True to character, the Chinese authorities robbed jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) of his last bit of freedom even as he lay on his deathbed. Even when it came to his funeral arrangements, his family seemingly had no freedom to bid him farewell in their own way.
Some Chinese human rights defenders said the authorities forced Liu’s family to consent to his ashes being scattered into the sea immediately after he was cremated.
If that is so, the purpose was clearly to make Liu vanish as soon as possible and prevent any trace of him being left in China.
Announcing Liu’s death, China News Service published a report saying that Liu’s widow, Liu Xia (劉霞), “is currently free” and that “the relevant departments will protect Liu Xia’s rights under the law.”
The report also implied that Liu Xia, who is under house arrest, would continue to be silenced to prevent her from bringing her husband’s spirit back to life.
Liu was an internationally acclaimed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but the Chinese authorities saw him as a criminal guilty of “inciting subversion of state power,” just because he coauthored the reformist manifesto known as Charter 08, and they prevented him and his family from attending the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo.
Now that he is dead, they are still using airtight Internet controls and an information blockade to expunge any record of his existence. Such a regime defines itself by its very actions.
When BBC reporter Stephen McDonell asked ordinary Chinese people about Liu, he found that most of them did not know who he was or that any Chinese had won a Nobel Peace Prize.
According to a report published by Japan’s Jiji Press, as soon as NHK World Radio Japan reported the news of Liu’s death, its broadcast was cut off by the Chinese government.
Evidently the Chinese authorities have plenty of ways of handling people like Liu who are not wedded to the Chinese Communist Party.
As a result, most people in China have very different perceptions and opinions about the issue from the way it is seen elsewhere, where information is transparent.
The one-party rule that prevails in China is, one might say, an evolutionary step onward from conventional despotism. For lack of any suitable term, for the time being let us call it “neo-despotism,” meaning despotism that has taken a dramatic qualitative leap forward.
Beijing launched its policy of “reform and opening up” at the end of the 1970s. In the more than three decades that have passed since then, China’s economic development has taken a very different path from what democratic countries expected.
Rapid economic growth has led to China’s rise as a great power, but economic development has not been accompanied by political reforms. On the contrary, China’s rapidly growing national resources and new technologies have enabled the Chinese Communist Party to strengthen its rule over the nation.
This explains how the Chinese authorities have pulled out the thorn in their side — Liu — in a way that is more ruthless than that of the former Soviet Union, which sent its troublesome Nobel laureates into internal or external exile.
The Chinese communists’ annihilation of Liu and all potential threats to its one-party rule serves as a living lesson as to how far “neo-despotism” has evolved.
It is a harsh warning to other potential challengers not to put the law to the test and tells the international community that no matter how much it complains about the state of China’s human rights, it will have no effect.
The Chinese authorities have absolutely no fear of people like Liu, because, based on their experience in “harmonizing” Liu, they have long since worked out a standard operations procedure that leads from prison cell to graveyard.
The steps taken in Liu’s case include intentionally allowing his health to deteriorate, turning his late-stage cancer treatment into an international public relations show and releasing limited amounts of information meant to show the authorities in a good light.
All this was done to make Chinese clueless and the international community helpless. These methods differ from the past, when dissidents and human rights defenders could, under various pretexts, gain Beijing’s approval to go abroad, where they could no long have much influence in China.
In contrast, the iron-fisted methods applied in Liu’s case might lead one to speculate in two directions.
First, could this approach be meant to demonstrate the ability of those in power to keep everyone in line, with nothing to fear from anyone who wants to challenge them, be they in China or abroad?
Second, could it be that, below the superficial appearance of deference to a single authority, there is some kind of serious internal conflict going on that could cause the old-style, relatively lenient, treatment pose a subversive risk?
From 2010, when Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, to his diagnosis with late-stage cancer and the attendant public relations show, the international community has kept calling for Liu to be released and given compassionate leave to go abroad for medical treatment.
However, the Chinese authorities never heeded these pleas. If this leads the international community to give up on turning its concern for human rights in China into meaningful action, then we must brace ourselves for an erosion of human rights values.
Signs of this can already be seen in the different levels of concern expressed by international leaders while Liu was suffering from late-stage cancer.
Clearly, behind the scenes, they were weighing up potential gains and losses in the China market. If this goes on, China’s “neo-despotic” rulers will surely become even more adept at using the Chinese market as a bargaining chip.
The danger is that the concepts of democracy, freedom and human rights around the world will be remolded according to China’s low standards, and the biggest and most disastrous irony would be if one day the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the very people who destroyed Liu.
People in Taiwan who really care about Liu must also reconsider the ways in which Taiwan and China interact across the Taiwan Strait.
Democratic Taiwan and despotic China have been communicating for more than 30 years. In all this time, Taiwanese democracy has not been communicated to China, but Chinese despotism has been communicated to Taiwan, leading to rampant political chaos that makes it hard for democracy to function normally.
Ironically, whereas Taiwan’s pro-unification factions originally sought to unite in a democratic China, these days they just want to unite, with no concerns about despotism.
This attitude is echoed by the China-friendly media, which keep preaching that the market comes first and there is no harm in giving in to Beijing’s demands.
The most ridiculous thing is that some people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait want Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to be nominated as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize because they met and shook hands in Singapore in November 2015, oblivious to the fact that the two of them had forgotten Liu in his dark and dingy prison cell.
Now the seat that was left empty for Liu in Oslo remains vacant as a symbol of China’s absent democracy. That is a lesson that people in China and in democratic countries, including Taiwan, should take to heart.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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