China Digital Times

China news tagged with: dissidents (70)

• Where is China Heading?

  

  The Guardian produced a video report on Charter 08 and Liu Xiaobo:

  Writer Liu Xiaobo remains in detention five months after helping to write Charter 08 – a call for freedom of expression and other human rights in China

  See more of the Guardian’s China reporting this week at China at the Crossroads.

  » Read more
  • May 20, 2009 10:23 PM

• Isabel Hilton: Tiananmen: The Flame Burns On

  

  For the Guardian, Isabel Hilton interviews exiled leaders of the 1989 student movement, including Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, and Wang Chaohua, about their experiences then and in the intervening twenty years. From her introduction:

  Last week I listened to a man in his 40s unburden himself of a secret he had carried for two decades. He was a student leader in a major provincial city, and although he was arrested in mid-June 1989, he was released after a month of enforced confessions. He moved to another city and eventually made a successful career. But for 20 years the burden of the hopes that were shattered on 4 June, and the apprehension that he could be targeted at any time by a regime that never forgets and rarely forgives, has weighed on his spirit. It is part fear, part depression, part rage.

  Some are still in prison. Others, in mourning, are still harassed. A few campaign openly for a reversal of the Communist Party’s verdict that the movement was the work of “a small clique of counter-revolutionaries” who wanted to overthrow the party and the socialist system. Behind the few high-profile campaigners and dissidents is the much larger throng of those who still nurse memories too painful to discuss.

  It’s been two decades since that lone protester defied a column of tanks on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, before vanishing, never to be identified. Since that time, China has prospered economically. The party has embraced the market and traded the socialist system it claimed to defend for the pleasures of getting rich. Younger generations are vague about a movement that still cannot be publicly discussed or documented. But the suppression at Tiananmen continues to exact a high price: the constant falsification of history, a political system frozen by the fear of the people’s judgment, and a leadership that sees the ghosts of Tiananmen wherever voices call for political reform.

  » Read more
  • May 3, 2009 4:46 PM

• Tiananmen Anniversary: Memory of Executed Poet Resonates

  

  Robert Marquand, former Beijing correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, writes about executed poet Lin Zhao and Charter 08. Read more about Lin Zhao in Philip Pan’s book “Out of Mao’s Shadow.” From the CSM report:

  It was hard not to think of poet Lin Zhao when I heard about Charter 08 in China. The charter is a sweeping petition for democracy, civil reform, and to “end the practice of viewing words as crimes.”

  It was signed by 2,000 brave and quixotic Chinese in December – and then seemed to be quashed. But no: It is gaining traction on the Internet; even some Chinese officials have raised the question of democracy and the party’s absolute hold on power.

  Lin Zhao asked the same question – in the time of Mao Zedong. I discovered Ms. Lin – an extraordinary individual by any reckoning – in my last months as a Monitor correspondent in Beijing. She was a prophetic voice, a thinker, a Vaclav Havel of China who believed deeply in the reality of what she called “truth.”

  She was executed in 1968 at the age of 36, probably by the order of Mao. She remains virtually unknown in her country.

  » Read more
  • May 1, 2009 2:29 PM

• China to Begin Security Crackdown

  

  Aileen McCabe reports in the Vancouver Sun:

  China will begin a five-month security crackdown later this week in preparation for the nation’s 60th anniversary celebration on Oct.1.

  According to public security vice-minister Zhang Xinfeng, the goal is to provide “a harmonious environment” for the nationwide celebrations.

  The official Xinhua news agency said Zhang underlined that “the campaign will highlight the eradication and prevention of crimes to maintain social order.”

  It is a move reminiscent of the ramped-up security ahead of last summer’s Beijing Olympic Games in which hundreds of “dissidents” were detained and such tight visa restrictions enforced that hotels in Beijing, which expected to reap windfall profits from increased tourism, found they had rooms going begging.

  Although the Beijing government has been focusing on its 60th anniversary plans for many months, it is likely not coincidental that the escalated security measures are being put in place one month before the 10th anniversary of the deadly Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations, a date China is definitely not celebrating.

  » Read more
  • April 29, 2009 9:31 AM

• Liu Xiaobo: The Internet is God’s Present to China

  

  Imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo is set to receive the prestigious 2009 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award. From The Times:

  Kwame Anthony Appiah, president of the PEN American Centre, said: “The liberties that allow all of us to make meaningful lives have always depended, alas, on those who are willing, like Liu Xiaobo, to put their own freedom at risk. His consistent self-sacrifice for the cause of democracy in China should inspire all freedom’s friends around the world. I am filled with admiration – indeed, with awe – each time I read about the extraordinary things he has done.”

  Mr Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, told The Times: “I miss him. I just want him to come home.”

  Liu wrote an op-ed in The Times today about the powerful influence the Internet has had on his life and on China:

  With the censorship here, my essays can only be published overseas. Before using the computer, my handwritten essays were difficult to correct and the cost of sending them was high. To avoid the articles being intercepted, I often went from the west side of the city to the east side where I had a foreign friend who owned a fax machine.

  The internet has made it easier to obtain information, contact the outside world and submit articles to overseas media. It is like a super-engine that makes my writing spring out of a well. The internet is an information channel that the Chinese dictators cannot fully censor, allowing people to speak and communicate, and it offers a platform for spontaneous organisation.

  » Read more
  • April 28, 2009 11:26 AM

• China Rights Activist Beaten at Cemetery

  

  The New York Times reports on the beating suffered by Sun Wenguang, a 75-year-old retired university professor in Shandong, when he went to a cemetery to pay his respects to Zhao Ziyang on Qing Ming day:

  As he entered the cemetery in Jinan, a city about 230 miles south of Beijing, Mr. Sun said, four or five men attacked him and beat him severely. He is now in a Jinan hospital with three broken ribs and injuries to his spine, head, back, arms and legs, according to China Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong-based human rights group. The group said the attack on Mr. Sun was part of a concerted effort by the Chinese government to head off any efforts to memorialize the deaths of hundreds of Tiananmen Square protestors on June 4, the 20th anniversary of the government’s crackdown.

  “Chinese authorities are staging a campaign of terror to intimidate and suppress expressions of commemoration for the 1989 Tiananmen massacre,” the group said in a statement. The attack on Mr. Sun “is part of the overall campaign,” it said.

  Public security officials in Jinan referred calls about the incident to the propaganda office of the city’s Communist Party. No one answered phone calls to that office last night.

  Mr. Sun said he had previously visited the cemetery to honor Mr. Zhao’s death on Qingming Day without serious incident. But this year, he said, announced his forthcoming visit in an Internet posting.

  » Read more
  • April 7, 2009 10:30 AM

• Two Chinese Dissidents Freed After Years in Prison

  

  Yang Zili and Zhang Honghai, two writers who were imprisoned on charges of subversion, have been released after spending eight years in detention. From the New York Times:

  “I still don’t understand why were punished so severely,” said Mr. Yang in an interview on Friday, shortly after his release from Beijing’s No. 2 Prison “We never broke any laws. I have no regrets.”

  An Internet entrepreneur with a masters in mechanics, Mr. Yang, 37, gained his freedom on the same day as his friend, Zhang Honghai, 36, a freelance writer who was also a member of the New Youth Society, a study group that sought to tackle such topics as government corruption, democracy and the unrelenting poverty of rural China. The group rarely drew more than four or five participants and met sporadically during the course of a few months before its membership was detained.

  The remaining two defendants, Xu Wei and Jin Haike, are scheduled to be released in 2010. Li Yizhou, a group member who informed against his friends, later fled to Thailand and tried to help them by submitting letters to the court saying his reports to security officials were exaggerated or outright lies.

  The letters were rejected.

  Read more about their arrest, via the Committee to Protect Journalists.

  » Read more
  • March 13, 2009 12:06 PM

• Chinese Dissident Lawyer’s Family Defects

  

  From Radio Free Asia:

  The wife and children of a top civil rights lawyer under close surveillance by the Chinese authorities have arrived in the United States after walking across the border to Thailand, Gao Zhisheng’s wife Geng He said.

  Geng said her daughter, 15, and son, 5, had suffered “great hardship” in China from living under virtual house arrest in their Beijing home.

  “I left China because my family had been under tight surveillance for a long time. We experienced—in our careers and daily life—great hardship and difficulty,” Geng told RFA’s Mandarin service in her first interview since arriving in the United States on March 11 to seek asylum.

  “My daughter was unable to attend school. Because she was unable to attend school, she tried to commit suicide several times,” Geng said. “I had no place to turn. So I fled with my children.”

  See also this Associated Press report for more.

  » Read more
  • March 13, 2009 10:05 AM

• Dissidents Denied Family Visits

  

  From RFA:

  Political prisoners across China are being denied family visits over the traditional Lunar New Year holiday period, their relatives and close friends said.

  The daughter of Wuhan dissident Qin Yongmin, who is serving a 12-year jail term for subversion, said she had been hoping to visit her father for the first time in 11 years, but when she arrived at Wuhan Prison she was refused permission to visit.

  “I had everything prepared. It didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t be let in,” A Dan said. “They just said it, just like that.”

  “I’m very disappointed. I had hoped to spend Lunar New Year with my father.”

  A Dan said she had only received one letter from Qin, who was sentenced to prison in 1998, when she was just eight years old.

  “It was numbered, so I could see that there were more than 20 letters which he wrote before it,” she said.

  Read also Blind Activist Seeks Medical Parole from RFA.

  » Read more
  • January 29, 2009 3:42 AM

• Chinese Dissident Bao Tong Speaks Out

  

  From Time:

  On Fuxing Road in western Beijing is a vast Soviet-style building that proudly houses old jets, tanks and ships — all memorials to the various military conflicts faced by the People’s Republic of China. But just around the corner, in a typical middle-class housing complex, is an unwelcome reminder of how the country manages its political conflicts.

  On the sixth floor of an apartment building there lives a veteran of the opaque, unforgiving world of Chinese statecraft. Bao Tong, 76, was a top aide and speechwriter for the secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s. Now he lives under virtual house arrest, his every move observed, every visitor screened by a handful of guards, every conversation presumably monitored. The Communist Party would clearly like him to fade into oblivion, to live out the rest of his days caring for his goldfish and taking walks in the park. But Bao Tong has no intention of going out quietly.

  Over the past month Bao has repeatedly questioned the authoritarian nature of China’s central government — in very public ways. He helped draft Charter 08, a lengthy pro-democracy online manifesto initially published in early December by 303 mainland writers, scholars and artists, a number that has since grown to several thousand. Soon after, he released a series of essays through Radio Free Asia that questioned the very motivations and accomplishments of the Party.

  Bao Tong says his decision to sign the landmark Charter comes from a long-held regret over joining the Communist Party as a young man. “Sixty years ago I wanted violence. In order to promote Leninism and communism, I joined this Party…I signed Charter 08 to correct my mistake of 60 years ago,” Bao said one recent afternoon in the Beijing apartment he shares with his wife. Bao’s face is visibly weary, but he sits with an erect posture, and his eyes flash as he discusses history and politics. “This is not about using violent means to change society,” he says. “It’s about using peaceful, rational means. Everything I do can be boiled down to one word: patriotism.”

  » Read more
  • January 27, 2009 6:34 AM

• Writers Call For China Dissident’s Release

  

  From Reuters:

  An international writers’ organization has called for the release of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, detained after he helped write a pro-democracy manifesto.

  Writers including Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Chinese novelist Ha Jin and Jung Chang, whose family autobiography “Wild Swans” was followed by a critical biography of Mao Zedong, were among the 300 who signed the call for Liu’s release, writers group International PEN said on Wednesday.

  Liu has been in detention since shortly before the December release of Charter 08, which was signed by 300 Chinese dissidents and intellectuals. It called for greater rights for Chinese, direct elections and political and fiscal reforms.

  » Read more
  • January 21, 2009 5:56 AM

• The Year of Living Dissidently

  

  The Economist looks at what is in store for China with a number of politically sensitive anniversaries approaching in 2009:

  As China’s economic growth falters and unemployment rises, political activists—marginalised during the past few years of prosperity—will become a bigger worry to the government. The 20th anniversary on June 4th of the quashing of the Tiananmen Square protests will be the highlight of the dissident calendar. For Tibetans it will be the 50th anniversary on March 10th of an uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile in India. Followers of Falun Gong, a quasi-Buddhist sect, will want to mark the tenth anniversary on July 22nd of its banning. Ever fearful of instability, the government will be especially anxious to quell dissent in the build-up to celebrations on October 1st of 60 years of Communist Party rule.

  Dissidents can take some pride in their first salvo of the season. Their petition, known as Charter 08, which they issued online in early December to mark the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was initially signed by 303 intellectuals. They included a wide range of lawyers, journalists, academics and activists. Organisers say that thousands more have added their names (by sending their details to an e-mail address), although the identities of many of them are difficult to verify.

  On a similar topic, read “The Year China Jumped the Gun” by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom in The Nation.

  » Read more
  • January 15, 2009 12:42 PM

• Beijing Strikes At Dissidents

  

  From The Observer:

  China has launched a tough countrywide crackdown on a new network of political activists, writers and lawyers who have supported a bold new manifesto that presses for the end of one-party rule.

  The group of 300 or so people had all signed Charter 08, which called for democracy and the rule of law in China and was named after the famous Charter 77 dissident group formed in cold war Czechoslovakia.

  Charter 08 has been hailed as the most significant act of public dissent against China’s Communist party since the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests were brutally crushed in 1989. It was posted online on 10 December, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It condemned recent economic modernisation efforts as having “stripped people of their rights”, and called for political reform and a new liberal, democratic constitution.

  » Read more
  • January 3, 2009 11:41 PM

• Chinese Activists’ Voice Supported By the White House

  

  Today I had the honor to be invited to a White House event with President George W. Bush to commemorate Human Rights Day on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More than anything else, the meeting itself showed that the voices of activists inside China are being heard and supported by the White House.

  

  President Bush met with me and seven other bloggers and new media users from Cuba, Belarus, Burma, Iran, Egypt (through video conference) and Venezuela (through video conference) in the Roosevelt Room at 2:50 pm, December 10, 2008. The meeting lasted for an hour. The President opened the meeting with remarks about U.S. government support for universal freedom and human rights all over the world. Then he said he wanted to hear from us. I had the chance to speak first, and I used this opportunity to talk about two specific and significant recent events in China. The first is the release of Charter 08, signed now by more than 500 Chinese citizens across the social spectrum, from prominent scholars to victims of rights abuses. I particularly mentioned the detention of one of the leading figures in this movement, Liu Xiaobo. The second issue I mentioned was the list of the “Twenty Most Influential Figures in China’s Cyberspace,” profiled in the reform-minded paper Southern Metropolis Weekly. Some names were prominent in both events, such as He Weifang and Yang Hengjun; in my view, this signifies the nascent convergence of different social forces — from voices within the system to human rights activists and bloggers — to promote democratic reform in China, facilitated by the Internet, under the common banner of a “Citizens’ Movement.”

  I appreciate that the U.S. government acknowledges and supports such freedom voices in China and around the world.

  » Read more
  • December 11, 2008 12:04 AM

• A New Call for Chinese Democracy

  

  On the eve of International Human Rights Day, the Chinese government has arrested prominent dissident writer Liu Xiaobo.

  Jane Macartney reports for the Times in Beijing:

  A leading dissident who organised a charter signed by hundreds of Chinese thinkers, academics and writers calling for dramatic political and legal reforms was under arrest yesterday.

  Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic first jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, was taken from his home in Beijing late on Monday by a dozen police officers and was asked to sign a document acknowledging his detention. They searched his flat and took away three computers, mobile phones and documents, friends told The Times.

  His arrest came hours before the release on the internet of the “Charter 08”, a rare, outspoken document challenging the ruling Communist Party to grant greater freedom of expression and to hold free elections. Its publication was timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights today.

  AFP reports that his wife told journalists that he was detained on Monday and is being held by Beijing Public Security:

  She said she was not told why her husband had been detained, but suspected it was related to Charter 08, which calls for democratic reform in China and has been signed by more than 300 Chinese people, including Liu Xiaobo.

  The charter has been published online and its signatories include intellectuals and human rights activists, according to press freedom advocates Reporters Without Borders.

  Liu’s wife said police had searched their house all night and seized their computer and mobile phones.

  Read the full text of Charter 08 (in Chinese) here.

  Update: Perry Link has translated the full text of Charter 08 into English and it is available on the New York Review of Books website and on the China Rights Defender website:

  A hundred years have passed since the writing of China’s first constitution. 2008 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of Democracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of China’s signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy student protesters. 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.

  By departing from these values, the Chinese government’s approach to “modernization” has proven disastrous. It has stripped people of their rights, destroyed their dignity, and corrupted normal human intercourse. So we ask: Where is China headed in the twenty-first century? Will it continue with “modernization” under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system? There can be no avoiding these questions.

  See also an article from the Telegraph comparing the Charter 08 to Charter 77, and reporting that several signatories have been detained:

  “After we handed over the Charter, I was detained by the police,” said Zhang Zuhua, a writer and political analyst. “Right now the police have searched my home. My computer and documents have all been taken away.

  “I am now being held at my home. I can’t go anywhere. I don’t know what will happen to me next. But I was told by the police that they are carrying out a formal investigation, so I think there will soon be further punishment.”

  Other signatories have been detained in Zhejiang province in central China, and Guizhou in the south.

  Here is Austin Ramzy’s report on the Time Magazine: A New Call for Chinese Democracy

  How the government reacts to the document — and the people who signed it — remains to be seen. Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent rights attorney in Beijing, says he signed the charter because he supports its emphasis on freedom and democracy. “Not only do I approve these ideas, I believe the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government have no reason not to approve them,” Pu says. “These are not bad ideologies; the charter does not advocate violence, nor does it aim to destroy the current social order.”

  More than 500 people joined Pu in signing the document. Bao Tong, a deputy to Communist Party secretary Zhao Ziyang who was purged from the government for his support of the 1989 pro-democracy protesters, is the most prominent former official on the list. It also includes activists such as Liu Xiaobo and Ding Zilin, who co-founded the Tiananmen Mothers group after her teenage son was killed in the 1989 crackdown. Several prominent lawyers and writers who are actively working and publishing also signed, giving “Charter 08″ more clout than it would carry if it was only the work of politically isolated dissidents. “It seems like a varied bunch and I think the Internet helped bring these people together,” says Joshua Rosenzweig, a Hong Kong-based official with the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group. “It’s not simply what many people call ‘dissidents.’ There are a number of well-known liberal intellectuals and lawyers.”

  The declaration was released during a period of sensitive anniversaries. It comes 60 years after the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Chinese scholar P.C. Chang helped draft, and 30 years after Deng Xiaoping launched the economic liberalization that would transform China into a capitalist powerhouse. It was also 30 years ago that activists in Beijing posted signs on a “Democracy Wall” calling for political reform, including electrician Wei Jingsheng’s declaration that Deng Xiaoping’s campaign for “Four Modernizations” in agriculture, defense, industry and technology was meaningless without a fifth modernization, democracy.

  » Read more
  • December 9, 2008 8:35 PM

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