing anything, and spent the entire time listening to Beethoven’s Egmont, Coriolan, and Leanore, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. The wait wore into the afternoon. Finally, at five, the countdown timer on the Nobel official site clicked to zero. Never, until I heard the Nobel Committee Chairman mispronounce “Liu Xiaobo,” did I understand what it means to cry from happiness. I wailed long in my song, in the tradition of our Chinese lyrical forerunners. Twenty-one years have passed since the Tiananmen massacre. This is the first time I, finally, can cry. Chinese social media went off all afternoon. That night, after certain commands silenced the China-based microblogs, Twitter carried on. Many grown men came clean about their shameless breakdown. The best Tweet with the biggest bang I saw: “Black Hand Liu – could it be you finally got what you deserve!”

Liu Xia’s phone line has not worked since. We had agreed I would drive her to Jinzhou, in a Northern province, to visit Xiaobo. It was scheduled for today, and I had bought three cartons of two brands of eight-treasure rice pudding, figuring this way we’ll know which brand he likes better next time. Someone reported on the Internet that Liu Xia left in a government vehicle yesterday, so at this moment Xiaobo should have already had his belated consolation. The three cartons of rice pudding are still sitting in the trunk of my car. I don’t know when I can hand them over to Liu Xia, and even less when I can get to see Xiaobo. I would really like to give him a hug.

As I am ending this piece, I poked my head in on Twitter again, and saw that Liu Xia just met Xiaobo, today, on October 10, and Xiaobo already heard about his prize from prison authorities yesterday. During Liu Xia’s visit, they talked about the Tiananmen Mothers and those who lost their lives, and Xiaobo wept. He said that this Nobel belongs to the dead of June Fourth.

In Sternstunden der Menschheit: Twelve Historical Miniatures, Stefan Zweig wrote about how certain fleeting moments turned the tide of history, such as when General Grouchy decided to have his troops hunker down rather than go to Waterloo, or the split second Handel saw the script of “Messiah.” The impact of Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize on Chinese history is, for now, unclear to me. I can clearly feel, however, that the Nobel can be counted as a watershed event in the fight of the Chinese people for guarantees of their liberty under a constitutional democracy. The same echoes resound throughout Liu Xiaobo’s “I Have No Enemies” statement during his trial, what the Nobel Committee did, and the universal values Premier Wen Jiabao mentions in his speeches. They have not died out.

In the last few days, I have entertained a bit of an extravagant hope. I hope that the government would undertake a sincere self-examination and to recognize the importance of universal values, that the political reforms visualized by Premier Wen can be launched now, and that during this process the moderate and reasonable recommendations of the Charter can be drawn upon. How I wish the National People’s Congress can confront the political appeals of civil society, realize the promises Premier Wen made to his people, bring about social reconciliation, and with the hands of master craftsmen put together a common and prosperous blueprint for the Chinese people’s future, integrating us securely into the great family of the world community.

Liu Xiaobo is crying out to us from behind bars, and civilized societies are waving the olive branch at us from Norwegian Wood. Is the answer to be yes or no? Let us get back to them.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, Liu Xiaobo
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On Dec. 10, for the first time since 1936, when Nazi Germany prevented Carl von Ossietzky from traveling to Norway to receive his Nobel Peace Prize, neither the laureate nor any of his family members will be able to attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo.

Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, is serving an 11-year sentence in a prison in northeastern China, after being convicted one year ago of “inciting subversion to state power.” His wife, Liu Xia, is forcibly confined at home in Beijing by the police, and prevented from talking publicly under threat of losing her right to visit Liu. All the principal signatories and co-drafters of Charter 08 – the manifesto calling for bottom-up political reforms that prompted Liu’s arrest in December 2008 — are under tight police surveillance, prevented from assembling, giving interviews to the media, or traveling abroad.

In selecting Liu in the face of pressure from Beijing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has laid bare the Chinese government’s overt hostility to human rights norms, at home and abroad. Since the prize was awarded in early October, the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a sweeping crackdown on dissidents. Scores of Chinese citizens have been detained, placed under house arrested, or prevented from travelling to the ceremony in Oslo. But the prize and the ensuing clampdown may turn out to have profound consequences for how the world views China, and China’s own ability to pursue its foreign-policy objectives.

The Global Times issued another editorial blasting the prize. From Reuters:

The Nobel Committee said on Thursday human rights were basic “universal values” but Communist Party ideologists consider the phrase to be code words for Western liberal values.

“Today in Norway’s Oslo, there will be a farce staged: ‘The Trial of China’,” popular tabloid the Global Times, which is run by Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, said in an editorial.

“Recently Western public opinion has not stopped cheering for the Nobel Committee, they are attempting to describe China’s ‘loss of face’ and ‘embarrassment’,” it said. “No matter how strong the West’s opinion, its slap will not be that strong, it will not be able to hoodwink the public.”

And the Washington Post looks at Liu’s comments and articles that are now being used against him by government propagandists:

Debate over whether China can find its own uniquely Chinese path to economic and political modernization or take the road pioneered by the West has raged since the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in 1911. Liu, a literary critic and essayist, stands firmly at the pro-Western end of the spectrum, a position that has put him sharply at odds with China’s prevailing orthodoxy.

Over the last 30 years, the Communist Party has steadily cut its roots in Marxist dogma imported from the West and put Chinese nationalism at the center of its governing ideology.

“This is the best card they’ve got and they play it to the maximum,” said Bao Pu, a Hong Kong-based publisher whose father, a former senior Communist Party official in Beijing, was jailed in 1989 for supporting pro-democracy student protesters. Bao described efforts to paint Liu as a traitor “as ridiculous” and has just published a collection of the dissident’s writings to present a more complete picture of his views. But, Bao said, branding critics of the ruling party as unpatriotic “can be very effective.”

See also:
- Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize by James Fallows in the Atlantic
- For China’s Absent Nobel Winner, A Lasting Reward from NPR
- All of CDT’s coverage of Liu Xiaobo over the past six years
- Video from Al Jazeera:

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As we write, Liu remains cloistered in a remote prison in northeast China. This fourth prison sentence of 11 years came after he co-authored Charter 08, a document calling on the Chinese government to institute democratic reforms and guarantee the freedoms of assembly, religion and expression. Though Charter 08 was modeled after Czechoslovakia’s Charter ’77, the fundamental values it invokes are no more Western than they are Chinese.

We nominated Liu for the Nobel Peace Prize this year because of the universality of his call for fundamental freedoms for his people.

At its core, Charter 08 asks the Chinese government to honor rights enshrined in the Chinese Constitution. The government has already signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and ratified the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights. In a recent interview with CNN, premier Wen Jiabao acknowledged that “Freedom of speech is indispensable. . . . The people’s wishes for, and needs for, democracy and freedom are irresistible.”

This need not be a moment of shame or insult for China. This should be a moment of pride, celebrating the fact that one of China’s own is recognized as the world’s greatest contributor to that which all nations seek: peace. It is an affirmation of one of humankind’s oldest living languages that Liu’s words in Charter 08, Chinese words, could inspire such admiration. It is a testament to the strength and courage of the Chinese people that Liu’s actions have earned such widespread respect.

Read more about Charter 08 and Liu Xiaobo via CDT.

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The text of Charter 08, the document which more than anything else sealed Liu Xiaobo’s fate and led to his harsh 11-year sentence on Christmas Day 2009, is explicit in its appeal to universal values:

‘The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.’

Attacks on Liu Xiaobo will inevitably link his ‘wholesale Westernisation’ with the universal values to which the Charter 08 document subscribes. His insistence that universal values really be universal — that the West itself be subject to its own culture of critical enquiry —will be swept aside. But there is a fatal weakness in the critique of universal values in China today. Something has to be offered in their place such as ‘Chinese values.’ So far nothing but ‘motherhood’ concepts like ‘harmonious society’ and ‘peaceful rise’ have been put forward. Social order, based at its core on a pervasive police state, and unquestionable authority protecting the interests of an opaque power elite are values that dare not state their real names. In any genuine debate they must fall before the universal values of Charter 08. If there is anything of value in them — say traditional Confucian ideas of meritocracy — these will survive genuine debate and become special applications of universal values. Meritocracy that arbitrarily arrests and imprisons will be thrown in the trash-can of history.

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Despite Liu’s imprisonment, his ideas cannot be shackled. Charter 08 has articulated an alternative vision of China, challenging the official line that any decisions on reforms are the exclusive province of the state. It has encouraged younger Chinese to become politically active, and boldly made the case for the rule of law and constitutional multiparty democracy. And it has served as a jumping-off point for a series of conversations and essays on how to get there.

Perhaps most important, as in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, Charter 08 has forged connections among different groups that did not exist before. Before Charter 08, “we had to live in a certain kind of separate and solitary state,” one signatory wrote. “We were not good at expressing our own personal experiences to those around us.”

Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08 are changing that, for the better.

Of course, Charter 08 addresses a political milieu very different from 1970s Czechoslovakia. In its quest for economic growth, China has seemed to embrace some features far removed from traditional Communism. Especially for young, urban, educated white-collar workers, China can seem like a post-Communist country. And yet, China’s Communist Party still has lines that cannot be crossed. In spearheading the creation of Charter 08, Liu Xiaobo crossed the starkest line of all: Do not challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power, and do not suggest that China’s problems — including widespread corruption, labor unrest, and rampant environmental degradation — might be connected to the lack of progress on political reform.

For making that very connection in an all too public way, Liu got more than a decade in prison.

Read more about Liu Xiaobo via CDT.

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Charter 08 represents a significant step forward and provides a remedy for the limits of the 1989 democracy movement. Despite harsh suppression of democracy and liberal ideas by the Chinese party-state, and partly due to this suppression, liberalism and the quest for human rights have been on the rise and achieved a level of sophistication in China since the late 1990s. Charter 08 can be seen as an embodiment and synthesis of theoretical and intellectual achievements by Chinese liberal intellectuals over a decade.

The first achievement is the open embrace of constitutional democracy in rejection of one-party dictatorship, including the illusion of “socialist democracy” or “proletarian democracy”. For those who are critical of the practice of constitutional democracy or liberal democracy in the West, the universal values, liberal concepts and democratic recommendation summarized in Charter 08 are nothing but common sense.

However, as argued by the signatories of Charter 08, one-party dictatorship is the root of social ills and inequality in China, whereas constitutional democracy or liberal democracy, less than perfect as it is, forms the basic institutional framework that is the prerequisite for other improvements, including deliberative democracy, social justice and economic equality. This is a lesson that has been paid for in the blood of millions living under state socialism.

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Liu’s lawyer, Shang Baojun, told reporters his client’s appeal to the High Court had been rejected with no change in his sentence, which was meted out in December by the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court.

Liu, 54, was convicted of subversion for helping organize the “Charter 08″ manifesto, which called for sweeping political reforms. He was detained shortly before it was released online in December 2008, and tried a year later.

…Diplomats from the United States and the European Union spoke to reporters outside the Beijing High Court and condemned the sentence.

It is the second sentencing this week of a Chinese dissident. A Chinese activist who sought to document shoddy construction that contributed to deaths in China’s devastating 2008 earthquake was sentenced to five years in prison for subversion, his lawyer said on Tuesday.

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Liu Xiaobo, I have no enemies: my final statement*

June 1989 was the major turning point in my 50 years on life’s road. Before that, I was a member of the first group of students after restoration of the college entrance examination after the Cultural Revolution (1977); my career was s smooth ride from undergraduate to grad student through to PhD. After graduation I stayed on as a lecturer at Beijing Normal University. On the podium, I was a popular teacher, well received by students. I was at the same time a public intellectual. In the 1980s I published articles and books that created an impact, was frequently invited to speak in various places, and was invited to go abroad to Europe and the US as a visiting scholar. What I required of myself was: both as a person and in my writing, I had to live with honesty, responsibility and dignity. Subsequently, because I had returned from the US to take part in the 1989 movement, I was imprisoned for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement to crime”, loding the platform which was my passion; I was never again allowed publish or speak in public in China. Simply for expressing divergent political views and taking part in a peaceful and democratic movement, a teacher loses his podium, a writer loses the right to publish, and a public intellectual loses the chance to speak publicly, which is a sad thing, both for myself as an individual, and for China after three decades of reform and opening up.

Thinking about it, my most dramatic experiences after June Fourth have all linked with courts; the two opportunities I had to speak in public have been provided by trials held in the People’s Intermediate Court in Beijing, one in January 1991 and one now. Although the charges on each occasion were different, they were in essence the same, both being crimes of expression.

Twenty years on, the innocent souls of June Fourth do not yet rest in peace, and I, who had been drawn into the path of dissidence by the passions of June Fourth, after leaving the Qincheng Prison in 1991, lost in the right to speak openly in my own country, and could only do so through overseas media, and hence was monitored for many years; placed under surveillance (May 1995- January 1996); educated through labour (October 1996 – October 1999s), and now once again am thrust into the dock by enemies in the regime. But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed twenty years ago in my “June Second hunger strike declaration”— I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who have monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities, including Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing who act for the prosecution at present. I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December.

For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

As we all know, reform and opening up brought about development of the state and change in society. In my view, it began with abandoning “taking class struggle as the key link,” which had been the ruling principle of the Mao era. We committed ourselves instead to economic development and social harmony. The process of abandoning the “philosophy of struggle” was one of gradually diluting the mentality of enmity, eliminating the psychology of hatred, and pressing out the “wolf’s milk” in which our humanity had been steeped. It was this process that provided a relaxed environment for the reform and opening up at home and abroad, for the restoration of mutual love between people, and soft humane soil for the peaceful coexistence of different values and different interests, and thus provided the explosion of popular creativity and the rehabilitation of warmheartedness with incentives consistent with human nature. Externally abandoning “anti-imperialism and anti-revisionism”, and internally, abandoning “class struggle” may be called the basic premise of the continuance of China’s reform and opening up to this day. The market orientation of the economy; the cultural trend toward diversity; and the gradual change of order to the rule of law, all benefited from the dilution of this mentality of enmity. Even in the political field, where progress is slowest, dilution of the mentality of enmity also made political power ever more tolerant of diversity in society, the intensity persecution of dissidents has declined substantially, and characterization of the 1989 movement has changed from an “instigated rebellion” to a “political upheaval.”

The dilution of the mentality of enmity made the political power gradually accept the universality of human rights. In 1998, the Chinese government promised the world it would sign the the two international human rights conventions of the UN, marking China’s recognition of universal human rights standards; in 2004, the National People’s Congress for the first time inscribed into the constitution that “the state respects and safeguards human rights”, signaling that human rights had become one of the fundamental principles of the rule of law. In the meantime, the present regime also proposed “putting people first” and “creating a harmonious society”, which signalled progress in the Party’s concept of rule.

This macro-level progress was discernible as well in my own experiences since being arrested.

While I insist on my innocence, and that the accusations against me are unconstitutional, in the year and more since I lost my freedom, I’ve experienced two places of detention, four pre-trial police officers, three prosecutors and two judges. In their handling of the case, there has been no lack of respect, no time overruns and no forced confessions. Their calm and rational attitude has over and again demonstrated goodwill. I was transferred on 23 June from the residential surveillance to Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau Detention Center No. 1, known as “Beikan.” I saw progress in surveillance in the six months I spent there.

I spent time in the old Beikan (Banbuqiao) in 1996, and compared with the Beikan of a decade ago, there has been great improvement in the hardware of facilities and software of management.

In particular, Beikan’s innovative humane management based on respecting the rights and dignity of detainees, implementing more flexible management of the will be flexible to the detainees words and deeds, embodied in the Warm broadcast and Repentance, the music played before meals, and when waking up and going to sleep, gave detainees feelings of dignity and warmth, stimulating their consciousness of keeping order in their cells and opposing the warders sense of themselves as lords of the jail, detainees, providing not only a humanized living environment, but greatly improved the detainees’ environment and mindset for litigation, I had close contact with Liu Zhen, in charge of my cell. People feel warmed by his respect and care for detainees, reflected in the management of every detail, and permeating his every word and deed. Getting to know the sincere, honest, responsible, good-hearted Liu Zhen really was a piece of good luck for me in Beikan.

Political beliefs are based on such convictions and personal experiences; I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom. China will eventually become a country of the rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict ——one that can stand the test of history.

Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife, Liu Xia. She cannot be present in the courtroom today, but I still want to tell you, sweetheart, that I’m confident that your love for me will be as always. Over the years, in my non-free life, our love has contained bitterness imposed by the external environment, but is boundless in afterthought. I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one. Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my every cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning. But my love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough hobble my steps. I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes.

Given your love, sweetheart, I would face my forthcoming trial calmly, with no regrets about my choice and looking forward to tomorrow optimistically. I look forward to my country being a land of free expression, where all citizens’ speeches are treated the same; here, different values, ideas, beliefs, political views… both compete with each other and coexist peacefully; here, majority and minority opinions will be given equal guarantees, in particular, political views different from those in power will be fully respected and protected; here, all political views will be spread in the sunlight for the people to choose; all citizens will be able to express their political views without fear, and will never be politically persecuted for voicing dissent; I hope to be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisition, and that after this no one else will ever be jailed for their speech.

Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth.

I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints. Thank you!

Liu Xiaobo (December 23, 2009)

Read more about Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08 via CDT.

Image source: Amnesty International – Hong Kong.

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