Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia, Beijing, October 22, 2002'A Turning Point in the Long Struggle':
林培瑞：刘获诺奖是一个重要转折-刘晓波代表反中国专制文化的普世价值
Chinese Citizens Defend Liu Xiaobo
Perry Link 林培瑞
陈凯一语：
陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com
刘晓波获诺奖打破了几十年来西方政界对中共党朝的一贯绥靖态度。 这一举动告知了世界所有的人们中共党朝的路是邪恶的反人类之路；一个党朝在物质上的强大只能是一个对世界良知人们自由的严重威胁。 我对刘获诺奖感到欣慰与鼓舞，因为它不光是对中共党朝的打击，也是对所有反人反自由的专制文化的打击。
Kai Chen's Words:
Liu Xiaobo's winning Nobel Peace Prize breaks the mode of Western "appeasement" attitude toward China since the 1980s. It is an indictment of "China Model of Development". It tells people in the world that China Model is anti-human and anti-freedom. It tells people in the world a despotic party-state with economic and military power can only pose as a mortal threat to peace in the world. I applaud the decision by Nobel Peace Prize Committee to have awarded this symbolic prize to Mr. Liu Xiaobo, for it is not only a rejection of China's communist party-state, it is a rejection of a despotic anti-human and anti-freedom culture.
Perry Link 林培瑞
It would be hard to overstate how much the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo on October 8 has meant to China’s community of dissidents, bloggers, and activists. Not only has it lifted their spirits tremendously; many also view it as a possible turning point in the long struggle to bring democracy and human rights to their country. Their ebullience seems unaffected by the hostile reaction of the Chinese government, which has called the Nobel Committee’s decision “obscene” and an “insult to China.” Chinese authorities have spread the message in China’s state-run media that Liu Xiaobo is a criminal serving time in prison, but without quoting even a small sample of the words or ideas that have caused him to be there; and they have escalated their harassment of Liu’s friends and colleagues.
On October 14, one hundred and nine of those friends and colleagues released on the Internet the open letter that follows. The signers include Zhang Zuhua, Wen Kejian, Wang Debang, and others who worked with Liu Xiaobo on Charter 08, the citizens’ pro-democracy statement that became the main reason for Liu Xiaobo’s 11-year prison term. The co-signers include many other distinguished figures: rights lawyers Pu Zhiqiang and Teng Biao; Dai Qing , the journalist and environmental activist; the novelist and democracy theorist Wang Lixiong; the Tibetan poet Woeser; veteran publisher Yu Haocheng; film scholar (and translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese) Cui Weiping; senior academicians in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Zi Zhongyun, Xu Youyu and Zhang Boshu. Co-signers came from all across China, including two each from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
After release of the letter, its organizers invited signatures from anyone in the world, and within days hundreds more had signed. Readers of this blog are welcome to sign, too, by writing to 1c. An updated list of signers can be found at http://wexiaobo.org.
Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities continue to try to control how the story is perceived both at home and abroad. Liu Xia, who is Liu Xiaobo’s wife, is under house arrest without having been charged, which violates Chinese law and is bad press internationally for the regime. Her telephone and computer have been confiscated, but she managed to get this message out on October 16 by Twitter on a cell phone:
One of the policemen watching me said that it was his wife’s birthday and that he wanted to go shopping for her. But his orders were that he had to stay with me, so would I like to accompany him to the shopping mall? Sure, I thought, and went. When we got to the mall, I noticed all kinds of strange people photographing me from various angles. I realized it had all been a trick. The authorities wanted photographs to prove that Liu Xia is free and happily shopping at malls.
This shows, beyond the regime’s bald mendacity, that it cares about international opinion.
—Perry Link
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On Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize: An Open Letter
The awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese citizen, has drawn strong reactions both inside and outside China. This is a major event in modern Chinese history. It offers the prospect of a significant new advance for Chinese society in its peaceful transition toward democracy and constitutional government. In a spirit of responsibility toward China’s history and future promise, we the undersigned wish to make these points:
1.The decision of the Nobel Committee to award this year’s prize to Liu Xiaobo is in full conformity with the principles of the prize and the criteria for its bestowal. In today’s world, peace is closely connected with human rights. Deprivation and devastation of life happen not only on battlefields in wars between nations; they also happen within single nations when tyrannical governments employ violence and abuse law. The praise that we have seen from around the world for the decision to award the prize to a representative of China’s human rights movement shows what a wise and timely decision it was.
2.Liu Xiaobo is a splendid choice for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has consistently advocated non-violence in his quest to protect human rights and has confronted social injustice by arguing from reason. He has persevered in pursuing the goals of democracy and constitutional government and has set aside anger even toward those who persecute him. These virtues put his qualifications for the prize beyond doubt, and his actions and convictions can, in addition, serve as models for others in how to resolve political and social conflict.
3.In the days since the announcement of his prize, leaders in many nations and major world organizations have called upon the Chinese authorities to release Liu Xiaobo. We agree. At the same time we call upon the authorities to release all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience who are in detention because of what they’ve said or written, their political views, or their religious beliefs. We ask that legal procedures aimed at freeing Liu Xiaobo be undertaken without delay, and that Liu and his wife be permitted to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10.
4.Upon hearing the news of Liu Xiaobo’s prize, groups of citizens in several places in China gathered at restaurants to share their excitement over food and wine and to hold discussions, display banners, and distribute notices. Law-abiding and reasonable as these activities were, they met with harassment and repression from police. Some of the participants were interrogated, threatened, and escorted home; others were detained; still others, including Liu Xiaobo’s wife Liu Xia, have been placed under house arrest and held incommunicado. We call upon the police to cease these illegal actions immediately and to release the people who have been illegally detained.
5.We call upon the Chinese authorities to approach Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize with realism and reason. They should take note of the responses to the prize inside and outside China and see in these responses the currents in world thinking as well as the underlying preferences of our fellow citizens. China should join the mainstream of civilized humanity by embracing universal values. Such is the only route to becoming a “great nation” that is capable of playing a positive and responsible role on the world stage. We are convinced that any positive steps taken by or sign of goodwill from the government and its leaders will be met with understanding and support from the Chinese people and will be effective in moving Chinese society in a peaceful direction.
6.We call upon the Chinese authorities to make good on their oft-repeated promise to reform the political system. In a recent series of speeches, Premier Wen Jiabao has intimated a strong desire to promote political reform. We are ready to engage actively in such an effort. We expect our government to uphold the constitution of The People’s Republic of China as well as the Charter of the United Nations and other international agreements to which it has subscribed. This will require it to guarantee the rights of Chinese citizens as they work to bring about a peaceful transition toward a society that will be, in fact and not just in name, a democracy and a nation of laws.
October 18, 2010 10:36 p.m.
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陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com
Liu Xiaobo and universal values
刘晓波代表反中国专制文化的普世价值
October 11th, 2010
Author: David Kelly, UTS
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo is a salutary event. For a Chinese writer and public intellectual to be so singled out does his nation no dishonour, despite official statements to the contrary. It shows rather that China, a nation that once led the world in the enunciation of universal values, is capable of returning to its ancient role.
In the fullness of time, Liu’s contribution to the social and political development of China will very likely come to be seen as comparable to that of Mandela’s to Africa or of Havel’s to Eastern Europe. But even if such an outcome is somehow staved off, Liu has made the work of the forces of tyranny much harder, and the prospects of the forces of political reform much brighter.
Liu Xiaobo is a former university lecturer in literature and philosophy, the author of books and articles; gaoled after the Tiananmen movement of 1989, despite his well-documented role in attempting to persuade the students to drop their radical postures, and despite also his role in averting a worse massacre from occurring. Gaoled again in the late 1990s, constantly under surveillance and long prevented from pursuing an academic career, Liu became a phenomenally productive columnist, able to publish in Hong Kong and other overseas media. With his writings under strict ban in China, he is largely unknown to the general public, though capable of creating waves in cultural and intellectual circles. In 2009 he and a circle of associates produced Charter 08, modelled on Vaclav Havel’s Charter 77. This document challenged political authority, demanding that it live up to its own stated political reform objectives. At the top of politics in China, there is evidence of division over political reform. Premier Wen Jiabao, head of the Government and a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, has called for the realisation of universal values.
Despite the attempts of Wen and others, a shallow understanding of universal values has been attached to a conspiracy theory that poses them as weapons in an effort by the West to contain and repress China’s rightful rise in the world. In his best-selling book, China Stands Up (2010), the writer Moluo, who once sided with ‘liberal’ voices close to Liu Xiaobo, sets out to settle accounts with the ‘May Fourth Movement’, the patriotic movement criticising the entire Chinese tradition that followed the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 (and, ironically, gave rise to the Communist movement in China).
Moluo claims that the May Fourth, now a tradition of counter-tradition, embodied the denigration of Chinese culture that had been a mark of Western imperialism since the Opium Wars. While not mentioned explicitly by Moluo, Liu Xiaobo’s writings are solidly in the May Fourth lineage. From as early as his first book, Xuanze de pipan [Critique of Choice], (1988), Liu’s ‘Chineseness’ has always been open to nationalistic attack on grounds of supposed ‘wholesale Westernisation.’ On one occasion, interviewed by the Hong Kong journal Kaifang, he stated that political reform was possible in China only if one imagined it remaining under colonial reform for 300 years. ‘I doubt 300 years would suffice,’ he added. Those who know Liu can easily imagine the ironic grin and chuckle with which he would have made this statement. Nationalist propaganda, unrelenting since the suppression of the Tiananmen protest movement, has created a generation in China that is utterly tone-deaf to irony and for whom Liu is quite literally a traitor (though they can’t explain why he would have advertised this so publicly before returning to live in his motherland).
The text of Charter 08, the document which more than anything else sealed Liu Xiaobo’s fate and led to his harsh 11-year sentence on Christmas Day 2009, is explicit in its appeal to universal values:
‘The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.’
Attacks on Liu Xiaobo will inevitably link his ‘wholesale Westernisation’ with the universal values to which the Charter 08 document subscribes. His insistence that universal values really be universal — that the West itself be subject to its own culture of critical enquiry —will be swept aside. But there is a fatal weakness in the critique of universal values in China today. Something has to be offered in their place such as ‘Chinese values.’ So far nothing but ‘motherhood’ concepts like ‘harmonious society’ and ‘peaceful rise’ have been put forward. Social order, based at its core on a pervasive police state, and unquestionable authority protecting the interests of an opaque power elite are values that dare not state their real names. In any genuine debate they must fall before the universal values of Charter 08. If there is anything of value in them — say traditional Confucian ideas of meritocracy — these will survive genuine debate and become special applications of universal values. Meritocracy that arbitrarily arrests and imprisons will be thrown in the trash-can of history.
Universal values are only universal in a Platonic sense. They continually find concrete expression as societies, together with the economic and political systems, evolve and change. What is crucial is that a nation’s leadership articulate rather than impose its values. The adaptation of universal values to a particular context can be achieved only by the society as a whole. It is this that makes them universal. China has nothing to fear from genuinely universal values because they will at the end of the day be defined and enacted by Chinese people.
The regime quite literally gaoled Liu ‘because it could’. It will eventually release him for the same reason.
David Kelly is a Professor of China Studies at the China Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney.
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