Liu Xiaobo, China’s Prescient Dissident

By Jiayang Fan

Even a diagnosis of late-stage liver cancer has not liberated Liu Xiaobo, China’s lone Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

China’s lone Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the political dissident Liu Xiaobo, is gravely ill.
In 2008, Liu, a prolific essayist and poet, was working on a manifesto advocating peaceful democratic reform, which became known as Charter 08, when the Chinese government tried him and found him guilty of “inciting subversion of state power.”
Since then, he has been serving an eleven-year sentence at a prison in the remote northeastern province of Liaoning, and his wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest in Beijing, despite the lack of any charges against her.
Liu’s diagnosis of late-stage liver cancer came at the end of last month.
The prognosis is grim.
In a video that a friend of the couple’s shared on social media, Liu’s wife says, through tears, that the doctors “can’t do surgery, can’t do radiation therapy, can’t do chemotherapy.”
Yet even this particularly wretched twist of fate has not liberated the man who has devoted his life to fighting for liberty.
Although Liu, who is now sixty-one, has been transferred to a hospital in Shenyang, on medical parole, he has yet to be granted release from his sentence.
Last Thursday, his lawyer said that the authorities are refusing to allow him to travel abroad for medical treatment.
In response to a statement from the United States Embassy calling for the couple to be given “genuine freedom,” the Chinese foreign ministry warned that “no country has a right to interfere and make irresponsible remarks on Chinese internal affairs.”
It added that “China is a country with rule of law, where everybody is equal in front of the law.”
This is a curious remark, given the increasingly repressive regime that Xi Jinping has fostered since taking office, in 2013. 
Civil society and the rule of law were part of what Liu campaigned for more than a decade ago, but, as unlikely as those concepts seemed then, they are less certain now.
After a period of enforced ideological conformity, the government has expanded its security apparatus, increased censorship, tightened its control of nongovernmental organizations, and toughened surveillance laws. 
Rights lawyers and activists have been arrested and jailed, and others have fled abroad.
Liu once had opportunities to do so himself.
A scholar of Chinese literature and philosophy, he taught at Beijing Normal University in the nineteen-eighties, where he became known for his frank reappraisals of China’s past and present, particularly of the brutalities imposed during the decades under Mao.
Liu’s passion and audacity could at times be provoking to both his peers and to the public, but they spoke to a deep investment in his country’s future and his determination to contribute to it.
His intellectual honesty rendered him vulnerable yet dauntless.
In the spring of 1989, Liu was in New York, where he was teaching at Barnard College, when the student protests calling for democracy and accountability began in Tiananmen Square.
He returned to Beijing and stayed in the square for several days, talking to the students about how democratic politics must be “politics without hatred and without enemies.”
When Premier Li Peng imposed martial law, Liu negotiated with the Army to allow demonstrators a safe exit from Tiananmen.
But, at the beginning of June, the Party ordered a crackdown, in which thousands of people were killed. (The state has never permitted an official tally.)
For Liu’s involvement in the events, the Chinese press labelled him a “mad dog” and a “Black Hand” for allegedly manipulating the will of the people, and he was sentenced to two years in prison for “counter-revolutionary propaganda.”
After his release, Liu was offered asylum in the Australian Embassy, but he refused it.
Similar offers came again and again, but a life in which Liu did not feel that he could make a direct impact held no appeal for him.
At a time when other intellectuals, registering the need for self-preservation, turned to writing books less likely to be banned on the mainland, Liu chose to prioritize his principles, in order to be an “authentic” person.
He was barred from publishing and giving public lectures in China, but on foreign Web sites he wrote more than a thousand articles promoting humanitarianism and democracy; he called the Internet “God’s gift to China.”
Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2010, while he was serving his sentence, in recognition of “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”
In an essay titled “Changing the Regime by Changing Society”—which during his trial was cited as evidence of his counter-revolutionary ideals—Liu expressed hope that the Chinese people would awaken to their situation and that their new awareness would forge a sense of solidarity against the state.
But he also warned of a growing moral vacuum in the nation.
He wrote:
China has entered an Age of Cynicism in which people no longer believe in anything...
Even high officials and other Communist Party members no longer believe Party verbiage. 
Fidelity to cherished beliefs has been replaced by loyalty to anything that brings material benefit. Unrelenting inculcation of Chinese Communist Party ideology has produced generations of people whose memories are blank.
It’s impossible to say what access Liu has had to the outside world during his incarceration.
It would certainly pain him to see how little younger people in China care or even know about the events in Tiananmen (the subject is strictly censored in the media) and how the nation’s growing international prominence has obscured its domestic ills—though he predicted as much.
“The Chinese Communists are concentrating on economics, seeking to make themselves part of globalization, and are courting friends internationally precisely by discarding their erstwhile ideology,” he wrote in 2006.
“When the ‘rise’ of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement from the international mainstream, the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people, but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world.” 
It perhaps would not surprise him to hear that last week, austerity-stricken Greece, which is courting Chinese investment, blocked a European Union effort to issue a statement condemning China’s human-rights violations.
As the news of Liu’s illness spread surreptitiously throughout China, democracy activists started a petition far narrower in its ambitions than Charter 08.
It asks only for Liu to be freed and to be given whatever medical care might help him now.
He would surely be grateful to his supporters for that gesture, but more than his illness he would regret how correctly he diagnosed Beijing’s recurring authoritarian impulses and his countrymen’s growing indifference to them.
Liu has always been a man of ideas, but that prescience will be of no comfort to anyone.

Chinese Fifth Column

The new Red Guards: China's angry student patriots
By Carrie Gracie

Ms Yang said the air in the US was "sweet and fresh"

Half a century ago millions of Chairman Mao's Red Guards gathered in rallies in Tiananmen Square to chant slogans and wave their red books of his quotations in a show of loyalty to the ideas of the "Great Helmsman".
The 21st Century successors to the Red Guards are not a physical presence. 

After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the tragedy of the Beijing massacre in 1989, young people are not allowed to demonstrate in China.
But some now hound their enemies online. 

The underlying rage is reminiscent. 

The instinct for intimidation is the same. 

Despite all its strengths and all its engagement with the world, China is once again prey to political groupthink and fear.
The latest trigger is a speech by a Chinese student at an American campus. 

On 21 May, at an official event, Shuping Yang praised the fresh air and freedom of speech she had found at the University of Maryland.
The video clip of her speech quickly went viral and triggered an outpouring of anger from fellow Chinese students in the US and critics at home. 

Shuping Yang swiftly apologised.

But that was not enough to stop the flood of "I am proud of China" posts accusing her of lies and deception, or the online "human flesh searches" to dig up incriminating information about her and her family.
Of course there are also some reasons to be proud of China.

The Red Guard was Mao Zedong's ideological youth movement to "purify" the Communist Party

But being proud of China does not mean denying another Chinese citizen the right to an opinion. 

The irony is that the very backlash against her has only served to make her point about the want of freedom of speech in her homeland. 

It has also highlighted a conflict between a commitment to free speech in Western countries that host large communities of Chinese students and the paranoid determination of the Chinese government that free speech should be limited when it comes to talking about China, even beyond Chinese borders.
Freedom of speech is any society's feedback loop. 

It means precisely the freedom to say what is different or what may even offend. 

Of course, different societies have a different view on how much of this is appropriate. 

But China's freedom of speech goes no further than parroting the leader and attacking those who dare to speak from a different script.

Shuping Yang praised the fresh air and freedom of speech she had found at the University of Maryland.

Which brings us to Xi Jinping and his style of leadership. 

Xi's power comes from being leader of the Communist Party and since taking up that role five years ago, he has collapsed the distinction between party and government and dramatically shrunk the space for freedom of speech.
All public debate, whether in the media, academia, the legal profession or online, is a shadow of what it was in 2012. 

It is now off-limits to discuss universal values and liberal democracy. 

Instead China must loudly unite around the leadership of the Communist Party and "tell China's story confidently".

In Xi Jinping's first five-year term, China has become the world's second-largest economy and an increasingly powerful military power. 

But when Xi urges journalists, think-tanks and diplomats to "tell China's story confidently" he does not mean tell it how you like and with your own nuance. 

Students abroad are a particularly important voice in this chorus. 

It is stated Chinese government policy to "assemble the broad numbers of students abroad as a positive patriotic energy".
And so when the University of California San Diego announced that it would host a speech by Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama next month, the local Chinese Students and Scholars Association consulted with diplomats and threatened "tough measures to resolutely resist the school's unreasonable behaviour". 

At Durham University in the UK, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, again with the support of the Chinese embassy, attempted to bar from a debate a critic of China's religious policies and human rights record.

The Dalai Lama frequently gives speeches at universities around the world

This week's mobilisation against Shuping Yang, complete with commentaries in leading state media, is part of this drive for "positive patriotic energy".
All of which causes some bafflement on the campuses concerned. 

Students from countries with a tradition of free speech may feel irritation with someone who criticises their homeland in a public speech, but their instinct is usually to shrug it off or make a joke. 

Likewise when Chinese state media deploy students from Western countries praising China and its policies, such individuals do not become hate figures for outraged student associations or national newspapers.

Years after the real events, China saw Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant

That's because liberal societies take differences of opinion for granted. 

In the US, in Europe and in Australia, citizens regularly excoriate their own governments and praise other countries in the media, and on satirical TV and radio shows. 

They also mount protests against their leaders.
It is vital to Beijing that these habits should not rub off. 

So in Xi's era the numbers of Chinese students studying abroad is going up but their tolerance of diverging views on China is going down.
In one respect, this is puzzling. 

At great expense, young Chinese have chosen to move from the confines of China's tightly-controlled education system to the "fresh air" of campuses which cherish tolerance and which offer all the tools to explore a range of different narratives of their own place in the world through reading and debate. But it is not so puzzling if you factor in these students' prior ideological education, the pressure on them to perform academically, and the ever-present and watchful eye of the Chinese state.

Tension is likely to grow between the liberal values of Western campuses and the "positive patriotic energy" of the growing numbers of Chinese students on these campuses. 

But the very strength of the reaction to Shuping Yang's freedom speech ensures that her words will continue to echo.
After all, it's not just Western culture which honours a loyal opposition. 

It is firmly entrenched in the historical memory of China too. 

Respect resonates down through the centuries for officials and soldiers in the imperial and the more recent Communist era who braved banishment or death for daring to speak truth to power.

Remember that in all great civilisations, the patriots whose memories endure are often those who love their country enough to point out its flaws.

Two Chinas Policy

It is meaningless to perpetuate the myth that Taiwan is a province of China. It is time for Taiwan to become a normal country.
By Salvatore Babones

First the phone call, then the bombshell.
On December 2, Donald Trump reversed 37 years of American foreign policy by taking a ten-minute congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen.
He went further, announcing that he doesn’t know “why we [the United States] have to be bound by a one-China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.”
Trump’s official position is still unclear, but his comments indicate that on the issue of Taiwan, he favors changing a status quo that has persisted for nearly four decades.
The current version of the United States’ one-China policy, which holds that there is only one legitimate government of China, dates to 1979, when the United States recognized the communist government in Beijing while breaking off formal diplomatic ties with the nationalist government in Taipei.
At the time, Taiwan was still a repressive one-party state, but over the next 20 years it peacefully transformed itself into a vibrant liberal democracy.
Bet despite this progress, there is still not a independent country named "Taiwan."
The island Tsai governs still calls itself the Republic of China (ROC).
Mainland China refers to it as Taiwan and officially considers it to be a renegade province, but in practice treats it like a foreign country.
The World Trade Organization calls it the “Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu (Chinese Taipei)."
The United States still uses the name Taiwan and is open about its desire to maintain strong, unofficial relations with the government in Taipei.
Nevertheless, when a U.S. State Department spokesperson accidentally called Taiwan a country earlier this year, it was considered a major gaffe.
But what is Taiwan, then?
Today, 70 years after the end of the Chinese civil war that separated the island from the mainland, it is time for the international community to settle this question.
It is meaningless to perpetuate the myth that Taiwan is a province of China. Rather, it is time for Taiwan to become a normal country.

PUTTING AWAY CHILDISH THINGS
Of course, China may never accept Taiwan’s attempt to behave as a country like any other, and would certainly veto Taiwanese membership in the United Nations.
But Beijing must know that Taiwan is never coming back. 
Today’s young Taiwanese have grown up in a free, open, and democratic society and are never going to vote to be governed from Beijing, especially after witnessing what has happened to Hong Kong. 
Their children and grandchildren will be even less likely to do so.
Beijing waiting for Taiwan to peacefully join China would be like Pyongyang waiting for South Korea to peacefully join the North, and the mainland would not accept the costs of an attempted military solution.
By the same token, even if China never formally recognized Taiwan as a nation, it might begin to treat the island differently if Taiwan behaved more like a country.
If Taiwan wants to be taken seriously, it must behave seriously. Renouncing its territorial claims in the South China Sea would be a good place to start. 
Like Beijing, Taipei maintains a flimsy claim to sovereignty over the entire South China Sea, based on the premise that it is the rightful claimant of China’s maritime territory.
Taiwan’s South China Sea claims are based on the infamous nine-dash line, a rough sea boundary first drawn on Chinese maps in 1947.
The line illustrated the expansive claims over the waters, islands, and seabed of the South China Sea made by the ROC, which at the time was in control of the mainland.
When the communists won the Chinese civil war, they adopted the nine-dash line as the basis of their own claims, and today both China and Taiwan maintain that the entire South China Sea belongs to them—that is, to the real China.
Ironically, much of China's claim over the South China Sea is based on the fact that Taipei maintains extensive facilities on Itu Aba, a disputed feature more than 900 miles south of Taiwan.
But on July 12, 2016, the UNCLOS Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that the island is a rock and therefore affords its holder minimal territorial rights.
Even though Taiwan is not a party to UNCLOS, it should respect this ruling, withdraw from Itu Aba, and return the rock to its natural state. 
Doing so would earn it friends throughout the region, and China can't very well complain about a Taiwanese withdrawal.
Beijing may continue to press its claims in defiance of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), but a Taiwan that is no longer pretending to be China should not be involved in this dispute. 
Instead, it should embrace the peaceful development of the South China Sea under the auspices of multilateral institutions. 
Most of all, Taiwan should make it abundantly clear that it is not a party to the many South China Sea disputes.
Taiwan should also stop playing the aid-for-recognition game.
Taiwan may have given up its claims to govern the mainland in the early 1990s, but it still formally calls itself the Republic of China, and uses financial incentives to persuade 21 poor countries to maintain diplomatic ties with Taiwan instead of China.
Taiwan is a rich country that can help the poor anywhere in the world.
Given its own inspiring transition from dictatorship to democracy, Taiwan could play a particularly important role in advising countries such as Mongolia and Ukraine on how to solidify their own democratic institutions. 
The money Taipei spends in exchange for diplomatic recognition, on the order of $200 million per year, could be much better spent funding the spread of good governance in the world's many fragile democracies.

ONE CHINA
But the most important thing that must happen is for Taiwan to drop the fiction that it is the Republic of China—that is, drop the fiction that it has some claim, even if only a rhetorical one, over the mainland.
Such a change would be politically fraught, but it would not necessarily require anything as dramatic as a formal declaration of independence.
Even those few within Taiwan who want reunification now accept that any future united China would be run from Beijing and not from Taipei.
The obvious solution is for the government to simply change the island’s name from the Republic of China to Taiwan, without making any formal statement about the country's legal status.
It would be a declaration of identity, not a declaration of independence.
Even given such a declaration, of course, Taiwan would remain what it is today—a de facto state that is not formally recognized as such.
But for the rest of the world, the change could be profound.
In recent decades, world leaders, (until now including presidents of the United States), have refused to deal directly with Taiwan because they only recognize one China.
But they could learn to deal with a Taiwan that does not claim to be China. 
U.S. presidents, who talk to the leaders of non-state and quasi-state entities such as the Palestinian Authority all the time, could talk to the president of Taiwan.
This development would not make China happy.
But contrary to the alarmist rhetoric of many policy analysts outside the United States, China is not making preparations to invade Taiwan, and Trump’s phone call will not start World War III.
Consensus opinion about the Tsai-Trump call in the United States, which sensibly debates the merits of talking to Taiwan, is much more reasonable.
And although China is adamantly opposed to formal Taiwanese sovereignty, it nonetheless deals with Taiwan, one of its closest neighbors and most important trading partners, in a generally pragmatic fashion.

WHO NEEDS CERTAINTY?
The United States has always had a One China policy.
But that policy has always been ambiguous about the status of Taiwan in relation to that one China. Beijing claims that Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory.
But it makes an identical claim in the South China Sea, where the rest of the world has shown that it will not accept all of China's many territorial claims. 
In this regard, China’s claim to Taiwan should be no different.
Normalizing Taiwan's status as a de facto, rather than a de jure, state may chafe Taiwan hawks who advocate for the island’s recognition as a sovereign nation.
But it is better for behavioral change to precede political change, rather than the other way around.
As long as the status quo continues, and Taiwan makes sovereignty claims on the basis of its self-proclaimed identity as the Republic of China, other countries will be justified in letting Beijing dictate the terms of their Taiwan policies.
If Taiwan embraces a more modest identity of its own, the world may eventually come around to supporting it.