"Dissident": A Chinese Honorific

Artist Ai Weiwei Saluting His Comrades

While the world has been looking the other way at Japan and Libya, China has been busy silencing "dissidents" or chasing them out of the country. From the South China Morning Post:

Xiao Shu, an outspoken veteran columnist for Southern Weekly, was pressured into taking a two-year sabbatical after his employer ordered him to stop writing, a former colleague said. Phone calls to Southern Weekly chief editors rang unanswered yesterday.

Xiao Shu, 48, whose real name is Chen Min , wrote in his blog: "Sadness is inevitable, but...I have no regret being independent, fair and rational [in my writing]."

In addition, Peng Xiaoyun - an opinion editor at Guangzhou-based Time Weekly, who was put on involuntary leave after running a special report on "100 Influential People to China's Progress" that included milk safety activist Zhao Lianhai - was officially notified she had been sacked, she said on Twitter yesterday.

Ran Yunfei, by R. MacKinnon @ Flickr.com

Another huge threat is Sichuan writer and blogger Ran Yunfei. This poor sod is a major subversive. He actually had the nerve to criticize the authorities for prosecuting those who blamed corrupt officials for the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake! Imagine that? Here's what the scoundrel wrote back in 2009:

"In striking against those who criticize the government with subversion...they think that would block people's determination to fight for freedom, but that's just underestimating people's resolve to protect their own rights."

The charge of inciting subversion was also used to jail Liu Xiaobo, winner of last year's Nobel peace prize. Pity China for being plagued with such enemies. "Dissident" has become a coveted label, something to be worn with pride.

Then there's the case of the Ai Weiwei, probably the most famous international Chinese artist. He helped design the "Bird Nest" Stadium for Beijing's 2008 Olympics, which he then disowned while calling for a boycott. More recently he exhibited 100 million hand painted porcelain Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern in London. In China, he has been harassed, beaten and prevented from working. What's a poor guy to do? Get out. Weiwei has just announced plans to set up a studio in Berlin to showcase his work.

"Most of my activities have been in Europe and I cannot really show my work in China... It's very discouraging what's happening here and if I want to continue to develop my work, I have to find a base. But I will stay in Beijing unless the situation is an absolute threat to my life."

The PBS program Frontline just ran this brief documentary, Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei, a few nights ago:

The Fallout: China's Nobel Crackdown

"This award is for the lost souls of June 4th." - Liu Xiaobo via his wife, Liu Xia

The first to feel the fallout from Liu Xiaobo's Nobel win was Liu Xia, his wife. After the announcement was made she was placed under house arrest and had her mobile phone usage monitored and then restricted. She was eventually allowed to visit her husband, accompanied by some government thugs, and has been living under constant surveillance ever since. As she told the Guardian:

"They have told me not to go out, not to visit friends. If I want to see my parents or buy food, I can only go in their car. I don't even talk to my neighbours because I don't want to get them into trouble."

Yesterday, Beijing stopped a group of diplomats from visiting her. Simon Sharpe, first secretary of political affairs of the EU delegation, said he wanted to deliver a letter of congratulations from Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission.

Plain-clothes thugs keep watch where Liu Xia is being held. (via SCMP)

Sharpe was accompanied by diplomats from the embassies of Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy and Australia. (What about Canada? At least we issued a statement). But three guards at the gate of Liu's apartment complex prevented the group from entering. Now it appears she may not even be allowed to leave the country to collect the award:

"I can't even get out of my home, how could I go out of the country?"

This is how it's done in modern China - when all else fails, target the family. Then go after anyone remotely associated with the award, like other human rights advocates...and those damn Norwegians. China has called off a planned meeting with the Norwegian fisheries minister, blocked the Nobel peace prize website and promised further dire consequences. All this fuss because of an independent foreign committee made up of five members. As secretary of the Nobel committee, Geir Lundestad, said:

"We stand for a set of principles. A committee can't just overthrow a government. That is self-evident."

In China, that's not so - this "Gang of Five" is feared for precisely that reason.

Things have not fared well in Hong Kong either, despite our much vaunted "one country, two systems" principle. While celebrating Liu's win by drinking champagne and eating Norwegian salmon outside the central Chinese government's local liaison office, a woman was arrested for splashing an officer with some bubbly. I can't really blame the guy - he was probably feeling left out. Next time pass around some glasses.

Liu Xiaobo: China's Human Rights Adversary

On December 25, 2009, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in prison as a traitor for advocating human rights in China, or as the authorities call it, "inciting subversion of state power." He was one of the authors of the infamous Charter 08 manifesto and has a long history of engagement with human rights issues, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.



Below is an edited translation of the statement Liu prepared to read in court, but was prevented. (courtesy of the SCMP);

Guilty of a 'Crime of Speaking'

"Considering the facts in the indictment against me, I have no disagreement, except the one which says that I collected more than 300 signatures [for Charter 08], which is inaccurate. I wrote the six articles [cited in the indictment] and participated in Charter 08; but I collected only about 70 signatures and not 300. The other signatories were not gathered by me. As to the crimes of which I am accused, I cannot accept them. During this period of more than a year during which I lost my freedom, I have maintained my innocence during questioning by police officers, investigators and judges. I argue my innocence on the basis of China's constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, the political reforms I have advocated and the trend of history.

One important result of the reform and open-door policy has been the awakening of Chinese people to their human rights and the rise of civil protection of rights. This has pushed the Chinese government to progress in its thinking on human rights. In 2004, the National People's Congress revised the constitution to "protect and respect human rights", which gave constitutional principles to protect human rights, as a country ruled by law. The country must respect and protect human rights, according to the powers given to the people in Article 35 of the constitution. My freedom to express different opinions is the right of free speech given me as a Chinese citizen under the constitution. Not only should it not be limited or removed by the government; on the contrary, it should be respected by the government and protected by the law. So the accusations against me infringe my basic rights as a Chinese citizen and are against the basic law of China. It is a typical case of "the crime of speaking", of how using the ancient crime of sending a writer to prison has continued. It should be criticised as unreasonable and against the constitution.

The indictment quotes statements as proof of my "spreading rumours, slandering and in other ways inciting the subversion of the government and overturning the socialist system". "Spreading rumours" means fabricating and creating false information and harming people. "Slandering" means harming the good name and character of others. My opinion is a critical opinion, an expression of a point of view, a value judgment and a judgment of what is true and false. It is not meant to harm any person. So my opinion has nothing to do with spreading rumours or slander. Criticising is not the same as spreading rumours; even less is opposition the same as slander.

The indictment uses statements from Charter 08 to accuse me of slandering the government and the party and "plotting the subversion and overthrow of the government". This accusation takes quotations out of context and completely ignores the overall tone of Charter 08 and the opinions I have consistently stated in my articles. First, Charter 08 describes the "human rights disasters" in modern China. The anti-rightist campaign led to the unjust designation of more than 500,000 rightists; the Great Leap Forward created the unnatural deaths of over 100,000 people; the Cultural Revolution created a great catastrophe. June 4 was a bloodbath, in which many people died and many were thrown into prison. These events are universally recognised as "human rights disasters" and created dangers for China, "holding back the natural development of the Chinese race and the progress of human civilisation". Ending the monopoly of power and special privileges of a single party is only demanding the ruling party to hand the government back to the people and finally establish a free country, "for the people, by the people and of the people".

The values expressed by Charter 08 and the political reforms it proposes have the long-term objective of a federal state that is free and democratic. There are 19 reform measures, with reforms that are gradual and peaceful. Given that the current reforms have all kinds of shortcomings, we demand that the ruling party walk with two feet instead of one, implementing political as well as economic reform. This is a way for civil society to push the government to quickly give it back power, with pressure from below to push the government to enact changes from the top down. So the government and the public can work together in good co-operation and quickly implement the dream of a constitutional government cherished by Chinese for 100 years.

In the 20 years from 1989 to 2009, the opinions which I have expressed about political reforms for China have consistently been gradual, peaceful, orderly and controllable. I have always opposed sudden reform taken at one step and, even more, have opposed violent revolution. This idea of gradual reform is clearly expressed in my article "Changing the Political Power Through Changing Society", that is, by awakening the awareness of the rights of civil society to expand the rights of people, to increase their sense of their own power, develop civil society so that it can bring pressure from the bottom up and promote the reform of the government from the top down. In reality, the experience of reform in China over the last 30 years proves that the basic force for creative new reforms has come from reforms started by civil society; as the awareness of civil reform and influence expands, so the government is forced to accept new ideas and try them out on an experimental basis. This has changed the pattern of reform policies coming from the top.

To summarise, my key ideas for China's political reform are that they should be gradual, peaceful, orderly and controllable and should be interactive, from above to below and from below to above. This way causes the least cost and leads to the most effective result. I know the basic principles of political change, that orderly and controllable social change is better than one which is chaotic and out of control. The order of a bad government is better than the chaos of anarchy. So I oppose systems of government that are dictatorships or monopolies. This is not "inciting subversion of state power". Opposition is not equivalent to subversion.

One reason I am not guilty is that the accusations against me contravene internationally recognised human rights standards. In 1948, as a permanent member of the [UN] Security Council, China participated in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Half a century later, in 1998, China made a solemn pledge in front of the international community in signing two UN conventions on human rights. One of these, the International Treaty on Citizens Rights and Political Rights, recognises freedom of speech as a basic universal right and demands that the government of each country respect and protect it. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a member of the UN Human Rights Board, China has an obligation to respect treaties and a responsibility to fulfil its own obligations. It should be a model in implementing the clauses of these treaties that protect human rights. Only in this way can the Chinese government fully safeguard the human rights of its own people. It should make its contribution to promote the cause of international human rights and, in doing so, show the civilized demeanour of a great country.

Coming into the modern era, the Chinese Communist Party went from being weak to strong and finally triumphed over the Kuomintang. It drew its source of strength from its promise "to oppose dictatorship in the name of freedom". Before 1949, the Communist Party's Xinhua Daily and Liberation Daily regularly printed articles attacking the restrictions on free expression by the government of the Jiang family. It made a hue and cry about intellectuals punished for what they said. Mao Zedong and other party leaders often spoke of freedom of expression as a basic right. But, after 1949, from the anti-rightist campaign to the Cultural Revolution, from the execution of Lin Zhao to the cutting of the throat of Zhang Zhixin, the freedom of expression was lost in the Maoist era and the country fell into a deathly silence, like 10,000 horses standing mute. With the start of reform, the ruling party has corrected injustices and greatly increased the liberty for different opinions; the space for free speech by society has widened continuously and the number of writers thrown into prison has greatly decreased. But the tradition of the crime of speaking has not completely disappeared. From the April 5th movement to June 4th, from Democracy Wall to Charter 08, there have been examples of this. My indictment is only the most recent example.

In the 21st century, freedom of expression has become the common right of people in most countries and sending writers to prison comes when 1,000 people point the finger at someone. From an objective point of view, to block the expression of people is like blocking a river; the high walls of the prison cannot block the expression of freedom. A government cannot suppress the legitimate expression of different opinions and cannot depend on throwing writers into prison as a way to remain in power in the long term. The problems of the pen can only be solved by the use of the pen. As soon as you use the gun to solve the problems of the pen, you will create a disaster of human rights. Only by eliminating the practice of throwing writers into prison can you guarantee that the freedom of speech promised in the constitution will be given to each citizen. Then will the right of freedom of speech be protected in a systematic way and the throwing of writers into prison will be banished for ever from the land of China.

The crime of speech is contrary to the principle of human rights set down in China's constitution and laws and is contrary to the UN declaration on International Human Rights. It goes against universal justice and the current of history. I plead innocent for what I have done and hope that I can earn the acceptance of this court. If so, this judgment would set a significant precedent in China's legal history, pass the test of the human rights clauses in China's constitution and international human rights treaties, show the pursuit of justice, and pass the test of history. I thank you all."