Page 1 of 5 Charter 08 and China's troubled liberalism
By Feng Chongyi
The publication of Charter 08 in China at the end of 2008 was a major event
generating headlines all over the world. It was widely recognized as the
Chinese human-rights manifesto and a landmark document in China's quest for
democracy. However, if Charter 08 was a clarion call for the new march to
democracy in China, its political impact has been disappointing. Its primary
drafter Liu Xiaobo, after being kept in police custody over one year, was
sentenced on Christmas Day of 2009 to 11 years in prison for the "the crime of
inciting subversion of state power", nor has the Chinese communist party-state
taken a single step toward democratization or improving human rights during the
year. [1] This article offers a preliminary assessment of Charter 08, with
special attention to its connection with liberal forces in China.
The origins of Charter 08
Charter 08 was not a bolt from the blue but the result of careful deliberation
and theoretical debate, especially the discourse on
liberalism since the late 1990s. In its timing, Charter 08 anticipated that
major political change would take place in China in 2009 in light of a number
of important anniversaries. These included the 20th anniversary of the June 4
crackdown on Tiananmen Square, the 50th anniversary of the exile of the Dalai
Lama, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China,
and the 90th anniversary of the anti-imperialist May 4 student movement in
1919. Actually Chinese liberal intellectuals had earlier begun to advocate and
discuss a road map and timetable for the march to constitutional democracy [2].
Charter 08 was discussed from the second half of 2008. Its three primary
initiators and drafters were leading dissidents Liu Xiaobo, Zhang Zuhua and
Jiang Qisheng.
Liu Xiaobo, born in 1955, joined the faculty at Beijing Normal University in
1984 and received a PhD in literature there in 1988. He was one of the four
celebrated intellectuals who took part in the student hunger strike at
Tiananmen Square in 1989 and played a key role in mediating between the
students and the troops for the peaceful withdrawal of students from the
square. Nevertheless, he was jailed after the June 4 crackdown and subsequently
lost his job.
Liu became a freelance writer, political commentator and human-rights activist,
as well as serving as president of the Independent Chinese Pen Center [3] for
the period of 2003-2007. Liu was repeatedly arrested and detained by Chinese
authorities for criticizing the ruling Chinese Communist Party and promoting
democracy and human rights. Zhang Zuhua, born 1955, received a BA in political
science from Nanchong Normal University in 1982 and was a member of the
Communist Youth League Standing Committee in charge of Youth League affairs of
the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee and the State Council in 1989
when the Tiananmen crackdown took place.
He lost his position for supporting the democracy movement and became a
self-employed researcher with a focus on Chinese civil society. He has
published extensively on political reform in China and was briefly detained by
the police in 2004 for his dissenting political views. Jiang Qisheng was born
in 1948 and was a leader of the Tiananmen student movement in 1989 when he was
a PhD candidate in Philosophy at People's University in Beijing. His PhD
candidacy was terminated and he was imprisoned twice, for about two years
between 1989 and 1991 for participation in the student movement and four years
during the period 1999 to 2003 for distributing pamphlets to commemorate the
Tiananmen movement.
To avoid crackdown by the security apparatus, the draft charter was hand
delivered to a small circle in Beijing for comments and revision, although it
was sent as an e-mail attachment for signatures once it was finalized. To avoid
the accusation of "colluding with hostile forces abroad", Chinese overseas were
deliberately excluded from the original signatories. After acquiring 303
signatories nationwide, the organizers planned to release Charter 08 on 10
December 2008 in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal
Declaration Human Rights by the United Nations. However, it was released on the
Internet one day earlier as Liu Xiaobo and Zhang Zuhua were detained on 8
December 2008 because of their association with the document.
Charter 08 takes its name from Charter 77 written by intellectuals and
activists in the former Czechoslovakia and borrows ideas and language from
several international documents on human rights and democracy, including the
Constitution of the United States, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen, the Universal Declaration Human Rights of the United Nations, and
the reconciliatory approach of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, as well as relevant Chinese documents throughout the modern era,
including the Constitution of the People's Republic of China.
Charter 08 is a wide-ranging and comprehensive political reform program that
embraces human rights, constitutional democracy and social policies for
distributive justice.[4] Part one is a "preamble", providing an overview of the
Chinese democracy movement over the last century, identifying fundamental
problems of current communist rule in China, urging the regime to "embrace
universal human values, join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a
democratic system". Part two lays down five "fundamental concepts" of freedom,
human rights, equality, republicanism, democracy and constitutional rule as
fundamental principles and defines these concepts according to the tenets of
liberal democracy.
Part three offers 19 specific recommendations calling for amending the
constitution, separation and balance of powers, democratizing the lawmaking
process, judicial independence, nonpartisan control of public institutions,
protection of human rights, election of public officials, urban-rural equality,
freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of
religion, citizen education, protection of property, fiscal reform, social
security, environmental protection, a federal republic, and transitional
justice (seeking social reconciliation on the basis of the findings of a Truth
Investigation Commission investigating the facts and responsibilities of past
atrocities and injustices).
Part four is a short "conclusion" about China's responsibility to humankind,
appealing to all Chinese citizens to participate in the democratic movement and
echoing the call in the preamble that human rights and democracy are vital for
China as a major country of the world, as one of five permanent members of the
United Nations Security Council, and as a member of the UN Council on Human
Rights. Charter 08 categorically sets constitutional democracy as the goal for
Chinese political development and peaceful reform as the means to achieve that
goal.
The concepts, standpoints and recommendations elaborated in Charter 08
represent a remarkable progress in sophistication of liberal and democratic
ideas in China since the 1989 democracy movement symbolized by the hunger
strike at Tiananmen Square and demonstrations on the streets of Beijing and
other major cities. The connection between the two events is obvious, as all
three primary drafters and many of the signatories took part in the democracy
movement in 1989. For all of its significance, impact and extraordinary level
of social mobilization, the 1989 democracy movement produced no comprehensive
document of political demands and aspirations, not even unified slogans for
political change and democracy. This limitation was not due to negligence on
the part of the democracy movement leaders and activists, but reflected the
reality that even they had not understood core concepts of democracy and human
rights.
May 15, 1989, the day after the hunger strike was proclaimed
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.
We know that Chinese "liberal elements" in the 1980s, including the most
profound thinkers such as Wang Ruoshui, Su Shaozhi and Yan Jiaqi, even the most
radical dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng, were confined to the Marxist
framework in their quest for democracy, typically expressed as "socialist
democracy and legality". This limit was overcome by Chinese liberals by the
late 1990s, when Li Shenzhi, a senior communist expert on international affairs
and former vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences with the
rank of vice-minister, solemnly proclaimed that:
After three hundred
years of comparison and selection in the whole world since the age of
industrialization, and particularly after more than one hundred years of
Chinese experimentation, the largest in scale in human history, there is
sufficient evidence to prove that liberalism is the best, universal value.
Today's revival of the liberal tradition stemming from Beijing University will
beyond doubt guarantee the emergence of a liberal China in the world of
globalization. [5]
The conversion to liberalism also means that
Chinese liberals are no longer confined to formulations of "socialist
democracy" that guarantee the leading role of the CCP. The experience of the
June 4 crackdown and the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union and
eastern Europe provided an opportunity for Chinese liberals to deeply reflect
on the illusion of "socialist democracy", and they were awakened to the fact
that the party-state had long been deceiving itself and others in claiming
communist one party rule as a higher form of "democracy".
They sharply pointed out that the CCP under Mao's leadership overthrew the
nationalist dictatorship only to supplant it with the CCP dictatorship, and
Mao's successors, the post-Tiananmen leadership, has maintained the despotic
system and become yet more corrupt. Since the 1990s, based on their new found
conviction that one party dictatorship and democracy are not compatible,
Chinese liberals have categorically abandoned one-party rule for constitutional
democracy with all of its inherent features such as multi-party elections,
legal safeguard of human rights by limiting the power of the government, and
checks and balance of powers among legislative, executive and judicial
branches. [6]
The second achievement is to address the issues of social justice from a
liberal perspective based on an "overlapping consensus" between liberalism and
social democracy. The Chinese new left has labelled Chinese liberals
"neo-liberals", resulting in grave confusion and misunderstanding. [7] Even
some China scholars in the West assume as a matter of course that the Chinese
new left champions the cause of social justice, which is neglected by Chinese
liberals. However, in the context of the contemporary West, neo-liberals are
widely regarded as a right-wing political and intellectual force prioritizing
efficiency over equality and promoting market mechanisms at the expense of the
welfare state.
Contemporary Chinese liberals differ fundamentally from "neo-liberals" in the
West. They understand liberalism in the classical sense as a political
philosophy that considers individual liberty as the most important political
goal and upholds liberal principles such as legal protection of individual
rights, the rule of law and limitations on state power. They not only strive
for individual freedoms and seek to replace the despotism of the Leninist
party-state with liberal democracy, but many also fight in the forefront
against social inequality and seek to champion the cause of the working class
quest for equality and a better life.
Three out of the 19 specific recommendations in Charter 08 are devoted to the
issues of social inequality, including the demands to strictly protect peasant
land rights (recommendation 14), build a social security system that covers all
citizens (recommendation 16) and repeal the current urban-rural household
registration system and implement equal rights for all citizens.[8] Chinese
liberals are tackling the burning issues in China, including increasing social
inequality.
Apart from promoting market efficiency, liberty, democracy and the rule of law,
they also took pains to advocate social justice, well before the new left took
up the issue; apart from promoting equality of opportunity and procedural
justice, they also stand for distributive justice [9]. In the eyes of liberals,
without accompanying processes of democratizing political power, China's reform
has been distorted by the power elite and turned into a process of "stealing
what is entrusted to their care" (jianshou zi dao) and "taking all the
food by those in charge of cooking" (zhangshao zhe si zhan daguofan).
[10]
As summarized by Xu Youyu, "most liberals do not promote the market at the
expense of justice. What they have consistently advocated are as follows: 1)
resolutely support markets economy as a mechanism to prevent plunder by power;
2) expose the grave injustices resulting from the current reform and demand
further reform to eliminate abuses of power; 3) take political reform as the
fundamental solution and the top priority".[11] As a matter of fact, the social
democratic elements within the liberal camp in particular have strongly
supported the egalitarian implications of the welfare state.
In tackling the issues of equity and inequality, Chinese liberals differ from
both the Chinese old and new left in two fundamental ways. Firstly, liberals
see the despotic political system, as well as the marketization of political
power in the process of transition to the market economy (rather than the
market economy per se), as the primary source of inequality, including the
unequal distribution of wealth. Based on the observation that power holders
have abused their power in the course of presiding over "yuanshi jilei"
(original accumulation), Chinese liberals draw the conclusion that unfair
distribution in China today is not primarily manifested in the distribution of
national income in the form of wages and property, but in the allocation and
control of resources through political power.[12]
"Current social evils in China", argues leading liberal Zhu Xueqin, "cannot be
simplified and equated with a "Western disease" and a "market disease". They
are a "Chinese disease" and a "power disease" resulting from the peculiar
circumstances where the market mechanism is parasitical, distorted, and even
suppressed by an outmoded power mechanism. Liberals raised the issue of social
justice earlier than the new left did, and they dug deeper to the root of the
problem, pointing out that it already existed in the Mao era, as in the plunder
of private property, possession of public property and suppression of different
political views by the privileged stratum.
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