Criminal Nation

After a Famed Prisoner Dies in China, Taiwan Fears for Another
By CHRIS HORTON

Pictures of Lee Ming-cheh, left, a rights advocate from Taiwan, and Tashi Wangchuk, an education advocate from Tibet, during a commemoration last month in Taiwan of the 1989 pro-democracy crackdown in China. Both men are in Chinese custody. 

TAIPEI, Taiwan — For many in Taiwan, the death in custody last week of the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo had double relevance.
It was a reminder of how much Taiwan — but not China — has changed politically since the late 1980s, when both were one-party, authoritarian states.
On Saturday, Taiwan, now a full-fledged democracy, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the end of four decades of martial law. 

On Tuesday, at the opening of the first Asian bureau of Reporters Without Borders, an organization that advocates press freedom, Wu’er Kaixi, a leader of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, dedicated a moment of silence to Mr. Liu, while praising Taiwan’s progress.
But the death of Mr. Liu, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence for his role in Charter 08, a manifesto for peaceful political change, also deepened concerns over the fate of Lee Ming-cheh, a human rights advocate from Taiwan who went missing after his arrival in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in March.
More than a week passed before Chinese officials announced that Mr. Lee had been detained. 

In April, Mr. Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu, was blocked from entering China, where she said she hoped to take him his blood-pressure medication. 

In late May, Mr. Lee was officially arrested on a charge of “subverting state power.”

It has not been lost on Mr. Lee’s family and friends, or the news media in Taiwan, that the charge he faces is similar to the one brought against Mr. Liu, of “inciting subversion of state power.”

Hours after Mr. Liu’s death, Taiwan’s state-owned Central News Agency reported that the governing Democratic Progressive Party had issued a statement calling on China to release Mr. Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, who was placed under house arrest in 2010, as well as Mr. Lee.
Comparing the plights of Mr. Liu and Mr. Lee, a commentary this month in a Taiwan newspaper, Liberty Times, asked: “Will Lee Ming-cheh be the next Liu Xiaobo?”
“What’s similar is that Lee Ming-cheh and Liu Xiaobo were both arrested for the crime of ‘subversion of state power,’” it said. 

“What’s different is that Liu Xiaobo is Chinese, whereas Lee Ming-cheh is Taiwanese. After Lee Ming-cheh entered prison, will he ‘get sick’ or be forcefully ‘sickened’? This deserves attention.”
Nongovernmental organization workers from Taiwan who travel to China should remain on a high state of alert, the commentary added. 

“You absolutely do not want to become the next Lee Ming-cheh,” it said.
In a letter to The Washington Post published on Sunday, Stanley Kao, Taiwan’s envoy to the United States, also connected the cases.
“Mr. Liu’s lifelong beliefs are the core values we live by in Taiwan, namely an abiding respect for human rights and due process of law,” Mr. Kao wrote, adding that China should immediately release Mr. Lee.
Beijing severed official communication channels with Taiwan in the fall after it became apparent that President Tsai Ing-wen, who took office in May last year, would not bow to Chinese pressure to endorse the “1992 consensus,” which holds that China and Taiwan agree there is “one China” — with each side reserving its own interpretation of what that means. 

Beijing has insisted that self-ruled Taiwan is part of its territory, and it has not renounced the use of force to achieve unification.
That has left the Tsai administration with limited tools to press Beijing for information about Mr. Lee. Ms. Tsai — one of the first government leaders to issue a statement mourning Mr. Liu’s death — has taken to her Twitter account to call for Mr. Lee’s release.
If history is any guide, progress on Mr. Lee’s case is unlikely in the coming weeks. 

The Chinese Communist Party is preparing for its 19th Party Congress this fall, a meeting that will determine the leadership lineup under Xi Jinping for the next five years and influence the succession beyond that. 

In the jockeying for power, concessions to Taiwan could be interpreted as a sign of weakness.
Eeling Chiu, secretary general of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, has supported Ms. Lee’s efforts to rally international pressure on China to free her husband. 

Ms. Chiu said that there had been no information about Mr. Lee’s situation aside from occasional statements from Beijing, such as the announcement last month that a lawyer had been appointed to represent him.
“We haven’t heard anything new since they announced they’d appointed him a lawyer,” she said in an interview, dismissing the gesture as “fake.” 

“We don’t even know who the lawyer is. If you’re trying to provide for the rights of someone involved in legal proceedings, getting in touch with their family is one of the most basic things you should do.”
The Tsai administration says it will continue to work on Mr. Lee’s behalf. 

“The government is doing everything it can to secure Mr. Lee’s release as soon as possible,” Alex Huang, the spokesman for the presidential office, said on Tuesday.

Criminal Nation

Malala condemns China over death of fellow Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo
By Paul Carsten

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai 
ABUJA -- Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai condemned China's treatment of her fellow peace prize-winner Liu Xiaobo following his death of liver cancer in custody last week.
Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for sweeping political reforms in China.
Liu's incarceration meant he was unable to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, and he became the second winner of it to die in state custody, the first being Carl von Ossietzky in Germany in 1938. Liu's wife Liu Xia remains under effective house arrest.
"I condemn any government who denies people's freedom," Yousafzai, 20, a Pakistani education activist who came to prominence when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012, told Reuters at a school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri.
"I'm hoping that people will learn from what he (Liu) did and join together and fight for freedom, fight for people's rights and fight for equality," she said.
Yousafzai's trip to Nigeria was aimed at raising awareness of education problems in Africa's most populous country where over 10.5 million children are out of school, more than anywhere else in the world.

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai speaks during an exclusive interview with Reuters in Maiduguri, Nigeria.

The issue is felt more severely in the mainly Muslim north. 

The south has over the decades seen greater investment and a system of schools started by Christian pastors affiliated with British colonists.
Nigeria needs to "increase spending on education and they need to make it public, the rate of spending planned and how much they're spending," said Yousafzai. 

Since her first trip to Nigeria three years ago, the proportion of the budget allocated to education has dropped from above 10 percent to around 6 percent, she said.
The eight-year Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram, whose name roughly means "Western education is forbidden," has compounded problems with education in Nigeria's north.
The militants have destroyed hundreds of schools and uprooted millions, forcing them into refugee camps which often lack the most basic necessities, let alone decent schooling.
On Monday, Malala called on Nigeria's acting president, Yemi Osinbajo, to call a state of emergency for the country's education.
"Nigeria in the north has been suffering through conflicts as well and extremism," she said.
"So it is important in that sense as well that they prioritize education in order to protect the future."

Criminal Nation

China murdered Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo: Reporters Without Borders
KYODO

In this Saturday file photo provided by the Shenyang Municipal Information Office, Liu Xia, wife of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, holds a portrait of him during his funeral at a funeral parlor in Shenyang in northeastern China's Liaoning Province. The photo shows (from left) Liu Hui, younger brother of Liu Xia, Liu Xia and Liu Xiaoxuan, younger brother of Liu Xiaobo holding his cremated remains.

RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire : “We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by the lack of care.” 

TAIPEI – Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières), which advocates freedom of information around the world, on Tuesday accused Chinese authorities of having murdered Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo by denying him proper medical care during his incarceration.
“We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by the lack of care,” RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire told a news conference held to formally launch an RSF bureau in Taipei, the Paris-headquartered media rights watchdog’s first in Asia.
Deloire rejected the claim that Chinese authorities did not know that Liu, who died last Thursday of multiple organ failure related to liver cancer, was seriously ill until just weeks before his death.
He urged democratic governments around the world to work for the release of other political prisoners in China, as well as jailed journalists, before it is too late for them, while he also called for Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, to be freed from house arrest.
If it happens again, he said, it “will be a failure for all democracies and for our own societies.”
Liu Xia was last seen in photographs and a video clip provided by Chinese authorities of her husband’s funeral and sea burial on Saturday.
A Hong Kong-based concern group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, quoted an unnamed relative of hers as saying Tuesday that she and her brother have been sent to southwestern China’s Yunnan Province on a “traveling tour” and that she would be allowed to return home in Beijing no earlier than Thursday.
Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, proposed at the news conference in Taipei that Taiwan erect a monument to Liu and designate July 13 as the day to commemorate his death.
“It is our duty to remember who died to make a better life for us,” she said.
Wu’er Kaixi, known for his leading role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, agreed, saying remembering a person like Liu is “the most humble but important power an individual possesses against tyranny.”
“I call upon the whole world to let each other know that we are determined to remember,” said the Chinese dissident, who serves as a member of the RSF Emeritus Board.
The RSF’s bureau in Taipei will monitor press freedom in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia and Taiwan.
The association said it chose Taiwan due to the self-ruled island’s central geographic location and ease of operating logistics, as well as its status of being the freest place in Asia in the group’s annual World Press Freedom Index ranking.
Praising Taiwan’s strides, Deloire said Monday in a meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen, “We hope this ‘freedom laboratory’ will be an example for the rest of the continent, amid a global decline in media freedom.”
“To this end, Taiwan must resist violations of the independence of its journalists, especially those carried out under Beijing’s influence, and must improve its legislation,” he said.
In his remarks Tuesday, Deloire said RSF decided against establishing its first Asian bureau in Hong Kong due to concerns over limits on freedom of speech there and possible surveillance of its staff.
He said the Chinese government, like that in Russia, “wants to set up a new world media order” and “wants to change the world before we succeed to change China.”

Criminal Nation

Liu Xiaobo’s Fate Reflects Fading Pressure on China Over Human Rights
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer while in state custody, was mourned in Hong Kong on Thursday.

BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, catapulted to fame in 1989, when the Communist Party’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square created an international uproar.
Now, nearly three decades later, Mr. Liu has died of cancer while in state custody, a bedridden and silenced example of Western governments’ reluctanc to push back against China’s resurgent authoritarians.
Mr. Liu’s fate reflects how human rights issues have receded in Western diplomacy with China. 

And it shows how Chinese Communist Party leaders, running a strong state bristling with security powers, can disdain foreign pleas, even for a man near death.
“It’s certainly become more difficult,” said John Kamm, an American businessman and founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, who for decades has quietly lobbied China to free or improve the treatment of political prisoners. 

He said his attempts to win approval for Mr. Liu to leave China for treatment, as Mr. Liu and his wife requested, got nowhere.

“I tried my best. I did everything I could,” he said before Mr. Liu died. 

“Things are pretty difficult right now. It’s hard for me to get the kinds of responses I need.”
These days, major Western governments struggle to get responses from China about prisoners and conditions in Tibet and Xinjiang. 

Western politicians have become less willing to dwell on human rights problems when other issues fill their meetings with Chinese officials.
The United States, Germany and other Western governments did politely prod China to release Mr. Liu from prison and let him go abroad for treatment of his liver cancer, accompanied by his wife, Liu Xia.
A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, issued a statement that “she "would like" a signal of humanity for Liu Xiaobo and his family,” while Trump said nothing publicly about his case, leaving any comment to lower-ranking officials.
Merkel’s statement was a reflection of how the world order has shifted, with the United States under Trump departing from its traditional role as the most vocal advocate of human rights.
Still, Mr. Kamm and others said the shift came many years before Trump entered the White House in January.
“I do not think that the world prior to Jan. 20, 2017, was one rife with robust, consistent diplomatic intervention on behalf of peaceful, independent civil society in China,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. 

“Taken together, particularly over the 2000s and into the 2010s, you have got progressively less interest on foreign governments in really fighting as hard as they ought to have for systemic change in China.”
In Mr. Liu’s case, Chinese officials have dismissed calls by Western governments as meddling.
Beijing issued video and still images of Mr. Liu in a hospital in northeast China, as if to say: We don’t need lectures about how to take care of our prisoners. 

Beijing ignored advice from a German and an American cancer specialist who visited Mr. Liu, at its invitation, and who said he was well enough to travel for treatment.

A torch parade in honor of Mr. Liu in Oslo on Dec. 10, 2010, the day of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. He was imprisoned by then, and his absence at the event was signified by an empty chair.

“If Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was able to win some freedom for half a month — or two weeks or four days or half a day — and could speak out after eight years of silence, that would be intolerable for the government,” said Wu Yangwei, a writer who uses the pen name Ye Du and is a friend of Mr. Liu’s. 

“Ten years ago, it might have been different, there might have been a little hope. But the political atmosphere has shifted.”
Lobbying China over its harsh prison sentences for dissent and its other shackles on citizens’ rights has never been an amicable conversation; progress has long been spotty. 

But Mr. Liu’s case reflects how Western pressure on China’s human rights problems has decreased, while Chinese leaders have become adept at using economic and diplomatic lures and threats to thwart it.
The shifting geopolitics around China and the human rights issue also appeared to be reflected in the disjointed reaction to Mr. Liu’s death from top officials of the United Nations, where China has moved to raise its prominence by increasing financial support and furnishing peacekeeping troops.
The organization’s high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, implicitly criticized China in a condolence statement by describing Mr. Liu as a champion who had been “jailed for standing up for his beliefs.”
But António Guterres, the secretary-general, was more circumspect. 

Asked for a comment, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said Mr. Guterres was “deeply saddened,” but he did not address the circumstances of Mr. Liu’s death or the restrictions on Mr. Liu’s wife. 

“I don’t have anything further to say at this point,” Mr. Dujarric told reporters on Thursday.
In 1989, Mr. Liu was detained for nearly two years after the Chinese government called him a “black hand” who supported the student demonstrators who crowded Tiananmen Square before an armed crackdown. 

Back then, Communist Party leaders railed against Western-inspired subversion and imprisoned leading participants in the protests who hadn’t fled.
Yet China was more vulnerable to pressure, and sometimes made concessions.
It was the world’s ninth-biggest economy in 1989, and needed expertise, investment and technology from advanced countries to begin growing again. 

It did not have a wide circle of countries that would help it thwart Western sanctions and isolation. 

And the party general secretary and later president, Jiang Zemin, appeared eager for affirmation and even friendship from Bill Clinton and other Western leaders.
But since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its economy took off, leaders in Beijing have become increasingly set against making concessions on human rights cases. 

That posture has reflected China’s economic and diplomatic strength. 

But it has also reflected leaders’ longstanding fears that, even with robust growth, broad public support and a powerful police apparatus, they are vulnerable to political foes.
From 1989 to 2008, when Mr. Liu helped start Charter 08, a petition for democratic change, he and other dissenters still hoped that the Communist Party could be coaxed to give citizens greater freedoms, pushed by civic mobilization in China and encouraged by Western governments and groups. 

Even if there were occasional setbacks, many believed expanding market forces and a growing middle class would shape history in their direction and would make the government ultimately accept political liberalization.
“China’s economy is growing quickly, and this economic development is supportive of a political transformation,” Mr. Liu said in an interview in 2004. 

“China’s international environment has seen big changes, and there’d be very strong international support for its political reforms.”
But Mr. Liu was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009. 

China’s leader since 2012, Xi Jinping, has overseen an even more comprehensive crackdown on dissent, rights lawyers and independent civil groups. 

Mr. Liu’s supporters have not abandoned their hopes, but they see that the government has gained confidence against critics.
Mr. Kamm of the Dui Hua Foundation said he would continue to present lists of political prisoners to Chinese officials. 

Now he also plans to point out how the government’s treatment of Mr. Liu hurt China’s image, he said.
“I think they have taken an incredible hit on this,” Mr. Kamm said. 

“There are five prisoners on my list tonight that I will use this to try to get out of prison into their loved ones’ arms.”

Criminal Nation: Why China Is Afraid Of Ailing Dissident Liu Xiaobo

Since Chicoms won’t let Liu Xiaobo leave China for medical help, he probably will die soon. But his efforts to speak the truth will endure.
By Helen Raleigh

Chinese authorities accuse dying Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo of being one of the most dangerous enemies of the state. 

Yet Liu’s recently leaked picture shows him staring back, very thin and fragile, with a gentle smile. His glasses gave him a bookish look. 

You probably can’t help wondering: what could make this seemingly harmless man public enemy number one in China? 

His “crime”: believing in exercising his human right to free speech. 

That’s a dangerous thing in China.
Before he became a political dissident, Liu was a scholar and a teacher. 

He was among the first generation of Chinese youth to take the national college entrance exam and attend universities following the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). 

After he received a PhD in literature from Beijing Normal University, he became a teacher at the same university.
Besides teaching, he was known to offer sharp opinions that challenged government-sanctioned doctrines and ideology through his many published literature critique pieces. 

Thus he was nicknamed a “dark horse.” 

Liu didn’t considered himself a radical, though. 

In his words, he determined instead merely that, “whether as a person or as a writer, I would lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity.”

He Sacrificed Himself for His Country
The decade from 1980 to 1989 was probably the most liberal period in China’s history since the founding of communist China in 1949. 

China implemented a series of economic and political reforms under pragmatic political leaders, from Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang to Zhao Zhiyang. 

A group of Chinese intellectuals encouraged by the relatively relaxed political atmosphere, including Liu, explicitly advocated that China learn from Western civilization: rule of law, free and open markets, and more personal freedom. 

Liu was a rising star among them, but he wasn’t the most famous.
The year 1989 began as a relatively uneventful year until Hu Yaobang’s unexpected passing in April. Coincidentally, he died right around the Qingming holiday, a traditional Chinese holiday when people pay tribute to their deceased loved ones. 

Hu was regarded as a liberal hero in China. 

Many ordinary Chinese people took to the streets to pay tribute for Hu’s death. 

Gradually, mourning for Hu turned into a movement calling on the Chinese government to grant people more freedom and to apply meaningful anticorruption measures. 

Peaceful demonstrators, mostly students, started occupying Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
At this time, Liu was a visiting scholar in the United States. 

He could have stayed here, advocating for freedom and democracy in safety and comfort. 

Yet he chose to return to China and join the movement, knowingly putting himself in life-threatening danger. 

By doing so, he followed a long line of intellectuals throughout China’s 2,000-year history who aspired to become “junzi”—virtuous men who are driven by responsibility to their country and to “tianxia” (the world). 

They believed that it’s their responsibility as well as a symbol of their virtue to sacrifice themselves to make their country better.
The rest was history. 

On June 4, 1989, China’s supreme leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the Chinese military to forcefully take back Tiananmen Square and “remove” protestors. 

The crackdown resulted in an unknown number of deaths of the innocent. 

June 4 was a turning point for China as well as for Liu. 

He lost his teaching position and “was thrown into prison for ‘the crime of counter‑revolutionary propaganda and incitement.’”
In Liu’s own words, “Merely for publishing different political views and taking part in a peaceful democracy movement, a teacher lost his lectern, a writer lost his right to publish, and a public intellectual lost the opportunity to give talks publicly. This is a tragedy, both for me personally and for a China that has already seen thirty years of ‘Reform and Opening Up.’”

Repression Led to International Acclaim
Since 1989, Chinese authorities have punished Liu for his various pro-democracy activities by putting him in prison several times. 

In 2008, modeled after Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, Liu co-authored Charter 08, a manifesto calling for Chinese government to implement things Americans have taken for granted, such as freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and freedom of association. 

Liu was promptly arrested and later sentenced to 11 years in prison. 

He has been in prison ever since.
What China didn’t expect was that its repression probably helped turn Liu into an internationally renowned political activist. 

In 2010, Norway’s Nobel committee awarded Liu the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Beijing was so furious, it froze diplomatic ties with Norway and heavily censored any Nobel-related news that year.
Liu was the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize, but he wasn’t allowed to claim it and his wife has since been put under house arrest. 

The picture of an empty chair representing him at the Nobel Prize ceremony is as iconic an image as the photo of the “tank man.” 

Both symbolize the Chinese people’s struggle for freedom.

The Nobel Peace Prize vindicated Liu’s moral and mortal bravery. 

Unfortunately it probably also sealed his fate, because Chinese authorities will never let Liu leave China after he gained such international fame. 

Recently Liu is reported to suffer from late-stage liver cancer but Chinese authorities are refusing to let Liu seek treatment abroad.

‘Hatred Can Rot a Nation’
China has made great strides in economic development. 

Internationally, China has used its newfound wealth and power to buy the silence of human rights critics. 

Many countries who are eager to profit from the world’s second-largest economy have complied by looking the other way. 

Within China, partly due to Chinese government’s censorship and partly by choice, Liu disappeared from many Chinese people’s collective memory. 

Most young people who were born after 1989 don’t even know who he is.
The news of Liu’s illness has renewed people’s interest in him and brought back discussions of his work, his struggle, and the part of China’s history that the government still eagerly suppresses. 

Liu’s ailing picture has cast a long shadow on China’s painstakingly crafted image of a benevolent and progressive global leader. 

Liu said before that he hoped he “will be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisitions and that from now on no one will be incriminated because of speech.” 

Unfortunately, Liu won’t be China’s last sacrificial lamb. 

China today is less free than back in the 1980s, and the fight for freedom goes on, only becoming more difficult.
Confucius said “Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of a junzi (virtuous man).” 

Liu certainly lives up to that high standard. 

He paid a high price for what he believes in, but he is never bitter. 

When he last had a chance to communicate to the outside world, he titled his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, read by Liv Ullmann, “I have no enemies.”
While maintaining his innocence and that the charges against him are unconstitutional, Liu gave sincere praise to almost everyone he encountered: policemen, prosecutors, and jailers. 

He did so not as a grandstanding gesture, but because he believes “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation’s progress toward freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation’s development and social change, to counter the regime’s hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.”

Since the Chinese authorities won’t let the 61-year-old Liu leave China for medical help, he probably won’t have much time left on this earth. 

But his effort to dispel hatred with love and to never give up speaking the truth has been and will continue to inspire generations to come. 

“History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.’” 

Chinese people probably have a long way to go before they can speak their minds freely without worrying about government persecution. 

When that day finally arrives, they will remember the name Liu Xiaobo.