Christmas in Beijing

On Christmas day, the Chinese authorities sentenced Liu Xiaobo, a literature professor and writer, to eleven years in prison, and deprived him of his civil rights for an additional two years.
Mr. Liu was arrested in December 2008 and charged with incitement to subvert state power. The accusation based its case on Mr. Liu’s participation in the development of Charter 08, a document calling for the establishment of a democratic China and the respect for basic human rights. It also accused him of subversion because of six essays that he wrote between 2005 and 2007.
The sentence was issued December 25, after a two-hour trial found him guilty of subversion on Wednesday.
During the sentence hearing, which also lasted but two hours, his lawyer had only twenty minutes to defend his client.
The verdict stipulated that the accused had the goal of subverting our country's people's democratic dictatorship and socialist system. The effects were malign and he is a major criminal.
Western diplomats and journalists were not authorized to attend the trial at the Number One Intermediate People’s Court in Beijing.
The prominent Chinese human rights lawyer Mo Shaoping, whose firm was representing Mr. Liu, declared that they would lodge an appeal against the decision,
Mr. Liu has worked to try to find a way to allow the ordinary citizen to criticize the government or to make proposals to the government, on how the people can participate in government. We pleaded not guilty - his crime is a crime of speech, he said. We cannot accept this sentence because we have argued in court that Liu is innocent, he added.
This is not the first time that Mr. Liu has run afoul of Chinese law.
In fact, he has been confronting the authorities for over twenty years.
In 1989, though a professor at Columbia University in New York, he returned to China in order to support the students at Tiananmen Square who were staging a hunger strike. He was imprisoned for twenty months following the June 4 events.
He spent an additional three years in a reeducation camp (1996-1999), after he had publicly criticized China’s one party system.
Banned from the teaching profession by the authorities, Liu continued to write essays attacking the Chinese system, and promoting the cause of democracy and human rights.
In 2008, he co-authored a document called Charter 2008.
Inspired by the Charter 77 movement of Czechoslovakia led by Vaclav Havel and other intellectuals, the document called for putting an end to the monopoly on power of the Chinese Communist party, and the creation of a democratic China, we couldn’t have a repeat of June 4, where all sides lose, so we came up with a constructive way forward, one author of the Charter, Zhang Zuhua told the NYT.
There are laws but there is no rule of law. There is a constitution but no constitutional governance. And there is still the political reality that is obvious for all to see. The power bloc continues to insist on maintaining the authoritarian regime, rejecting political reform, the Charter declares in its preamble.
As such, the authors propose a new direction for China, based on the following fundamental principles: freedom, human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutionalism.
Furthermore, the Charter explicitly demands the repeal of the inciting subversion of state power provision, the one the authorities used to convict him December 24.
The Charter was written in December 2008, and sponsored by three hundred academics, lawyers and other professionals. Since then, some 10,000 Chinese citizens have signed it.
Only Liu has been arrested and prosecuted for his involvement in the Charter. He was arrested just before the document was issued.
During his trial, Liu denied the government’s contention that his activities were illegal, he rejected their argument that Charter 08 brought about a ‘malevolent social impact’ and told the court that his remarks are within the realm of free speech, which is protected by the Constitution, his younger brother, Liu Xiaoxuan told the NYT.
Indeed, Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution states the following, Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
China’s authoritarian regime is clearly violating its own laws, thereby confirming Liu’s analysis that there is no rule of law in China.
This strategy of confronting the regime with its own contradictions is clever, in that it exposes its hypocrisy, but dangerous in that it also fuels its vindictiveness.
In an essay called Changing the Regime by Changing Society, written in 2006, Liu states the following, the greatness of nonviolent resistance is that even as man is faced with forceful tyranny and the resulting suffering, the victim responds to hate with love, to prejudice with tolerance, to arrogance with humility, to humiliation with dignity, and to violence with reason. That is, the victim, with modesty and dignified love, takes the initiative to invite the victimizer to return to reason, peace, and compassion, thereby transcending the vicious cycle of “replacing one tyranny with another”.
The activist takes pride and solace in being everything the despotic regime is not, in embodying all that a decent regime should espouse,but only pays lip service to.
Liu has taken the initiative, and dared the regime to respect its own fundamental documents, heed its own legal texts and its professed principles.
By taking the regime’s laws and principles seriously, the writer has thus placed the onus on the authorities to do likewise, or publicly repudiate them, thereby revealing their true selves to the Chinese people and the world at large, as imposters and hypocrites.
The Chinese autocrats are well aware of this, and it is no accident that Liu was sentenced on Christmas, a holiday in the West.
In essence, by providing the authorities with an opportunity to redeem themselves or face the moral consequences, the dissident also reveals to them and the Chinese people their inherent moral corruption. It is the dissident’s audacity that fuels their wrath and hunger for retribution.
The activist seeks to provoke within the autocratic regime the realization that they are leading the nation on the wrong path.
A regime that has no democratic legitimacy can only cling to power through deception, oppression and corruption.
The regime feels sufficiently vulnerable to crack down harshly on militant democracy activists and make an example of Liu, but not enough to accept the offer of dialogue, and the inevitable dissolution of its monopoly on power that would ensue.
Today, the autocrats running the country have a tacit understanding with the Chinese people: in exchange for the people's submission, they will provide for their material well-being. They have, in essence, bought the people’s submissiveness. As a result, they are compelled to implement an aggressive economic policy promoting economic growth at all cost. Nothing is to get in the way of China’s economic expansion.
The viability of the regime depends on it…
Economic growth and a rising standard of living have so far enabled the regime to stifle all significant calls for social and political reform, for the time being.
Yet, the ruler and the ruled engage in a cooperation based on the principle of profit-before-everything. The loyalty bought by the promise of a comfortable life is actually a soul that is rotten to the core. Driven by profit-making above all else, almost no officials are uncorrupted, not a single penny is clean, nor a single word honest, Liu wrote in 2006, in an essay entitled The Many Aspects of CPC Dictatorship.
The ruler bribes the ruled to continue ruling. The ruled accepts ever-bigger bribes to satisfy his growing material needs. Each betrays his better self in the process…How long can this last, before the system collapses under the weight of its own corruption?
Liu seeks to promote regime change not by violent political upheaval, but gradually, by reforming the system, and fostering the development of a civil society in China.
In other words, pursue the free and democratic forces among the people; do not pursue the rebuilding of society through radical regime change, but instead use gradual social change to compel regime change. That is, rely on the continuously growing civil society to reform a regime that lacks legitimacy, Liu wrote.
The process will be a lengthy, gradual one, but one that can only succeed.
The lawyer, Mo Shaoping, also a signatory of Charter 08, similarly believes that the advent of democracy is inevitable, it’s a historical trend. China will move towards democracy, rule of law and constitutional governance. And no one can stand in its way, he told the NYT.
Indeed, there are less confrontational, and perhaps no less efficient ways to gradually reform the system, and widen the personal freedoms of the Chinese.
Mo Shaoping first began defending dissidents in 1995, when a democracy activist could not find any other lawyer willing to take the risk of representing him…
Since then, he has been involved in more sensitive cases than any other Chinese lawyer.
Needless to say, he has never prevailed in any major human rights case, it’s impossible to win these cases. The best you can hope for is a compromise, he said.
Mr. Mo has not been a victim of the regime’s wrath himself because he is careful not to provoke the authorities, and never emphasizes the political nature of the cases he accepts. He seeks instead to defend his clients through all possible legal means.
Hence, he is not a political crusader, but a pragmatist trying to use the system to broaden individual rights incrementally, without alienating the authorities. It is a difficult balancing act, I do my bit to push forward democracy and rule of law, but writing essays is not my thing, he said.
He is no Mr. Liu, therefore, though they share the same objectives.
A saying on how to conduct one’s self goes: Man is born free and equal. Universal enslavement and inequality are never due to the ruler being too powerful or brilliant, but because those ruled knelt down, Mr. Liu wrote in an essay called Can it be that the Chinese People Deserve Only «Party-led Democracy»?
In essence, the tyrants need the cooperation of the ruled in order to survive, and preserve their power. The ruled need to accept their subjugation for the regime to endure.
Liu, obviously, has always refused to kneel, even if that is the easier course to take, at great personal cost to himself.
The regime will tolerate dissent, as long as it is not overtly political in nature.
The party loathes anyone who engages in organization and Liu Xiaobo is paying for that, one Charter 08 signatory told Jane Macartney of The Times.
Although it was Christmas, observers around the world were appalled by the sentence.
Liu Xiaobo's detention and trial shows the Chinese government will not tolerate Chinese citizens participating in discussions about their own form of government, deplored Sam Zarifi, of Amnesty International.
The French human rights group Reporters without Borders called the sentence a disgrace.
The Chinese reacted harshly to international condemnation of the trial, and calls to release the dissident, as gross interference in China‘s judicial internal affairs.
If China’s Communist Party wanted to advertise to the world that they will do anything to protect their power and use the judiciary to accomplish that, then the persecution of Liu Xiaobo was a perfect vehicle, Jerome A. Cohen, of the Council on Foreign Relations, told the NYT.
Edward Friedman, an expert on China at the University of Wisconsin added that it’s clear that what matters most to the Chinese Communist Party is the survival of the regime and their monopoly on power.
More interestingly, some brave individuals inside China condemned the verdict as well,
China's Mandela was born this Christmas, wrote Beichen, a prominent Chinese blogger.
One unemployed worker who waited outside the courtroom, and who has signed Charter 08, Lei Ji told the NYT, I’m not afraid. I love China. I just want my country to have freedom and human rights.
Liu Xiaobo had to be dealt with harshly.
What would happen were his compatriots suddenly to refuse to kneel, and no longer accept the domination of a party no one has chosen and elected?
What is the fate of a despotic ruling clique once the people no longer fear it?
Its days are numbered.
The regime clearly hopes that Lui’s fate will ensure that no one emulates him.
But a nation, a people can wallow in fear only so long…
Some day, the Chinese will simply no longer tolerate being ruled by a clique of corrupt autocrats. Then, and only then will China fulfill at last its vast potential…
(the photograph above is by Kim Cheung AP)