There has never been much doubt about what Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders think of democracy: They hate it. Yet despite the party’s 57 years in power, it has not been able to completely eradicate the desire for democracy.
When given a chance to say what they really feel, many Chinese have been harshly critical of the CCP and demanded a greater voice in their government, from the 100 Flowers Movement of 1956 to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 to the uprising five years ago in a fishing village in Guangdong Province.
Unfortunately, the end results have been the same: harshly repressive crackdown, arrests, imprisonment and deaths. Yet in spite of that, many Chinese, including well-known intellectuals like Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), self-taught lawyers like Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), average farmers and fishermen, continue to press for democracy and human rights.
That fishing village near Lufeng, Guangdong Province, returned to the news this week because its residents have been under siege by armed police and plainclothes thugs who have used rubber bullets, tear gas, beatings and arrests to try to cower them.
Five years ago next week, the villagers of Wukan launched a protest against land seizures by municipal officials and developers, demanding an investigation by Beijing. They withstood months of intimidation until the mysterious death in police custody of one of the representatives chosen by the villagers to negotiate with officials pushed them over the edge and in mid-December 2011, they drove police and CCP officials out of the village.
Their bravery drew international media attention and an embarrassed Beijing eventually caved and agreed to investigate their complaints, probably because the villagers strongly professed their loyalty to the party.
The following February, provincial-level CCP authorities allowed the villagers to elect a new governing council and several of the protest leaders, including Lin Zuluan (林祖鑾), won in a landslide.
The election was seen as a possible model for grassroots democracy in China and did indeed inspire several other villages to push for similar votes. Yet city, county and provincial-level CCP officialdom continued on as always, with no end to the questionable land deals and corruption, despite the Chinese president’s widely publicized anti-graft campaign.
In early June, Lin wrote an open letter promising to launch new protests against illegal land sales and unauthorized construction on village land. A few days later he was arrested for allegedly taking bribes and ended up on television, making one of the confessions that the CCP loves so much. The villagers responded with protest marches and a staunch defense of their leader.
On Sept. 9, Lin was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison and on Tuesday, riot police launched a raid on Wukan, seeking more than a dozen people who have led protests since Lin’s arrest. Despite television broadcasts warning against sheltering the suspects and the offers of large cash rewards for tips, the villagers have fought back.
While Beijing has tried to block coverage of what is going on in Wukan, including ousting reporters from Hong Kong’s Chinese and English-language media on Thursday and blockading the village, photographs and video footage of clashes and wounded residents have emerged.
The protests in Wukan might lack the scale of Tiananmen, but the bravery and determination of the residents matches those of 1989.
Their fight is a reminder that the face that Beijing likes to present to the world of a modern power is built on a foundation of lies, and that many people inside China — in Wukan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong — and outside, including in Taiwan, are not willing to accept the CCP’s belief that only it can rule the nation.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers