SPEAKING
FREELY Chen marks new tone for
China By Man Yee Karen Lee
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
In late April, a
Chinese dissident's escape story gripped
international audiences. A blind, self-taught,
human-rights lawyer, Chen Guangcheng, known for
his activism for disability rights and against
coercive family planning measures, had somehow
managed to slip away from house arrest.
Chen had been detained in his house since
2010, following four years in prison on trumped up
charges of "damaging property and organizing a mob
to disturb traffic".
Just days before high
level Sino-US strategic talks were
scheduled to start in
Beijing, he evaded round-the-clock security at his
rural Shandong home, and allegedly with the help
of a female fellow activist travelled 640
kilometers to Beijing, only to end up in, of all
places, the United States Embassy. The rest is
history. Chen is now studying law at New York
University together with his wife and two
children.
The tale's dramatic twists of
fate, which saw a downtrodden grassroots activist
become a renowned rights advocate cum visiting
scholar, reveals the new and changing identity of
Chinese dissidents today. This article sheds light
on the various alliances that make up China's
homegrown dissident population and their growing
mobilization powers.
The human faces of
China's sprawling dissident movement In a
2010 paper entitled "Charter 08, the Troubled
History and Future of Chinese Liberalism",
Sydney-based liberal scholar Feng Chongyi observes
China's rights movements from the late 1990s to
the Charter 08 campaign in 2008 (an online
democratic manifesto for which the 2010 Nobel
Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned).
In particular, he highlights the rise of
an increasingly powerful liberal force that has
grown out of China's market Leninism since Deng
Xiaoping's open-door policy in the 1970s.
According to Feng, this diverse and expanding camp
comprises at least six "distinctive but partially
overlapping" groups. They are: liberals within the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), liberal
intellectuals, democracy movement activists,
Christian liberals, human-rights lawyers, and
grassroots rights activists.
Chen
Guangcheng is in this last group. While not all of
them hold themselves out to be dissidents, they
can be seen as liberals whose reformist views do
not follow the official discourse. Hailing from
all walks of life, they employ different
strategies in preaching their version of
liberalism.
Liberals within the
CCP This group is close to the ruling elite
as CCP members or in some cases serving officials.
Also called "democrats within the party", they
have the privilege to communicate directly with
top leaders in a measured tone. Due to their
special position, they have exclusive avenues to
espouse liberalism, ie, a few state-run
periodicals that they control.
The most
active members of this group are former officials
who have turned vocal after leaving frontline
politics. One prominent example is Bao Tong, a
former secretary of the CCP Politburo Standing
Committee (CCP's top rulers) who was deposed after
the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 due
to his close association with then-party chief
Zhao Ziyang.
Liberal
intellectuals In contrast, the "liberal
intellectuals" work outside the power circle. This
group comprises mainly middle-aged scholars and
intellectuals who witnessed the Cultural
Revolution as adolescents - the so-called
"Cultural Revolution Generation".
Their
personal experience under Mao Zedong's
totalitarian regime, followed by subsequent
exposure to liberal ideas, underpins their
liberalism. As intellectuals, they adopt the art
of persuasion with an express willingness to work
with the state. Hence, they have been actively
publishing their ideas in printed form and online.
Although banned from political
association, they have managed to organize
occasional meetings and conferences in and outside
China to foster links and cooperation. Feng
Chongyi is one of the active members of this
group.
Democracy movement
activists The "democracy movement
activists" represent a radical version of liberal
intellectuals. With its core leaders being
Democracy Wall Movement veterans of the 1970s or
former student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen
pro-democracy protest, this group regularly
challenges the Communist Party's ban on political
association and its authoritarian rule by forming
various organizations and mass movements,
sometimes resulting in violent clashes with the
authorities.
The aggressiveness of the
democracy movement activists appears to be at odds
with the moderation of the liberal intellectuals,
and as a result, leaves little room for
partnership.
In 1998, while both groups
were promoting their cause - the former
establishing an "open discourse" on liberalism and
the latter the "China Democracy Party", there was
little communication, let alone cooperation,
between them. Nevertheless, a few prominent
members of this radical group have subsequently
turned moderates and sided with the liberal
intellectuals. Among them is Liu Xiaobo, a
literature professor cum long-time dissident who
co-drafted Charter 08.
Liu won the 2010
Nobel Peace Prize for his life-long peaceful
struggle for democracy in China.
Christian liberals Compared to
the above veteran groups, "Christian liberals" are
an emerging force. While China's encounter with
modern Christianity began with the Ming dynasty
more than three centuries ago, its dissidents'
foray into the Christian faith has a shorter
history.
One representative figure is Yuan
Zhiming, a writer on the influential political TV
series, Yellow River Elegy, which aired in
1988. The political message of these popular shows
angered conservatives in the Communist leadership.
Following the purge of Zhao Ziyang at the
peak of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Yuan, a
doctoral student in philosophy, fled to the US,
where he converted to Christianity. Now a famous
pastor there and founder of China Soul
Association, Yuan is committed to advocating for
Chinese democratic reform through Christianity.
In China, an increasing number of liberal
intellectuals have become Christians and leaders
of the sprawling "family churches" - members of
the so-called "Underground Church" which, unlike
the state-sanctioned Catholic Church and
evangelical groups that have pledged allegiance to
the Communist Party, have operated independently
and have thrived across the nation in recent
years.
Although not officially banned,
their congregations have been regularly harassed
and their leaders persecuted by the authorities,
who regard such public mobilization as a threat to
social stability. This has turned many of the
formerly apolitical faithful into dissidents. In
delicately juggling between religious autonomy and
political neutrality - for the sake of survival
under the Communist Party's perception of the
church as a subversive agent - Christian liberals
largely focus their activism on "defending rights
according to the law".
Some high-profile
members have emerged as both preachers and social
critics. Among them, Yu Jie, a staunch government
critic now in exile in the US, once described
former premier Wen Jiabao - who incumbent
officials sometimes praise as a CCP liberal with
reformist ideas - as "China's Best Actor", for his
ardent but apparently empty talks over political
reform.
Human-rights lawyers
Lawyers committed to upholding justice,
rule of law, and constitutional democracy, many of
them also Christians, play a dual role as rights
defenders for the oppressed and opinion leaders
for legal and political reforms. The most notable
member of this group is Zhang Sizhi, who began
practicing law in 1956 and is known as the
"conscience of Chinese lawyers".
Since the
early 1980s, he has defended numerous dissidents
in the dock, including Wei Jingsheng (famous for
his Beijing Democracy Wall activism in the 1970s)
and Bao Tong (the former top party official
mentioned above).
Speaking of his calling,
Zhang said, "All lawyers are, due to the very
nature of being a lawyer, human-rights advocates.
Especially since it is so difficult to work as a
lawyer in China, we have to do this job. It is our
duty."
In 2008, he received the Petra
Kelly Prize from Germany's Heinrich Boll
Foundation for his "exceptional commitment to
human rights and the establishment of the rule of
law in China".
Today, standing on Zhang's
shoulders is a new generation of rights lawyers,
many of whom, like Zhang, have endured persecution
and imprisonment for their vigorous defense of
scores of social and political dissidents. One of
them is Gao Zhisheng, a Beijing lawyer and a
Christian, whose representation on behalf of
various family church leaders and practitioners of
Falun Gong (a religious sect banned in China) made
him an official target. That resulted in a 2006
probationary sentence comprising a three-year
imprisonment and a five-year probation for
"subversion of state power" and the forced closure
of his law firm.
In 2007, he wrote an open
letter to the US Congress exposing Chinese
authorities' torture of dissidents. Gao went
missing in April 2010 and is reportedly imprisoned
in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in
Western China.
Grassroots rights
activists The plight of human-rights
lawyers have not deterred others from joining the
rights movement. In fact, they have inspired many
grassroots activists to fight outside the
courtroom. Chen Guangcheng is a case in point.
His story explains how lawyers and
grassroots activists join forces from time to
time. After Chen filed a class action lawsuit
against the Shandong authority over forced
abortion and sterilization of poor villagers, he
was arrested in June 2005. Human-rights lawyers
from Beijing and Shandong immediately stepped in
to defend Chen, though in vain.
This
grassroots activism has also grown out of the
country's thriving microblogs (China's equivalent
of Twitter). Though heavily censored, the Chinese
Internet has spawned a growing league of active
users whose personal blogs have become vital
sources of information of official misconduct and
platforms for social mobilization.
A
prominent representative is Hu Jia, a two-time
Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who since 2001 has
exposed the plight of rural victims of HIV/AIDS
through his blog. He later began reporting on
wider human-rights abuses and speaking to overseas
media online. In November 2007, he joined a
European Union parliamentary hearing in Brussels
via webcam in which he criticized China's failure
to honor its promise to improve human rights in
the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.
Hu was
soon detained and sentenced for three-and-a-half
years in April 2008 for "inciting subversion of
state power". He regained his freedom in June 2011
and remains untamed. In early 2012, through his
blog he urged the authorities to allow prison
visits to the family of detained human-rights
lawyer Gao Zhisheng, resulting in a police raid at
his home.
In April this year, he appeared
with Chen Guangcheng in a photograph following
Chen's mysterious escape to a then secret location
in Beijing.
From group-based activism
to mass social movement The above six
groups (and perhaps more) operate at different
levels of Chinese society and in many cases with
overlapping membership. In the absence of a
central leadership, they are largely independent
but often join forces when unity is called for -
for example, in the face of intense government
persecutions or profound aspirations for reform.
The Charter 08 movement in late 2008 was a
good example. The cross-sectional support for this
democratic manifesto, whose 8,000-plus online
signatories included students, teachers, artists,
workers, farmers, entrepreneurs, civil servants,
in addition to the usual combination of
intellectuals and veteran activists, shows that
the momentum for bottom-up change has gradually
gathered steam in China.
The increasing
number of organized mass protests targeting
environmental issues is particularly revealing. In
recent years, there have been growing media
reports of villagers protesting in droves against
polluting facilities which, in an increasing
number of cases, have resulted in official
concessions.
In early July this year at
Sichuan's Shifang city, officials yielded to
public objections against the construction of a
controversial plant following fierce clashes
between protesting villagers, many of them
youngsters, and police. A familiar scene replayed
in Ningbo, a city in prosperous Zhejiang province,
at the end of October. After days of protests by
thousands of residents, local government halted
the expansion of a petrochemical factory, quelling
for the time being public anger amid deep distrust
against officials.
As for the blind
activist Chen Guangcheng, after all the hype
surrounding his feat, it remains uncertain whether
he will eventually fade away from the developing
scene of dissident movements in China - as has
happened for many in the exile community. In any
event, with a more vocal and rights-conscious
citizenry, which is no longer afraid of defying
official decrees, the organization and activism of
homegrown dissidents seems likely to grow.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
Dr Man Yee Karen Lee,
Assistant Professor, Department of Law and
Business, Hong Kong Shue Yan University. She
writes on human rights and rule of law issues in
Greater China, and is the author of "Democracy,
Charter 08, and China's Long Struggle for Dignity"
in Jean-Philippe Beja, Fu Hualing & Eva Pils
(eds), Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08, and the
Challenges of Political Reform in China (Hong
Kong: HKU Press, 2012)
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