There is an expression in China: “Kill the chicken before the monkey.” Target the weak and vulnerable, it means, to frighten the strong and many.
Last week, it was the turn of writer Zhao Shiying (趙世英, pen name Zhao Dagong, 趙達功), secretary-general of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, which campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers and in favor of free expression.
Zhao was a signatory — along with Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), a leading dissident jailed for 11 years on Christmas Day — of Charter 08, a document that called for political reform of China’s state institutions. Police went to his home in the southern city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, on Monday last week to take him away, along with his computers, books and other documents.
It was his second visit from the police. In December, they had turned up and warned him not to cause trouble; the same threat was delivered to his wife, Shi Xiaoli (石曉莉), and adult son after his arrest. And while Shi had been warned not to talk about his detention, on Friday she defied them.
“He’s with state security agents,” she said. “He’s never been taken away for this long.”
It is not only Zhao who has come under pressure for campaigning for the release of Liu Xiaobo. Since Liu’s sentencing for “subverting the state” in organizing Charter 08, China’s authorities appear to have been engaged in an escalating campaign against activists and human rights groups that (the groups say) suddenly seems in danger of rupturing the country’s fragile consensus that permits a degree of limited dissent — short of political organization challenging the one-party status quo.
Instead, in the past year, Chinese authorities have been increasing pressure on well-known dissidents that in recent months has seen them “detained by the fistful,” according to Amnesty International.
Last week alone saw not only Zhao’s arrest, but also the revelation by Google that Chinese hackers, widely believed to be acting on the orders of the state, had targeted — and not for the first time — the e-mail accounts of human rights activists, including one belonging to Tenzin Seldon, a 20-year-old US student whose parents are Tibetan exiles. Most seriously, it also saw the announcement by the authorities that Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), a prominent human-rights lawyer detained for 11 months, had “disappeared” while on a walk, prompting fears among his supporters that he may have died in custody.
All of which raises an urgent question: Why is China, the emerging superpower, so frightened of dissent?
It is a question that was asked earlier this month in an essay by historian Ian Buruma that looked at why a regime, communist in name only and apparently so strong, is also so paranoid.
Buruma’s answer is that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) insistence on orthodoxy can only be understood in cultural and historical terms, including what he describes as the “religious concept of politics ... a shared belief imposed from above” that echoes the Confucian notion of harmony. Others see it, however, less in historical terms and more as a reaction to what has been happening inside China today.
This was described last summer by one of China’s most famous dissidents, Bao Tong (鮑彤), in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, in terms of the Tiananmen Square Massacre 20 years ago.
An aide to the late CCP general-secretary Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), Bao has spent seven years in jail and remains under house arrest.
“Tiananmen is still here,” he said in the interview. “However, it’s not a Tiananmen massacre; it’s suppression in the style of a ‘little Tiananmen.’ Every four minutes there is a protest of more than 100 people.”
They are protests about every social issue: government corruption, land evictions, environmental contamination, police brutality and schools. Diffuse and often disorganized, they represent, however, an increasingly vibrant grassroots scene, including such groups as the “rights defense movement” and personified by figures such as Gao Zhisheng, or fellow lawyer Guo Feixiong (郭飛雄), who was imprisoned for representing villagers in Taishi, Guangdong Province, who wanted to remove local officials accused of corruption.
It has also been visible in recent large-scale environmental protests involving demonstrations and “collective walks” on issues ranging from the siting of pharmaceutical factories to the routing of a railway line in Shanghai.
But what the CCP fears most, according to human-rights activists and analysts, is that dissidents among the country’s intelligentsia might act not only as a lightning rod for myriad social concerns by challenging the legitimacy of the state’s institutions, but also that they might provide an organization to rally behind.
It is not an entirely new concern. It was this that drove paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) to order martial law in 1989 against the protesting students in Tiananmen Square, and it has driven the persecution of the Falun Gong religious sect after it organized its own silent demonstrations at the end of the 1990s.
But what constitutes “organized” — and thus threatening to the state — has in the past year become ever more finely defined to include even Liu Xiaobo’s Internet petition known as Charter 08.
Corinna-Barbara Francis, a China expert for Amnesty International, describes the often miscalculated efforts by Chinese dissidents to keep on the right side of the regime: “There are lines in the sand that people understand. Liu Xiaobo tried to keep just on the right side of them but Charter 08 pushed him over. But even then the sentence they gave him came as a shock.”
The Chinese authorities chose to interpret Charter 08 not simply as a critical statement but as evidence of “organization” against the state.
“It is why China has really been upping the ante in the last year,” Francis said.
Liu’s supporters expected him to get three years at most, but his sentence of 11 years in Beijing’s Detention Center No. 1 is on a par with those handed out to members of the Democratic Party of China, founded in 1998, who have been hammered by the regime for forming an alternative political organization.
But why Liu, 54, has been so harshly treated — and the scope of the authorities’ fear of the Internet — is revealed in the verdict handed out by Beijing Municipality First Intermediate People’s Court. There, described in the bureaucratic language of oppression, are the CCP’s anxieties: collusion, organization against the party and propagation outside the country’s borders of a narrative critical of China.
“Between September and December 2008,” the verdict reads, “the defendant Liu Xiaobo colluded with others to draft and concoct the ‘Charter 08’, which proposed views such as ‘eliminate the monopoly of one party on the exercise of political power,’ ‘to create a Chinese federation under the framework of democratic constitutional system of governance,’ and seeking to incite the overthrow of state power. Liu Xiaobo collected the signatures of more than 300 people and sent ‘Charter 08’ together with the signatures in an e-mail to Web sites outside the borders of mainland China, to publish it on Web sites outside the borders of mainland China such as ‘Democratic China’ and ‘The Independent Chinese PEN Association.’”
“The Communist Party has had a monopoly on power for the last 60 years,” said Phelim Kine, a researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Everything it does is dedicated to holding on to power. The party has monitored and learned the lessons of the fall of the Soviet Union and the color revolutions and is determined not to go down the same route. They have seen the necessity of controlling the narrative within their own borders. But they have also realized that they cannot be like North Korea and shut the country off. So they have created a paradigm where the party controls, but provides a level of economic development and economic rights. The price is the control of freedom of expression and other human rights.”
Many Chinese have accepted this trade-off, expressing bafflement at what they see as the West’s obsession with a handful of dissidents. But for the CCP, which has long thrown off most aspects of socialist ideology in favor of economic liberalization, the perceived threat of dissent has not diminished but increased.
One reason, some analysts believe, is that by largely dispensing with a guiding Marxist ideology that conferred values and moral meaning — by its own standards at least — on the party’s institutions, those same institutions have become vulnerable to a line of criticism that questions what legitimacy they now claim.
The result, according to those like Bao Tong, is that there is less freedom now to criticize party leaders than there was in 1989, despite the fact that there exists, even within the party’s own senior cadres, so-called dangnei minzhupai (黨內民主派) — advocates for greater political liberalization who, crucially, confine their political discourse to within the party.
And if there were a difference between the 1989 democracy movement and Charter 08, whose three principal drafters came out of that movement, it is this: While the events around Tiananmen created mass protests, they did not see the emergence of a document of coherent political demands.
In comparison, the drafters of Charter 08, as historian Feng Chongyi (馮崇義) noted in an essay in The Asia-Pacific Journal, pointedly embraced open democracy, while signaling their rejection of the one-party dictatorship — the most serious of heresies.
Kine believes that the imprisonment of Liu, and the increasing pursuit of his supporters, marks a convergence of multiple issues that have scared the CCP: from Charter 08’s use of the Internet to Liu’s emergence — in their eyes — as a leader of dissent by way of organizing his petition.
“The Communist Party is evolutionary and adaptive. It is no longer shooting people in the streets. It persecutes [figures such as Liu Xiaobo] to frighten dissenters and the nascent middle classes,” Kine said.
And while Kine believes that China would probably have preferred that its hacking of Google accounts of human rights activists remained undiscovered, its disclosure by the Internet giant serves a similar function as Liu’s trial — forcing lawyers, bloggers and other activists to rethink how they communicate with one another.
Increasingly, it is the same threat that the authorities are using against those whom it has decreed have crossed the invisible line between freedom of expression and dissent: the charge of “subverting the state.”
Another to have been imprisoned like Liu for “inciting subversion of state power” is Hu Jia (胡佳), who led protests against deforestation in northern China before becoming a rights activist. Hu was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison on the same charges in 2008.
Subversion, as understood by the regime these days, says Corinna-Barbara Francis, is “anything that makes people question the monopoly on power of the party. Despite economic successes, the party is steadfastly opposed to political reforms. It wants to keep the party in power and not share power with anyone.
“And what the elites fear now is what they feared in 1989: that intellectuals might inspire a wider mass dissent against the party,” she said.
For that, the chickens must continue to be killed.
Peter Beaumont is the Observer’s foreign affairs editor.
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