Freedom Fighters

A Nobel Prize for Hong Kong’s Democrats
By BARI WEISS

Leaders of the “Umbrella Movement” Nathan Law, left, and Joshua Wong, center, at a rally in Hong Kong on Wednesday. 

Here’s a suggestion for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which opens its nominating season next month: Look to the three young men who earlier today became Hong Kong’s first prisoners of conscience.
In 2014, the courageous trio helped lead what become known as the Umbrella Movement — an enormous political protest defending Hong Kong’s freedoms from an increasingly aggressive Beijing. Like Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Aung San Suu Kyi and so many dissidents that came before them, the men were hit with a bogus charge (“unlawful assembly”), were found guilty and served out their punishments last year.
But today, Hong Kong’s Department of Justice decided that those penalties were too lenient.
Joshua Wong, who burst onto the city’s political scene at 14 years old and is the public face of its democracy movement, was sentenced to six months. 

Nathan Law and Alex Chow were sentenced to seven and eight months, respectively. 

All three had budding political careers, but these new sentences bar them from running for public office for the next five years.
As Mr. Wong put it to a reporter from The New York Times before his sentencing: “The government wanted to stop us from running in elections and directly suppress our movement.” 

He added: “There’s no longer rule of law in Hong Kong. It’s rule by law.” 

Just so.
The implications of their imprisonment are monumental. 

Since Britain handed over jurisdiction of its former colony to China 20 years ago, the city has operated under the notion of “one country, two systems.” 

That increasingly appears to be an empty slogan. 

“The outcome isn’t just a travesty for these three peaceful pro-democracy activists or free speech — it’s also a painfully clear sign that Beijing’s political dictates are eating away at Hong Kong’s judiciary, an institution essential to the territory’s autonomy,” Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, told me.
Derek Lam, Mr. Wong’s best friend and a key activist in the movement, put it even more bluntly in a call from Hong Kong: “The court of Hong Kong is a slave of the Chinese government.” 

He added: “The judge doesn’t acknowledge that democracy, freedom and human rights are the reasons Joshua is doing this. He just kept insisting that they were inciting violence.”

Mr. Lam, who aspires to become a pastor, could soon be accused of the same: Next month he faces sentencing for his role in a 2016 protest.

“I am heartbroken. All my friends went to jail today. I might join them next month,” he told me. 

“But we will never regret what we have done. What we are doing is correct. It is the truth. And we will persist.” 

That relentless spirit was echoed by Mr. Law, Mr. Chow and Mr. Wong today. 

As Mr. Wong, just 20 years old, put it on Twitter before he was jailed: “You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds! We want democracy in Hong Kong. And we will not give up.”
The battle these young people are waging is far bigger than their futures — or even than Hong Kong itself. 

They are among some of the most prominent leaders pushing an authoritarian China to honor its international and political commitments. 

Can a handful of Davids hold a Goliath to account? 

The imprimatur of a Nobel Prize would help.

Criminal Nation

Liu Xiaobo: The man China couldn't erase
By Carrie Gracie

Activist Liu Xiaobo has died after spending eight years in prison

"There is nothing criminal in anything I have done but I have no complaints."
So stated Liu Xiaobo in court in 2009, and in the eight long prison years between then and now, he refused to recant his commitment to democracy. 

No wonder China's leaders are as afraid of him in death as they were in life.
The Chinese Communist Party was once a party of conviction, with martyrs prepared to die for their cause, but it's had nearly 70 years in power to become an ossified and cynical establishment. 

It imprisons those who demand their constitutional rights, bans all mention of them at home and uses its economic might abroad to exact silence from foreign governments. 

Under Xi Jinping, China has pursued this repression with great vigour and success. 

Liu Xiaobo is a rare defeat.
Beijing's problem began in 2010 when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. 

That immediately catapulted Liu Xiaobo into an international A-list of those imprisoned for their beliefs, alongside Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Carl von Ossietzky.
The last in that list may be unfamiliar to some, but to Beijing he's a particularly uncomfortable parallel. 

Carl von Ossietzky was a German pacifist who won the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize while incarcerated in a concentration camp.

Hitler would not allow a member of the laureate's family to collect the award on his behalf.
Liu Xiaobo was also serving a prison sentence for subversion when he won the peace prize. 

Beijing would not let his wife collect the award and instead placed her under house arrest. 

Liu Xiaobo was represented at the 2010 award ceremony in Oslo by an empty chair and the comparisons began between 21st Century China and 1930s Germany.

While in jail, Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. An empty chair was left for him at the ceremony
Strict censorship is another shared feature of both cases. 

Mention of Carl von Ossietzky's 1935 Nobel peace prize was banned in Nazi Germany and the same is true of Liu Xiaobo's award in China today. 

For a time China even banned the search term "empty chair". 

So he has been an embarrassment to China internationally, but at home few Chinese are aware of him. 

Even as foreign doctors contradicted the Chinese hospital on his fitness to travel, and Hong Kong saw vigils demanding his release, blanket censorship in mainland China kept the public largely ignorant of the dying Nobel laureate in their midst.
Selective amnesia is state policy in China and from Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment until his death, the government worked hard to erase his memory. 

To make it hard for family and friends to visit, he was jailed nearly 400 miles from home. 

His wife Liu Xia was shrouded in surveillance so suffocating that she gradually fell victim to mental and physical ill health. 

Beijing punished the Norwegian government to the point where Oslo now shrinks from comment on Chinese human rights or Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize.

Liu Xiaobo (left) is seen here with his wife Liu Xia (right) in this undated photo

But in death as in life, Liu Xiaobo has refused to be erased. 

The video footage of the dying man which China released outside the country was clearly intended to prove to the world that everything was done to give him a comfortable death. 

The unintended consequence is to make him a martyr for China's downtrodden democracy movement and to deliver a new parallel with the Nobel Peace Prize of 1930s Germany.
Liu Xiaobo was granted medical parole only in the terminal stage of his illness, and even in hospital he was under close guard with friends denied access to his bedside. 

Nearly 80 years ago, Carl von Ossietzky also died in hospital under prison guard after medical treatment came too late to save him.
Comparisons with the human rights record and propaganda efforts of Nazi Germany are particularly dismaying for Beijing after a period in which it feels it has successfully legitimised its one-party state on the world stage. 

At the G20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, no world leader publicly challenged Xi over Liu Xiaobo's treatment. 

With China increasingly powerful abroad and punitive at home, there are few voices raised on behalf of its political dissidents.
Liu Xiaobo was not always a dissident. 

An outspoken academic with a promising career and a passport to travel, until 1989 he'd led a charmed life. 

The Tiananmen Square democracy movement that year was the fork in his path.

After the massacre on June 4th, the costs of defying the Party were tragically clear to all.
Most of his contemporaries, and of the generations which followed, judged those costs too high. 

They chose life, liberty and a stake in the system.
Liu Xiaobo was one of the few who took the other fork. 

He stayed true to the ideals of 1989 for the rest of his life, renouncing first his opportunities to leave China, and then, repeatedly, his liberty. 

Even in recent years, his lawyers said he had turned down the offer of freedom in exchange for a confession of guilt.
'If you want to enter hell, don't complain of the dark....' Liu Xiaobo once wrote. 

And in the statement from his trial which was read at his Nobel award ceremony alongside his empty chair, Liu Xiaobo said he felt no ill will towards his jailers and hoped to transcend his personal experience.
No wonder such a man seemed dangerous to Beijing. 

For a jealous ruling party, an outsider with conviction is an affront, and those who cannot be bought or intimidated are mortal enemies.
But for Liu Xiaobo the struggle is over. 

The image of his empty deathbed will now haunt China like the image of his empty chair. 

And while Beijing continues to intimidate, persecute and punish those who follow his lead, it will not erase the memory of its Nobel prize winner any more than Nazi Germany erased its shame 81 years ago.

The EU must stand up to China

The scandalous treatment of Nobel prizewinner Liu Xiaobo means Europe has to challenge Xi Jinping over human rights at next week’s G20 summit
By Natalie Nougayrède

A pro-democracy protest in support of Liu Xiaobo and other jailed activists, in Hong Kong yesterday. ‘Who will cry out Liu’s name in Hamburg?’ 

Next week Donald Trump and Xi Jinping travel to Europe for a G20 summit in Hamburg. 

Who do you think will attract the most protests? 

Very probably Trump. 

But what about attitudes towards the Chinese leader, whose regime is currently preventing the Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo from travelling freely to receive cancer treatment in a place of his choice? 

Surely this scandal warrants a strong reaction.
Yet Liu’s oppressors are counting on silence. 

Hamburg is a unique occasion to try to help an iconic dissident and, more than that, to push back against autocracy and defend universal values. 

Will this happen? 

Will the protesters readying themselves to descend on the city also carry “Free Liu!” banners?
Like Nelson Mandela and Andrei Sakharov in their time, Liu is a symbol of the struggle for dignity and human rights across the world, not just in his own country. 

His bravery is indisputable, his cause is universal, and his plight is scandalous.
His illness was recently revealed. 

He is dying, and he is kept under duress. 

His friends say he wants to travel outside China with his wife. 

The Chinese leadership has so far refused the request. It treats him as a criminal. In short, it is intent on making everyone forget about Liu. 

That’s how dictatorships operate.
So who will cry out Liu’s name in Hamburg? 

Alongside the anarchists and radical leftwing activists, hardline militants are promising to create a “hell” of demonstrations. 

There’s hardly any sign they have Liu in mind. 

More importantly, Europe’s leaders should be preparing to speak with one voice on upholding a rules-based global order: will they include UN human rights conventions in that?
Angela Merkel, the host of a summit being held in the city of her birth, has made it plain that confronting Trump on climate change, trade and multilateralism are her priorities. 

“If you believe you can solve the problems of this world with isolationism and protectionism you are very wrong,” she’s warned. 

She’s laid out the question that stands before Europe: “What role will the continent play in the years to come?” 

Note: she hasn’t said much about dealing with Xi on human rights.

Liu Xiaobo (left) is fed to by his wife, Liu Xia, in a hospital in China. Last month he was diagnosed with liver cancer, and his request to travel abroad for treatment has been denied. 

It’s easy to ascribe this to the cynicism that comes with protecting business interests: China is an important economic partner for Germany, and its political leverage increases with every investment or buy-up it secures in other European countries too. 

Witness Greece vetoing an EU condemnation of China’s human rights record at the UN in June.
But a larger diplomatic factor is in play: China has positioned itself as a power that might help Europe counter Trump’s views on climate and trade, and is fast capitalising on Europe’s need for its cooperation – as Xi’s performance in Davos, to loud applause, illustrated.
Here’s the crux, however: Europe feels on the up these days, and wants to show it is more confident. Its leaders insist that, with Trump in the White House, there is a growing need to be steadfast on one of the EU’s key principles: an open world where individual rights and international norms are protected, not threatened.
Citizens want that too. 

The supporters of autocrats such as Vladimir Putin – Xi’s international ally – have, after all, hardly come out victorious in recent elections across the continent. 

Against that backdrop, surely Liu’s case is one on which Europe’s voice must be heard much more clearly and combatively.
Liu’s tragedy is not just about one man – nor is it something Europe should minimise. 

Liu was imprisoned for penning Charter 08, a political manifesto calling for basic freedoms in China that was inspired by the history of eastern European dissidents in the communist bloc. 

Its particular reference was to Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, with Václav Havel at its helm. 

He went on to become president of his country in 1990, and in many ways acted as a moral voice in Europe.
At a time of democratic backsliding in eastern Europe, a wholehearted defence of Liu would help cement the EU’s commitment to its values, and demonstrate an awareness of what courage can do in politics. 

The “power of the powerless” (to quote the title of one of Havel’s memorable texts) is what Liu symbolises.
Memories of this part of Europe’s history should be rekindled – they carry urgent messages for today. And there is another special European responsibility here: like Liu, the EU was awarded the Nobel peace prize (in 2012), in recognition of six decades of work in promoting “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”.

Fifth column: Greece blocks EU's criticism at UN of China's human rights record

Sadly, as Liu’s fate hangs in the balance there has been only a modest level of support for him in official EU statements. 

France, it is true, has indicated it would be ready to welcome him. 

European diplomats in Beijing are said to be closely following Liu’s situation. 

But as worthy as these steps may be, they fall short of expressly – and officially – addressing the significance of what is at stake. 

Liu’s battles should rank alongside those of other globally applauded emblems of nonviolent resistance to oppression, such as Martin Luther King or Aung San Suu Kyi.
Xi is coming to Europe and will appear before the world’s cameras at the first Trump-era G20. 

Now is the time for Europeans who care about the world they want to live in to show some solidarity on human rights – not just on climate and trade. 

Now is the time for some naming and shaming. 

If the Chinese leader gets through this summit without any pressure over Liu’s full freedom, the illiberal state model he promotes will only be strengthened. 

No one would stand to gain.
Targeting Trump in Hamburg is understandable, but we can confidently hope America’s democratic system will one day get the better of him. 

There are no such checks and balances in China, as Hong Kong dissidents well know. 

Chinese human rights activists have only their courage to count on, and the hope that the outside world, its citizens and its democratic governments, will somehow show support.
If you’re getting ready to protest in Hamburg, think about Liu Xiaobo. 

This is the time and place to act: to show you care about one man’s brave struggle against a regime’s impunity. 

It wouldn’t be about “western imperialism”: it would be about people power. 

Remember the man who in 1989 stood in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. 

Liu is like that man.