China Digital Times

China news tagged with: Liu Xiaobo (73)

• Liu Xiaobo: I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement

  

  Writer Liu Xiaobo, one of the drafters of Charter 08, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on December 25, Christmas Day. On December 23, the day he was tried, Liu Xiaobo wrote a “final statement” which is being widely passed around online. CDT thanks David Kelly, Professor of China Studies, China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, for the translation (the original Chinese version can be found here):

  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.

  » Read more
  • February 8, 2010 7:26 PM

• Perry Link: What Beijing Fears Most

  

  On the New York Review of Books blog, Perry Link writes about the 11 year sentence handed down to Liu Xiaobo and the tenacity of the Charter 08 movement:

  Friends and supporters of Liu were generally startled at the length of the sentence. Fellow writer Li Jie, for example, wrote that “I expected [the authorities] might want to play down the issue—give Liu a one-year sentence, declare that he’d already served it [because he had already been held without trial for a year], let him go home, and move on. I really did not imagine that they would be as feeble-minded as this.” Among Charter 08’s supporters, there is little doubt where the eleven-year sentence originated; such a decision could be made only by the government’s most senior leaders. But no one has a good answer for why eleven seemed the right number. (The maximum under the law was fifteen years.) One theory that has spread on the Chinese Internet is that eleven years is 4,018 days, and Charter 08 contains 4,024 Chinese characters. So: one day for each character you wrote, Mr. Liu, and we’ll waive the last six.

  If the purpose of the harsh sentence was to intimidate others, it has not worked well. Hundreds of signers of Charter 08 have endorsed an additional statement declaring that if Liu Xiaobo is guilty then we are, too. Cui Weiping, a film scholar (and translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese), spent the days following the announcement of Liu’s sentence conducting a telephone survey of more than 100 prominent Chinese intellectuals, including both signers and non-signers of Charter 08, on how they viewed the sentence. Finding almost unanimous disgust, she collected her findings under the heading “We Give Up on Nothing” and published them in a series of twitter feeds that circulated widely in China and abroad—even to my computer in California. Until now, the authorities have not been able to stop her.

  Cui quotes Zhang Sizhi, a senior lawyer, who wonders how the once “great, glorious, and correct Communist Party” could now be so “manipulative, petty, and selfish.” Wang Lixiong, a leading writer and advocate of peace with the Tibetans, said the best way to support Liu Xiaobo is to continue to work for his cause, until “society is changed and everyone in it is free.” Liang Xiaoyan, a well-known editor, said the sentence shows that while some things in China have changed radically in the last thirty years, other things “haven’t budged, and there is not the slightest impulse [at the top] to budge them.” The eminent historian Yu Ying-shih, reached at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, noted that this was the third time in twenty years that China’s rulers have sent Liu Xiaobo to political prison, and “each time has been more glorious than the last.”

  » Read more
  • February 1, 2010 2:24 PM

• Ma Jian (马建): It Doesn’t Pay to Appease China

  

  In Japan Times, author Ma Jian writes about the arrest of Liu Xiaobo, Google, and China’s growing economic clout:

  History is said to repeat itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. And it is indeed farcical for China’s government to try to suppress the yearning for freedom in the same brutal ways that Soviet-era communists once did. For jailing Liu on the absurd charge of trying to overthrow the Chinese state is typical of the type of thinking found in the closed societies of 20th-century communism, where the state asserted its absolute right to judge every thought and every thinker.

  In such a state, the only way to survive was for everyone to become his or her own thought police: self-censoring and never daring to question. But to judge and imprison one’s own mind, or any other mind, is to criminalize civilization.

  In the Internet age, moreover, no prison or censorship can destroy an idea whose time has come. In its fight with Google, for example, China’s government appears to think that its technologists can provide the means to maintain the old thought control. But, thankfully, for anyone with persistence and a modicum of computer skill, the Internet leaks like a sieve.

  The great economic progress China has made over the past 30 years is something all Chinese celebrate. But the jailing of Liu also demonstrates in the starkest terms that China’s neglect of human rights is flowing to the rest of world alongside the mass of Chinese goods. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that China opened its economy only to maintain the country’s over-mighty rulers in power, not to respect and enhance the lives of ordinary Chinese.

  » Read more
  • January 28, 2010 2:33 PM

• Communist Party Officials Criticize Liu Xiaobo Conviction

  

  Four Party officials, Hu Jiwei, Li Pu, Dai Huang and He Fang,  have written an open letter to protest the incarceration of Liu Xiaobo:

  Four senior Communist party officials known for their liberal views are pushing for the release of an imprisoned Chinese dissident who had called for political reform.

  The four have signed a strongly worded letter addressed to “incumbent party and government leaders”, urging authorities to reconsider the verdict against Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced in December to 11 years in prison on subversion charges…The signatories are all in their 80s and 90s, according to the letter; their age could provide them with a degree of protection from harassment.

  It said the main evidence against Liu was that he had called for the establishment of a Chinese “federal republic.” Hu and other signers contend that the term was a “correct slogan” used in the early days of the Chinese Communist party.

  “If the judge violates the constitution and has no knowledge of the history of the party … and makes false and incorrect accusations that will seriously tarnish the image of the country and the party, then it’s difficult to prove that China is a country ruled by law and a harmonious society,” said the letter.

  See also past CDT posts on Liu Xiaobo.

  » Read more
  • January 24, 2010 4:40 PM

• EU Parliament Calls on China to Release Dissident Liu Xiaobo

  

  The European Union, China’s biggest trading partner, has called for the immediate release of Liu Xiaobo:

  STRASBOURG: The European parliament called on Thursday for the immediate release of prominent jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, accusing Beijing of judicial harassment.

  The parliament expressed solidarity with Liu’s peaceful actions and called for his “immediate and unconditional release” while condemning “the judicial harassment of which he was a victim.” …The MEPs also took aim at EU policy on China, accusing Europe of putting money before rights.

  The parliamentary resolution said that the massive two-way trade and economic relations involved “have overshadowed the questions of democratic reforms, respect for human rights and the rule of law.”

  » Read more
  • January 21, 2010 10:53 AM

• Geremie R. Barmé: China’s Promise

  

  From the China Beat blog:

  On Christmas Day 2009, as a momentous year of anniversaries drew to an end, the Beijing authorities announced that Liu Xiaobo had been sentenced to eleven years in jail for ‘inciting subversion’. According to media reports, this was the longest term given to any offender accused of this particularly nebulous crime since it was introduced in 1997. Ironically, for the two decades since the tragic denouement of the 1989 mass protest movement that pressed for media freedoms and basic rights Liu’s has been a voice of reason and decency. Like patriots who had agitated for the party to make China a modern and civil nation in the 1940s, activists like Liu, and the thousands who signed the Charter 08, have used peaceful means and public protest to appeal to Chinese authorities to respect their own constitution.

  As China continues on its path to become a major world influence, it is important that we remain heedful of the complex realities of China’s society and the varying demands of its citizens. As international criticisms of China’s failure to realize a social and political transformation concomitant with its economic achievement, the Chinese authorities have become increasingly anxious to present their monolith version of Chinese reality to the world as the only truly Chinese story worthy of our consideration. The Chinese Party-state, with the support of many citizens nurtured by a guided education and media industry, is now investing massively in presenting what it calls the ‘Chinese story’ (Zhongguode gushi 中国的故事) to the rest of the world. However, in doing this, it constantly limits and censors the variety of stories and narratives that make up the rich skein of human possibility in China itself.

  Geremie R. Barmé is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Professor of Chinese History in The ANU College of Asia & the Pacific. He is also the editor of China Heritage Quarterly (www.chinaheritagequarterly.org).

  » Read more
  • January 20, 2010 2:49 PM

• All Politics Are Local

  

  Newsweek explores why China was willing to ignore international condemnation in the recent execution of British man Akmail Shaikh and the arrest of dissident Liu Xiaobo:

  Pundits have missed a key point: an increasingly confident China is not playing to an international crowd. Politics is always local, and never more so than in China today, where an autocratic regime must ensure political stability above all. The need to project power internally has also become a particularly important goal in the run-up to 2012, the year that China will announce new leadership. For the first time in decades, there is an internal jockeying for control within the party, in which populists led by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are duking it out with a group of coastal elitists. Hu is already under fire from the rival faction for being indecisive and ineffectual on everything from dissent to economic policy, and those internal critiques ring louder in his ears than the complaints of international human-rights activists.

  If the execution of a mentally disabled Brit seems particularly gratuitous to outsiders, it looks a bit different inside China, which has recently been dealing with a series of deranged murderers, at least one of whom officials claim had a history of mental illness.

  » Read more
  • January 9, 2010 9:29 PM

• Liu Xiaobo: Vaclav Havel Confronts Chinese On Sentencing Of Dissident

  

  From Christian Science Monitor:

  Czech dissident playwright-president Vaclav Havel, a principal author of East Europe’s Charter 77, rang the door bell at the Chinese Embassy in Prague this week to support another charter author, Liu Xiaobo. Mr. Liu, co-author of a manifesto called Charter 08 and a well-known democracy advocate, received an 11-year prison sentence on Christmas Day by Beijing authorities.

  But after three rings, Mr. Havel had to “post” a protest letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao in an outdoor embassy mail slot.

  Coming out of a relative seclusion, Havel has described frustration along with other European human rights advocates at the relative Western silence on the hefty sentence given Liu in Beijing.

  “We are here now because we are asking the Chinese president and Chinese government not to repeat what happened to us 33 years ago ,where fighters for freedom were pursued and persecuted,” he stated.

  » Read more
  • January 9, 2010 9:50 AM

• Chinese Dissident Appeals Subversion Conviction

  

  From AP:

  An imprisoned Chinese dissident has appealed his conviction on subversion charges tied to his co-writing of a daring call for political reform of the communist state, his lawyer said Monday.

  Liu Xiaobo was sentenced on Dec. 25 to 11 years in prison on the vaguely defined charge of incitement to subvert state power.

  International human rights groups and Western nations have heavily criticized Liu’s detention, trial and sentence — seen by some as a direct slap at international pressure and a warning that the treatment for dissidents will become increasingly harsh.

  » Read more
  • January 4, 2010 5:49 AM

• Thousands In New Year Hong Kong March For Democracy

  

  From Reuters:

  Thousands of Hong Kong residents appealed to China on New Year’s Day to allow full democracy to be introduced soon in the city, as opposition lawmakers pressed forward with a mass resignation plan later this month.

  Congregating outside the city’s historic domed legislature, protesters carried colorful banners with slogans such as “Democracy Now!” and made their way to Beijing’s representative office.

  Some demonstrators held aloft portraits of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, demanding the release of the prominent activist and writer, jailed last week for 11 years on a subversion charge.

  » Read more
  • January 1, 2010 4:16 PM

• Jerome A. Cohen: China’s Hollow ‘Rule Of Law’

  

  Written by Professor Jerome A. Cohen, co-director of the NYU School of Law’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute and adjunct senior fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, from CNN:

  Two major criminal cases in one week — one resulting in an execution, the other a lengthy prison sentence — have focused new foreign attention on China’s judiciary. They are vivid reminders of the limits that China’s Communist Party-dominated legal system imposes on the government’s efforts to impress the world by its “soft power”: its political, cultural and economic influence.

  Both the 11-year sentence a Chinese court delivered to democracy advocate Liu Xiaobo for “inciting subversion of state power” and the execution Tuesday of British national Akmal Shaikh for heroin smuggling make clear why the People’s Republic of China emphasizes that it has a “political-legal” system.

  In both cases, the party denied the courts the independence to consider the defendants’ claims. And without judicial autonomy, there can be no genuine rule of law.

  » Read more
  • December 31, 2009 10:33 PM

• Writers Rally for Jailed Chinese Dissident

  

  Several well-known writers, including Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Edward Albee and A.M. Holmes, gathered in the snow in New York to offer tribute to imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo before delivering a petition to the Chinese representative at the U.N. calling for Liu’s release. From CBS News:

  The writers who assembled for the protest read the passages deemed subversive by the Chinese government, as well as poems Liu wrote during a three-year term in a labor camp in the late 1990s. They also read from the verdict against Liu.

  Among the sentences deemed subversive is Liu’s assertion that “since the Communist Party of China took power, generations of CPC dictators have cared most about their own power and least about human life.”

  As snow fell and a small crowd watched, writer Honor Moore, standing on the steps of the main branch of the New York Public Library, read a portion of the verdict against Liu.

  “He wrote the documents and used the Internet to publish them in order to slander and urge other people to overthrow our country’s democratic dictatorship and our socialist system,” the verdict said. “…The published documents have been spread through links and republishing. People read them and they have a bad effect. This is the crime of a major criminal and should be severely punished according to the law.”

  After reading one of Liu’s poems, Doctorow, the author of “Ragtime” and other books, criticized the Chinese government for its “sorry record of artist intimidation.”

  Read and listen to the introduction from K. Anthony Appiah. Watch a slideshow of the event from Flickr:
  

  » Read more
  • December 31, 2009 1:17 PM

• Cui Weiping Tweets Elite Views On Liu Xiaobo

  

  From Global Voices:

  Charter 08 has been around for just over a year, reportedly gathered more than 10,000 signatures, and Liu Xiaobo, one of its founders, was sentenced to eleven years in prison on Christmas Day last week.

  While most of the original 303 signatories to Charter 08 were prominent liberal mainland Chinese public intellectuals, the larger group of people who tend to fall in that category have for several years often been criticized for a tendency to remain silent on China’s numerous social issues.

  More recently, well-known Beijing Film Academy professor Cui Weiping has been getting some of that on Twitter, which she took up in late 2009. Following several tweets from her followers, though not her stated motivation, she decided this week to phone up friends and colleagues and tweet their responses to the news of Liu’s heavy sentence.

  » Read more
  • December 29, 2009 4:17 PM

• Wei Jingsheng: President Obama, Push Back on China

  

  Written by Wei Jingsheng, one of China’s prominent dissidents, from
  New York Times:

  Last week, a moderate reformist in China, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced to 11 years in prison by the Chinese government for the mere act of organizing and signing a petition, Charter 08, calling for political reform and the basic human rights much of the world already enjoys.

  The message was clear for all those who sought restraint from a newly powerful China that now sits prominently at the tables of global governance: Since you made a fuss about releasing Mr. Liu after his arrest, we will punish him even more severely. In no uncertain terms, that will let you know that not only don’t we care what you think, but we don’t have to.

  Though diplomats from Germany and Australia were among the two dozen people allowed to observe the “public trial,” the fact that no one from the American Embassy was admitted should be read as a particularly clear and open challenge to the United States.

  » Read more
  • December 29, 2009 3:46 PM

• Sentence for Dissident Signals Beijing’s Tougher Stance

  

  Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer reporting from Beijing:

  The trial also underlines Beijing’s increased efforts to control the internet. Mr Liu once predicted the internet would have a huge political impact in China. “The internet is God’s present to China,” he wrote in 2006. “It is the best tool for the Chinese people in their project to cast off slavery and strive for freedom.”

  Earlier this month, the Chinese government introduced measures to control the internet, including rules that limit the ability of individuals to set up a website and increase the scrutiny of companies with websites.

  This year China has blocked Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as well as hundreds of other websites in a drive the authorities say is aimed at limiting access to pornography and preventing internet scams.

  » Read more
  • December 27, 2009 9:39 PM

CDT BOOKSHELF

China Digital Times is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project | Copyright © China Digital Times | Powered by WordPress.