It was a few minutes past midnight on June 4, 1989, when Yang Jianli (楊建利), 26 at the time, heard the first gunshot from his campus dorm.
Yang and a friend hopped on their bicycles and rode towards Tiananmen Square. More shots were fired along the way and the duo soon found themselves dodging bullets.
“I saw someone get shot and killed just three feet away from me.”
Photo courtesy of Oslo Freedom Forum
Yang was fortunate to escape to the US days after what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre. But in 2002, he visited China on a friend’s passport and was detained and held in solitary confinement. His imprisonment lasted for five years. During this time, he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured.
Since his release in 2007, Yang, who currently resides in the US, has been an outspoken activist for human rights and democracy.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Photo courtesy of Alex Gladstein
Yang was in Taiwan last week to support the New York-based Human Rights Foundation in its plan to host a freedom forum in Taipei in the fall of next year. The non-profit aims to promote and protect human rights in countries like Cuba and North Korea where it is most at risk, through programs that support activists and civil society leaders.
For chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein, the choice of Taipei was an easy one. The foundation, which hosted its first freedom forum in Oslo in 2009, has since held forums across Europe, North America and Latin America, and is seeking to expand to East Asia.
Gladstein says the goal of the forums is to make the concept of human rights less abstract and more relatable to attendees. For that reason, the audience is diverse and includes artists and economists, business and tech people.
Photo: Dana Ter, Taipei Times
“The feeling is that you’re at a TED conference,” Gladstein jokes. “It’s educational entertainment.”
He adds that it’s people like Yang that the organization invites to speak at forums — in other words, “people who are great storytellers.”
In the past, the foundation has also invited a Chinese graffiti artist, an Uzbek photojournalist and a Saudi woman who caused an uproar when she learned how to drive a car. Though not technically human rights activists, each speaker had much to share about their own struggle for freedom living in oppressive regimes.
Photo courtesy of Oslo Freedom Forum
MOBILIZING TECH COMMUNITY
Another group of people that the foundation is particularly keen on mobilizing is the tech community. They’ve held forums in Silicon Valley, where discussions revolved around developing apps for users to communicate without being kept under surveillance. For example, using virtual reality to “enter” a Syrian refugee camp.
Gladstein says the tech community has an important role to play in advancing human rights. Though social media has been useful in organizing democracy protests in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong, he says that as social media expands, so too will the capability of governments to monitor their citizens — Facebook and Twitter were temporarily shut down in Turkey during last month’s attempted coup. Hence the need to develop more secure apps, especially those that are encrypted.
Photo courtesy of Oslo Freedom Forum
“It’s a new cold war, in a way, this digital arms race,” Gladstein says.
Yang says it is more difficult today to stop the flow of information, even to places as sealed off as North Korea.
But we also need to be selective about the types of social media we use. Yang has been using WeChat to send his family photos of food he’s been eating in Taipei.
Photo courtesy of Oslo Freedom Forum
“I would never, for instance, say something like, ‘I’m off to Thailand to rescue a political prisoner.’”
Gladstein says that Periscope, a live video streaming app, and Vine, an app used to record short videos, has helped him digest news around the world in real-time. The foundation has also been working with several VPN companies to experiment with more secure forms of communication that could be used by activists.
Yang and Gladstein both believe in Taipei’s potential as an Asian tech hub, and they are hoping to get more tech businesses and entrepreneurs, especially younger people, involved.
“We need to be digitally armed,” Yang says.
He adds that he feels that it’s his duty to help political prisoners and human rights activists as he owed his own freedom to the efforts of people from around the world who helped free him.
‘HUMAN VALUES’
Taiwan, Gladstein says, has much to teach China and the world about relatively peaceful transition to democracy, to which Yang adds: “Taiwan is a good example of how the desire for freedom is universal regardless of cultural background.”
The Chinese government, Yang says, has been making the argument that democracy as a system clashes with core tenants of Chinese culture. He believes that this is absurd as China and Taiwan share a similar cultural background.
Gladstein agrees.
“There is no such thing as ‘Asian values,’” he says, referring to the political ideology popularized in the 1990s that the cultural background of Asian nations made it such that they were more suited for authoritarian governments.
“There are human values,” Gladstein says.
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