What I Told Obama About Beijing’s Human Rights Problem

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/18/obama-china-human-rights-problem/

Xiaorong Li

                                           (January 19, 2011, 7pm, Penn. Ave, 16th St., Washington, DC) 

On January 13, President Obama invited me and four other activists and scholars—the writer Zha Jianying, whose brother is a former political prisoner in China;Andrew Nathan, a Columbia professor; author Bette Bao Lord; and Paul Gewirtz, director of Yale’s China Law Center—to meet with him at the White House to discuss the current state of human rights and reform in China. The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, took place as the president prepares for this week’s meeting with Chinese president Hu Jintao in Washington. He wanted to know whether we think his approach on these issues is working, and how that approach might be improved. For me, it was an opportunity to bring to the direct attention of the president some critical questions about China’s human rights record I hope he will take up in the summit. The following outlines some of the issues I raised with the president, including a series of specific recommendations concerning US policy toward China.

The human rights situation in China has not fundamentally improved after a generation of economic development, after many rounds of US-China human rights dialogues, and after millions of dollars of assistance to promote “rule of law” and other “reforms” in China.

Despite the country’s impressive GDP and growing prosperity, popular discontent in China is deep and widespread. Millions of people have been flooding to governmentoffices to complain about injustices; there have been numerous workers’ strikes over lack of labor protection, violent clashes over land and housing rights, and demonstrations organized by teachers, veterans, bank employees, victims of pollution, and by parents whose children were poisoned by dairy products or died in school buildings that collapsed during the Szechuan earthquake in 2008. There have been protests by ethnic and religious minorities about discrimination and cultural destruction. According to the government’s own statistics, in each of the past five years, about 90,000 “mass protests” have taken place. The actual numbers are undoubtedly higher than this.

Fearful of losing control, China’s rulers have developed the world’s most sophisticated Internet censorship system, which they use to block information, silence dissent, and conduct surreptitious monitoring of online activism. The security police have gained enormous power in recent years and use it against dissident writers like Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Laureate who is now serving an 11-year jail sentence; or activists like Xu Zhiyong, whose NGO, the Open Constitution (gong meng), was shut down, and Hu Jia, who worked to raise awareness about AIDS and the environment, and who now also is in prison on charges of “inciting subversion against state power”; or the rural organizer and legal advocate Chen Guangcheng, who, recently released from prison, is now subjected to unlawful house arrest; or human rightslawyers like Gao Zhisheng, who was imprisoned, tortured, released, then taken away again, and now has disappeared without a trace. Today, there are unknown numbers of such prisoners of conscience in Chinese jails and extra-legal “re-education through labor camps” where hundreds of thousands of people are held without trial. In 2009 the Chinese authorities spent $75 billion on “internal security,” nearly as much as the $80 billion they spent on national defense.

Many Chinese activists view state-sponsored “political reform” in China as simply dead. Human rights lawyers and legal scholars have concluded that “rule of law” reform is regressing. Flagrant human rights violations—including torture, arbitrary detention, censorship, repression of religious and ethnic minorities—continue unabated. (These practices are well documented in annual US State Department reports and the Congressional Executive Commission on China, as well as by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.) Yet the major Western democracies have largely chosen to remain silent—as each competes, apparently, for a piece of China’s “miracle growth.” Such economic interests make multilateral efforts to address China’s human rights problems difficult. But the US could change this pattern by taking a strong stand now.

Looking beyond the upcoming summit, the US administration should also formulate a clear longer-range strategy toward the problems of human rights in China, bearing in mind that this issue profoundly undergirds virtually all of the other issues that the USand the world face with China. Here are some suggestions:

1. Support civil society, and in particular activists and lawyers who are taking great personal risks to promote human rights and democracy. The good news is that Chinese citizens are learning to speak up, to organize, and to demand that their rights be respected. For nearly a decade now, a civil rights movement known as the “rights defense movement” has spread among citizens of many backgrounds. Victims of forced eviction or migrant laborers are transformed into rights activists when they see their efforts to remedy injustices answered with censorship, police brutality, and corruption in legal institutions. Most of the 12,000 signers of Charter 08 —farmers, workers, AIDS activists, environmentalists, and others—are citizens who decided to endorse the charter even after police had suppressed it and imprisoned one of its authors, Liu Xiaobo.

Some practical ideas for supporting civil society:

(a) Make strong and clear public statements in support of human rights activists and that speak directly to the Chinese people: Rhetoric is important. The Norwegian Nobel Committee did a great service by speaking past the Chinese government and directly to the Chinese people, saying, in effect, “we see you, too, and we honor you.” The most significant and sensitive divide in China today is between the Chinese state and its citizens. People in the democratic governments of the world should bear in mind that the Chinese state still dominates the Chinese press and rules without popular consent. It is insensitive to lump rulers and ruled together as if they were the same thing and as if only the rulers can speak for the whole.

(b) Facilitate Internet freedom: Today the Internet is the most important way, in China as much as in other repressive societies, for ordinary citizens to access information, express their views, organize themselves, and engage in activism. TheUS government should do what it can to provide Chinese Internet users with technical support to get around the “Great Firewall” that the Chinese government has erected to block political dissent and prevent access to information. At a minimum, the USgovernment should work to discourage American IT companies from the sordid practice of supplying the Chinese government with technology that facilitates censorship and surveillance.

(c) Strengthen direct contacts with activists and provide them support: US officials should publicly raise concerns about individual cases at high-level meetings; USleaders visiting China should meet Chinese civil-society activists personally; the State Department international visitor program should invite civil society actors only; the current practice of sending the US ambassador or someone from his embassy staff to attend the trials of dissidents, or their talks at civic forums, should continue and increase; small grants from the embassy for public civil-society activities should increase.

2. Focus on holding the Chinese government to its own rhetorical commitments to its citizens. Such an emphasis is effective in its own right and will also help avoid stirring up “nationalist,” anti-Western sentiment. The Chinese government, although it constantly abuses human rights, continually claims to observe them. “Human rights” no longer is a taboo phrase in official discourse. Such rhetoric creates opportunities to push the authorities to deliver. Western democracies can answer the Chinese government’s accusations about “interference in China’s internal affairs” by citing its own rhetoric. If the Chinese government is called upon to observe the constitutional and legal commitments that it has made to its own citizens—some of which are inscribed in international protocols—it can hardly claim “interference.”

3. Strengthen US involvement in multilateral forums such as the UN Human Rights Council. The Chinese government participates actively in the UN Human Rights Council. If it is eager to be a global player in this forum for promoting human rights around the world, then of course it should observe international standards for human rights. The US should use the UN HRC more effectively, to press the Chinese government to adhere to the international human-rights conventions that it has signed and/or ratified. Such a policy would require the US to take a leadership role in forums such as the UN HRC and to build multilateral coalitions to hold the Chinese government accountable for its failure to respect international conventions. This kind of international scrutiny will undercut the Chinese government’s exceptionalist claims about “human rights views with Chinese characteristics” and will render vacuous its reflexive accusation that discussion of its human rights record amounts to “interference in internal affairs.” It will also limit the Chinese government’s ability to fan nationalist sentiment at home into opposition to “Western” human rights.

4. US programs to assist “Rule of law” reforms and to facilitate exchanges of “legal experts” should be designed to address the particular administrative and legal problems in China that have led to human rights abuses. Current US legal assistance to China is misconceived insofar as it assists the existing legal system in becoming more efficient. Instead, US assistance would be better directed toward problems such as widespread torture. The Chinese government ratified the Convention against Torture in 1988. On paper, “torture to force confession” is no longer legal in China, and in legal circles torture is no longer a taboo topic. The US might use its legal-aid resources to address issues such as how to prevent deaths in detention and how, in court trials, to reject evidence that was extracted by forced confession. US legal aid could also be used to strengthen protections for criminal defense lawyers to help them avoid arbitrary prosecution or disbarment. Such lawyers —especially those who defend human rights activists, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Uighurs, and underground Christians—are already in very short supply.

5. The proposed US-China talk of “open government” must address China’s draconian “state secret” law. In January 2007, the Chinese State Council adopted the“Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Open Government Information”that was supposed to take effect in May 2008. But the government has ignored these regulations wherever it relates to human rights. For example the number of death sentences and executions remain “state secrets,” and authorities continue to use vaguely-defined “state secret” provisions of the criminal law code to prosecute many people for “leaking,” “stealing,” or “possessing” state secrets. Victims of such abuses have included not only Chinese human rights activists and protesters in ethnic minority regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang, but also American businessmen and a scientific researcher. Any talk about “open government” with the government of China must address this area of law and practice. Since Americans are among those who have been ensnared—and might again be in the future—this is not an “internal matter.”

6. Resume the “US-China Human Rights Dialogue” only if transparency and participation by representatives of civil society in China are guaranteed. Previous“dialogues” brought no real change and were even counterproductive because they allowed the Chinese government to claim an “achievement” on human rights when in fact no progress was being made. The dialogue should not only address abuses of social and economic rights but also sensitive issues concerning serious violations of civil and political rights. Any future dialogues should be open—i.e., publicly reported in full. The lack of free press and free association (genuine NGOs devoted to human rights) in China has allowed the government to distort earlier dialogues in the state-run media and prevented them from having any broader educational impact for Chinese citizens. Maintaining secrecy diminishes the opportunity to authenticate and follow up with what the Chinese officials provided as “information” or promised to do behind doors. Each round of the dialogues should be followed by an honest and public assessment of impact, and talks should be resumed only if it can be shown that real progress has resulted from the previous round. Non-government human rights organizations in both countries should be invited to participate, or to engage in parallel dialogues, or they should at least be consulted and heard well in advance and afterward.

Finally, I conveyed this message to the President: The US should lead by example. The US will have an impact on positive changes in China and elsewhere by respecting human rights and strengthening democracy at home and taking a global leadership in upholding human rights as the guiding principle of its foreign policy. When the US ends torture, protects free press, or makes healthcare affordable to everyone, those who promote human rights and speak out against abuses in hostile environments can hold their heads high and carry on their arduous struggle, often at great personal risk.

January 18, 2011 10:15 a.m.

奥斯陆的空椅子

写于2010年12月8日

自1901年以来，诺奖委已经颁布了九十一个诺贝尔和平奖。除了没发奖的那几年外，其间只有四次出现领奖人缺席的情况。12月10日星期五，在奥斯陆的和平奖颁奖仪式上，又会有一把空椅子。

今年的得主刘晓波在中国东北锦州监狱中服刑，“罪行”是支持倡导民主人权的《零八宪章》，被判刑十一年。他的妻子和其他亲属近友也去不了奥斯陆，因为他/她们也被软禁或被监控起来了。

这次的这张空椅子比能有人去领奖更能说明中国人权状况的恶劣。中国的经济和政治实力在扩增，但是这种实力并没有带动人权的改善。这张空椅子也道出了人们在中国倡导自由民主所付出的代价。空而富有内涵，好比无声的呐喊。
自诺奖在10月8日公布以来，全国各地公安对那些敢于庆祝或传播这一消息的人们进行了威胁和惩罚。刘晓波的妻子刘霞最后一次在推特上发推条是10月18日，据说20日以后就再也没有她的任何音讯。官方警告刘晓波的老父和三个兄弟不准对媒体发表评论也别想去奥斯陆领奖。刘晓波在北京的好些朋友和同事被国保日夜监控。官方因担心他们会去奥斯陆，堵住了刘晓波的律师莫少平和北大法学教授贺卫方，不让他们去伦敦参加一个国际律协会议。有好几十人因商务或学术会议出国，包括著名经济学家矛予试和艺术家艾未未，就因为涉嫌绕道去奥斯陆，受到边控。至少已经有一百多人被公安传唤或请“喝茶”，有的受到威胁：如果就诺奖接受媒体采访将会面临严重后果。有几位支持晓波的人或“零八宪章”签署人已经被以无端捏造的罪名拘留或送去“劳教”。

中国政府的这些威胁和报复行为从一个侧面表明，诺奖委把今年的和平奖授予刘晓波很明智，也挺有勇气。这个决定使国际社会上更多人知道中国还有像刘晓波这样因言论被严重治罪的人，对其它上千中国狱中良心犯的关注可能会达到1989年以后的第二个高点。世界主流终于开始悟出一个道理：一个国家的经济总产值增长与人权自由压制可以并行，别以为前者一定会带动后者，因此也不要因为有了前者就不再批评后者。

抵制诺贝尔和平奖、报复获奖人，在这方面中国政府这次比缅甸的军统集团、甚至希特勒的纳粹德国走的更远。1991年，缅甸的反对派民主党领袖昂山素姬获诺贝尔和平奖，她当时被拘禁在家里，但她的儿子还能出席颁奖仪式致答谢词。在她2010年11月获释之前，昂山素姬有15年是在软禁中度过的，但她有时还能见到外国使节。1936年，德国的反战记者卡尔. 冯. 奥赛茨基获和平奖，他当时被关押在集中营，重病在身。纳粹德国把他转入市民医院，并公开宣布他可以自由去挪威领奖，但没给他办护照。刘晓波获奖后，中国官方发言人和媒体连篇诋毁诺奖委和诺贝尔和平奖倡导的普世价值：和平、公正、人权，不但没有任何释放刘晓波的迹象，而且对刘晓波进行人格攻击，把刘霞软禁起来，对他们的近亲好友进行了各种形式的打压。在国际层面，中国外交部门公开向各国驻挪威领馆施压，要它们抵制12月10日在奥斯陆举行的和平奖颁奖仪式。

过去十几年中，中国政府投入巨资在国际上营造“软外交”公关工程，塑造良好国际形象。耗资庞大的北京奥运和上海世贸就是这样的“公关”战绩。但是它对诺奖的反应是对这些工程的自我瓦解，与它这些年来刻意营造良好国际形象和信誉的意愿背道而驰。一个继续监禁诺贝尔和平奖得主的政府，不可能受到国际道义和舆论的亲睐，更不可能在世界上有“良好”形象。刘晓波继续被关押在监狱里多久，中国政府的人权劣绩被国际社会重点关注就会持续多久。诺奖提高了对民主国家和多国机构领导人的期望值：他们会感到更大的压力推动他们就人权问题向中国领导人加压。

历史可以佐证。除中国之外，近代还有四个个国家在自己的公民获诺奖后继续监控他（她）们：纳粹法西斯德国（奥赛茨基1936年获奖），苏联政府（沙哈诺夫1975年获奖），波兰政府（瓦文萨1983年获奖），缅甸军统政府（昂山素姬1991年获奖）。

中国政府在颁奖仪式前一天推出一个“孔子和平奖”与诺贝尔和平奖对阵，以此表达官方的一贯说法：“人权”和“民主”是西方概念、“和谐稳定”繁荣才是中国人所向往的。“孔子和平奖”第一任获奖人、台湾前副总统连战已经谢绝接受。在儒家伦理与人权理念之间制造对立，这不仅是一个学术不严谨的问题。当代儒家学者当中一个非常活跃的流派一直在论证儒家的“仁爱”、“宽恕”和“官逼民反”思想是与人权思想一致的。1946年，罗斯福夫人牵头、由世界各国学者组成《世界人权宣言》起草委员会里就有一位中国学者张彭春。他的渊博学术论述说服了起草委员会在最后的文本里接纳了饱含儒家伦理的理念，如《宣言》第一条“人人生而自由,在尊严和权利上一律平等。他们赋有理性和良心,并应以兄弟关系的精神相对待”中“良心”、“兄弟关系”等提法。

中国政府在国际台面上表现的很自信、强大，然而它在国内对待本国公民的作法却显得十分怯弱和恐惧。把一个书生文人打入牢狱11年，恰好说明了这个政府害怕他，怕他是因为他替普通人说话。限制言论自由、惩罚表达民怨的声音，这样的政府出面来说“中国人不要民主人权，”怎么会有信誉？只有开放言论自由，让人们充分表达自己的观点，自由辩论是非，才能真正了解中国民众的价值观和向往。否则，政府官员和官方操控媒体的说法只能代表中国政府的观点。也就是说，“不要人权民主”是中国政府，不是中国民众。

去年的诺贝尔和平奖得主奥巴马在他的答谢词中说，“在一个公民被剥夺言论自由、宗教自由，和无畏选择自己的领导人和集会的权利的国家，和平不可能长久。”奥巴马应该为那些没有表达自由的人们说话，为诺奖最新得主刘晓波的自由呼吁，只有这样，他才能说话算话。

诺奖颁奖仪式实况将会被网警屏蔽，但是中国的四亿多网民当中不少人会通过他们自己的途径翻墙观看并传播仪式的影像和信息。 中国政府把刘晓波、刘霞和她邀请的140多中国贵宾都堵在了牢墙里或国门内，不让去领奖或参加典礼，但是它堵不住刘晓波多年来倡导的那些得到诺贝尔和平奖肯定的理念和价值观穿越国界和防火墙。

12月10日那天，人们会更加树耳倾听刘晓波从他的空椅子上发出的沉寂的声音。

Empty Chair in Oslo

The missing Nobel laureate

latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-xia-nobelist-20101209,0,469228.story

Neither China's Liu Xiaobo nor his wife or family or friends will be in Oslo to receive his Peace Prize. Who will speak up for him?
By Renee Xia
December 9, 2010

Ninety-one Nobel Peace Prizes have been awarded since 1901. On Friday, at the Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, there will be an empty chair.

This year's recipient, Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and dissident currently serving 11 years in prison for supporting the pro-democracy and human rights manifesto Charter 08, will not be here to receive the honor. Nor will his wife or any other relatives or close friends, as they have been placed under house arrest or police surveillance, or barred from traveling abroad.

The empty chair will speak volumes about the deteriorating human rights conditions in China, a rising economic and political power unchecked by democratic balances. It will also speak of the tremendous sacrifices that Chinese human rights and pro-democracy activists have made, and the urgent need to support their struggle for justice and human rights for those living in China, and for upholding universal values.

Since the Nobel was announced Oct. 8, police across China have been intimidating and penalizing anyone who tries to celebrate or spread the good news. Liu's wife, Liu Xia, was last heard from on Twitter on Oct. 18. Authorities warned Liu Xiaobo's father and brothers to stay silent. Several of Liu's friends and associates in Beijing are guarded around the clock by police. Border control authorities barred his lawyer, Mo Shaoping, and outspoken Beijing University professor He Weifang from traveling to London for a seminar, for fear they would go to Oslo. Dozens of other friends or supporters of Liu, including the economist Mao Yushi and the artist Ai Weiwei, also have been stopped from leaving the country for conferences. At least 100 activists have been visited by police and threatened with severe consequences for speaking to the media about the prize. Several supporters of Liu and signatories of Charter 08 have been detained or sent to "re-education through labor" camps on trumped-up charges.

This campaign of intimidation and retaliation makes it evident that the Nobel Committee made a wise and courageous decision to award the Peace Prize to Liu, one of thousands of prisoners of conscience in China.

Chinese leaders have outdone Myanmar's military junta and even Hitler's Nazi Germany in their efforts to snub the Nobel Peace Prize and retaliate against the recipient. When Burmese democratic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won the Peace Prize in 1991 while she was under house arrest, her son made the acceptance speech at the ceremony. When Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist journalist, won in 1935 while imprisoned in a concentration camp, Nazi Germany declared that Ossietzky was free to go to Norway to accept the prize, while refusing him a passport. The Chinese government is handing out a competing Confucius Peace Prize.

Over the last decade, the Chinese government has invested heavily in soft diplomacy and image beautification projects, such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics and this year's Shanghai Expo. But international opinion will not look kindly on a government that jails its first Nobel Peace Prize winner. Keeping Liu in prison provides a platform for international mobilization to end rights abuses in China, and will continue to shame the government for its failures to honor its international treaty obligations to respect human rights.

Beijing puts out the Confucius prize to boost its claims that rights and freedoms are Western ideas, and that "stability" and prosperity are more desirable to the Chinese people. On the world stage, China appears as a confident and powerful player. Yet at home, the government is nervous about losing control, terrified that the people will find their own voice. Liu Xiaobo has articulated their voice. By silencing him, the government is silencing the voice of conscience. It is not the silenced Chinese people but the government that rejects the universal values of human rights and democracy.

President Obama, the recipient of last year's Nobel Peace Prize, has a special responsibility to advocate for the freedom of fellow laureate Liu. Obama should attend the Nobel ceremony and take the opportunity to speak publicly about China's worsening human rights conditions. He should ask Chinese President Hu Jintao to free Liu, release his wife from house arrest and allow them to travel to Oslo. Indeed, Obama has a solemn responsibility to speak for the Chinese citizens who cannot, to give substance to the words in his acceptance speech in Oslo a year ago: "Peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please, choose their own leaders or assemble without fear."

Despite Beijing's information blackout on the prize ceremony, many of China's 420 million netizens will find ways to watch the ceremony and spread the word online. Chinese authorities may have succeeded in keeping Liu, his wife and invited guests from China away from the Nobel ceremony. But they cannot prevent the ideas and values that Liu has spent his life promoting from traveling across national borders and China's great Internet firewall.

Renee Xia is international director of the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, which documents human rights abuses in China.

Chinese Leaders' “Catch 22”

Since the Nobel Committee announced that the 2010 Peace Prize is awarded to Liu Xiaobo, China's prominent prisoner of conscience, the Chinese government has respond with furious denouncement of the decision, blockage of information in the media and on the Internet, and harassment of Liu's family and supporters.

The leaders of this one-party state could have reacted very differently, that is, if they would choose to do so. They could have welcomed this prestigious prize and demonstrate that China as capable of embracing universal values such as peace, freedom, and justice.
Either way, whichever of the two responses they choose to adopt, they’d have to abandon the oxymoron of holding on to authoritarian capitalism and, at the same time, gaining world recognition -- that they much desire – as a respected member of modern nations in good standing.
The reason that the government has demonstrated no intention to take the course of positive reaction to the Nobel decision is clear: If it had embraced the 2010 Peace Prize, the Chinese government would have to release Liu Xiaobo from prison, where he is serving an 11-year term for expressing his views critical of the one-party state, writing about its corruption and abuses of human rights. Releasing Liu Xiaobo would be tantamount to tolerating free speech and admitting the wrong of imprisoning and detaining thousands of others for peaceful expression. Releasing all prisoners of conscience would also open the floodgate for free speech and free press, lifting censorship on the Internet, and so on, which is very likely to undermine the Communist Party's monopoly of power and ultimately putting the “Chinese model” for development -- authoritarian capitalism – on its death bed.

However, by taking the opposite stance to the above – denouncing the Nobel decision for “interfering in China's internal affair” and “blaspheme” the principles of Nobel Peace Prize, telling the world that Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his speech, is “a convicted criminal”, and putting Liu's wife and other supporters under house arrest, detaining people who tried to celebrate the Peace Prize, and canceling trade talks with the Norwegians – the Chinese government sets itself back twenty years in its diplomatic quest for a polished image and investment in acquiring a world imminence fit for its economic power.

Indeed, by telling the Nobel Committee that it has “blasphemed” its mandate of promoting universal values, the Chinese government blasphemed the Chinese Constitution and its international pledges and treaty obligations.

The Chinese Constitution, Article 35, grants all Chinese citizens the rights to free expression, assembly, and association. China signed the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights in 1998, thus committed to not violating this international treaty. China is an active member of the UN Human Rights Council, to be elected to which, it made a voluntary pledge to uphold the highest standards of human rights, and China has run and won a second term on the Council. Each year in the past several years, China’s State Council released its annual report on the human rights records of the US. Early this year, the government released its Human Rights Plan of Action promising to comply with its international obligations to respect human rights.

Does the Chinese government care about the negative publicity, unflattering to the image it had invested billions to polish – displaying itself as an irresponsible, unreliable, self-contradictory, bullying power? Its reactions to the Nobel decision have only reinforced these seedy sides of this increasingly influential hereby intimidating player on world stage.
One could almost be certainly though that the Chinese government cares a great deal about its appearances as a respectable power player in good standing in world politics. In recent years, the government has engaged in “soft diplomacy” to polish its image and dissuade those who fear and warn against China’s ascending power status. The state-funded global 24-hour English TV news network will dish out positive news about China and “promote a Chinese perspective” on world events. Chinese government also funded hundreds of “Confucian Institutes” in many US and European universities, prompting worries about Chinese influence on academic studies and minds of youth by cultivating sympathetic sentiments toward the Chinese government. China had spent billions to host the 2008 Summer Olympics and the Shanghai Expo, making these glittering mega attractions.

Awarding of the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo practically canceled out much of the effort China invested. And it will take as long as the Chinese government chooses to keep Liu Xiaobo and the thousands of other prisoners behind bars to undo the damages. No doubt the Chinese government is so furious at Norway and its retaliation against Chinese activists has since the Nobel announcement reached frenzy unseen since before the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Only the top leaders in the Chinese Communist Party can bail China out of its dilemma. Otherwise, they can count on sustained pressure and its shaming factor on the regime as long as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate remain in Chinese jail. Everyday goes by, with Liu Xiaobo imprisoned, Chinese government’s efforts to soften and polish its image will have diminishing return. Releasing Liu Xiaobo now would win China good praises from all around the world, yet the one-party state and its authoritarian capitalism “model” will suffer a blunt blow.

Xiaorong Li

UN Chief's Imbalanced Statement on Nobel Peace Prize for Liu Xiaobo

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s statement, released through his spokesperson, on the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded to China’s jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo last Friday, has gone too far in assuaging China’s furious authorities.

The statement offered little, if anything, about the achievement of Liu Xiaobo while devoting most part of this brief statement to sing the praises to the Chinese government for improving human rights. Facing potential pressure from China in his bid for a second term as the UN chief, Mr. Ban, in his well-known non-confrontational style, might have done better to stand firm on UN human rights principles while refraining from offering Chinese authorities praises that contradict the UN human rights expert bodies’ own findings.

Ban’s statement said, "the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo of China is a recognition of the growing international consensus for improving human rights practices and culture around the world." Ban went on to praise China: "Over the past years, China has achieved remarkable economic advances, lifted millions out of poverty, broadened political participation and steadily joined the international mainstream in its adherence to recognized human rights instruments and practices." “Lifting millions out of poverty” maybe, but “broadened political participation?” This claim pays no attention to the mere fact of China’s recent harsh crackdown on Chinese citizens who supported a political reform manifesto, Charter 08, since its publication on December 9, 2008, one day after Liu Xiaobo’s arrest for his role in drafting and organizing support for this expression of democratic aspirations.

Ban said nothing in terms of appealing to China to free Liu Xiaobo, but instead expressed his "sincere hope that any differences on this decision will not detract from advancement of the human rights agenda globally or the high prestige and inspirational power of the Award." This conclusion gives the impression that China was advancing the human rights agenda and it may also hint that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo might detract the prestige of the award while saying nothing about China’s bullying of Norway by issuing threats on diplomatic and trade relations for months prior to the Nobel Committee’s decision.

As if to counter-balance the UN chief’s statement, some UN human rights experts released a statement on Oct. 11 on Liu Xiaobo’s winning of the Peace Prize. The experts urge China to “respect human rights and release all persons detained for peacefully exercising their rights”. The experts have communicated their concerns over the arbitrary detention of Liu Xiaobo for expressing his democratic aspirations in the past two years.

In contrast to Ban’s statement, President Barack Obama, last year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, in his statement issued last Friday, praised Liu Xiaobo "as an eloquent and courageous spokesman for the advance of universal values through peaceful and non-violent means" and urged China to release Liu Xiaobo as soon as possible.

The reporter Nikola Krastev of Radio Free Europe called Ban’s statement a “congratulatory” message to both Liu and the Chinese authorities who jailed him. Krastev noted that Ban is caught between “a rock and a hard place”: on the one hand, China’s support to Ban as the UN chief, and on the other, the importance of giving this year’s Peace Prize to an imprisoned Chinese dissident.

Colum Lynch, the longtime Washington Post correspondent who reports on all things United Nations for Turtle Bay, shared his view on what might be going on behind such a compromising statement: Ban’s statement took a “diplomatic approach to Beijing”. The UN Secretary General “who will need China's support if he hopes to win a second term as secretary general in 2011.”

China displayed an uncontrolled outrage at the Nobel Committee’s decision since Friday. It has quickly censored media reports and the Internet on related news. Chinese police warned against and rounded up Chinese activists who tried to spread the good news and celebrate, calling for his release.

Mr. Ban is reasonably concerned about a diplomatic show-down with China. Yet, Mr. Ban went one step too far than it is necessary in pursuing his signature “non-confrontational” diplomatic approach to the “China vs. Nobel Committee” face-off.

(Oct. 11, 2010)

Copenhagen: China's Predictable Act of Game Change

Xiaorong Li

The UN Summit on climate change ended in a non-binding agreement. China and the US, for different reasons, hail it as a victory. Toward the end of the negotiations, Politico reported that China's negotiators were pushing for "a short, noncommittal collective statement" rather than a full-fledged binding agreement. What came out of the summit is something that those monitor China’s human rights have predicted. China emerged as the central holdout, leading developing countries with high emission rates, which, they said, if they were mandated to lower, would slow down their economy and cost billions, which they wanted the industrialized countries to pay.
No one should be surprised to learn from Copenhagen that the last thing the Chinese government wants is a binding agreement, transparency of its actions in implementing it and any opportunity for international monitoring. Yet, China also wants to appear a key player in global efforts to combat climate change.
China also says it deserves being given “exception”. Now that sounds familiar! Chinese officials told the gathering of world leaders that China is still a developing country and should not be held responsible for its carbon emissions as a developed country should. But China has become a big industrial country and replaced the US in 2006 to become the largest greenhouse gases producer. Without firm commitment by China and the US to abide by an enforceable treaty, with measurable benchmarks, to cut down emission, there is little hope to slow down climate change.
Copenhagen accentuates the stark choices that the Chinese leaders must make sooner or later: Will China rise as a responsible, cooperative, and rule-binding world power, a force to do good in solving global problems? Or will China rise as a force to undermine international efforts, imposing its own political will, changing the rule of the game by swinging its sheer weight around on world stage?
While many have been charmed and seduced by China’s rapid rising power status, it is easy to turn blind eyes to the fact that the Chinese government rules above the law at home. It needs the law and uses it as its political tool. The Chinese leaders love rule by law, but they have kept rule of law at bay! The government has little transparency in its decision making. It is un-accountable to its people, even those who would be negatively affected by its decisions and policies. Such a power is naturally averse to any international monitoring and efforts at holding it accountable to binding rules constraining its exercise.
It is true that China has singed on to binding international rules. That is when there were enough pressure and incentives. In 1998, China signed and ratified the binding human rights treaty International Covenant on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights (ICSECR), and also signed (but has not ratified) the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At that time, China was eager to return to international stage with as a respectable power player. It still had to struggle to shed off bad reputations after it had bloodily butchered peaceful pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen ten years back, in 1989.

The key to getting China to sign binding agreement on cutting emission, then, is making the government understand what is at stake for its own interest -- if climate change can’t be quickly contained. And monitoring is necessary if any quick effective emission cut is to be achieved.
Even if China had signed a binding international agreement in Copenhagen, it does not mean action. It is important to take seriously the lessons learnt from the way in which China evades its treaty obligations to international human rights law:
First, when ratifying an international treaty, China never fails to take reservations on key articles and opt not to accept optional protocols. Thus China took reservation on the article stipulating the right to form independent union in the ICSECR. It also took reservations on articles governing monitoring and refused to adopt the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. These moves practically exempted China from inspection by the Committee against Torture and prevented Chinese citizens from reporting individual cases to the Committee.
Secondly, international monitoring of China’s implementation of its treaty obligations and holding it accountable has been very difficult, if not impossible. Twenty-one years after China signed and ratified the Convention against Torture, the Chinese law has not yet been fully revised to conform to the treaty’s requirements, perpetrators have rarely been held criminally responsible, victims are hardly ever compensated, and torture remains rampant in detention centers, jails, and in law enforcement. (These are documented in the UN Committee against Torture’s 2008 “Concluding Observation & Recommendations” issued after its review of China’s own report on the implementation of this treaty in the past five years: http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G08/457/10/PDF/G0845710.pdf?OpenElement)
Thirdly, even after a treaty is signed and ratified, China would resist very hard any monitoring efforts. China responded to the CAT “Observations” with a belligerent comment, denouncing its conclusions as “biased” and the sources it cited as “fabricated” by groups whose purpose was to “overthrow the Chinese government”. (See UN document CAT/C/CHN/CO/4/Add.1) At the UN Human Rights Council, where China lobbied hard and voluntarily pledged to promote human rights in order to get re-elected for a second term in 2009, it plays an aggressive role in trying to change the rules and practices that give the UN human rights monitoring mechanisms some teeth. E.g., China is trying to undo the UN practice of appointing independent experts to the Committee against Torture or to the positions of mandate holders of the Special Procedures monitoring different thematic issues of human rights or specific countries. China does not want the experts to do the job independently. If China has its way, the professors, lawyers, judges and NOG human rights advocates, who currently serve as volunteers in these posts will be replaced one day by diplomats and politicians from member states.

Taking these lessons seriously allows environmentalists and others who care about climate change to work more effectively toward their goals by, for instance, supporting efforts at democratic reform, rule of law changes, and improvement in protection of human rights in China.

China’s Indictment of Liu Xiaobo: What Does It Say about the Obama Administration’s Human Rights Policy?

Xiaorong Li

The news came last Friday that Liu Xiaobo, the best known Chinese dissident intellectual who lives in Beijing, was indicted on December 10, 2009, “International Human Rights Day,” by the Beijing Procuratorate. This move seems rather provocative or defiant, considering that the US President Obama had just returned from his China trip, where he has, no matter clearly or opaquely – a subject of debate, made statements advocating freedom of expression and information.

The Chinese leaders’ defiance to Mr. Obama and his call for more freedom of expression at the Shanghai “town hall” meeting with students carefully handpicked by the Chinese officials cannot be more accentuated by the fact that Mr. Liu is indicted for “drafting Charter 08 with others”, which the prosecution said was a “serious crime.” This means that writing and expressing views urging democratic reform and improving human rights is officially “a serious crime” in China and people go to jail for doing that, like Mr. Liu Xiaobo has for the past year.

Many may have wondered why the Chinese authorities chose at this time to indict Mr. Liu. But why wouldn't they? What would they have been worried about? One interesting question is whether the Obama Administration would learn something about the diminishing effectiveness of quiet private engagement on human rights with a big and increasingly more powerful country like China – if such a policy ever had any effectiveness at all before.

From talking to many people inside China, including Mr. Liu’s close friends, supporters, and his lawyers, I have heard it said repeatedly, often passionately, that the move against Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08, after having detained him and harassed other signatories for an whole year, is the outcome of the US President’s timid appeal in China. They told me that Obama’s appeals for human rights, which came in the form of praising freedom of expression on the internet and in a statement about agreeing to disagree about human rights during the joint press conference with the Chinese President Hu Jintao, were too weak and too vague. This seems to signal green light for the Chinese leaders to take strong actions on detained democrats and human rights activists, whose fate had been put on hold, as if awaiting for Obama’s visit.

It now looks like that US officials handed a short list of prisoners of conscience to the Chinese officials and President Obama may have personally conveyed the US government’s concerns about the individuals on the list to Hu Jintao. It was a private, quiet effort, to the Administration’s credit. But precisely because it was quiet and private, the Chinese leaders could easily pretend that they didn’t know anything and feel not pressure to respond. If this laudable effort ends there, out of the public view, it practically re-assured the Chinese leaders that the US would not protest loudly if they refuse to release these individuals or improve their conditions. The Chinese leaders seem to have concluded, quite logically, that the Obama administration, coming to Beijing to ask for help on several issues of importance to the US -- constraining Iran and N. Korea’s nuclear programs, slowing climate change, and re-balancing the economy -- would be too distracted by its own problems and unwilling to offend China by exerting any real pressure if the Chinese government went ahead convicting Liu Xiaobo and accusing drafting Charter 08 a crime.

For the Charter 08 writers and signatories, it might be better to be acknowledged than ignored by the Chinese government, but being officially labeled as having committed “a serious crime” sends a chill through the community. Charter 08, a public petition calling for democratic reform and protection of human rights, was initially signed by 303 Chinese on its release day on Dec. 9, 2008. In the past 12 months, more than 10,000 people have signed the petition, including about 8,000 residing on mainland China.

During those 12 months, other than the initial arrests, summons, interrogations, raids of homes and confiscation of personal property, the government has only published articles in official media to denounce “universal values” and “multi-party democracy,” but officials have rarely responded directly to Charter 08 by naming its name and have refrained from calling it a criminal act. Coming out finally to label drafting Charter 08 “a serious crime” clarifies speculations that, within top ranks of the leadership, officials were divided and some reformist inclined officials might be sympathetic to the drive or might have seen this as an opportunity to consolidate their power in the high-level power struggle.

Calling drafting Charter 08 a “crime” sends a stern warning to those who wrote, edited, or promoted this text, about one hundred of people, I was told, and to the thousands who signed the petition. For being implicated in this “criminal” act, they too could face imprisonment. The Chinese authorities clearly want to put them in their place: stop them from voicing their political views and threaten them with legal punishment for engaging in any political organizing!

Once again, the Chinese leaders behaved like calculating maximizers of benefits. Since they see no costly consequences for locking up its most vocal critic, and on the contrary, feeling confident they have had other big world powers tied around their fingers, they no longer need to make concessions by making a soft landing on Mr. Liu’s case. There is no obstacle in their path: They revert to do what the nature of their power has always seduced them to do – silencing dissent, stamping out any civil society mobilization for political change. Being calculating, rational, does not make an authoritarian one-party regime less authoritarian.

Let’s face it, it would not be entirely fair to call Obama’s China trip the worst or least successful in comparison to previous US Presidents’ China visits on account of the lack of any deal on prisoners’ releases this time. China is almost a different country today and the US-China relations are in a very different place as compared to the days of the Clinton’s and the Bushes’ presidencies. But quiet private diplomacy, an old strategy that didn’t quite work under these former presidents, is less likely to work now as China sees little bargain in such deals and no real pressure for compliance.

Obama could still have done better at making clear, strong, and eloquent statements on human rights and democracy on his China trip. The outcome might not have been different, given the weakened position of the US vs. China. But even if that were the case, the President would have at least stood the ground of US values and made the American people proud. And more importantly, to many Chinese democrats and human rights advocates, he would not have let them down.

December 14, 2009

Speaking of Human Rights

Here's the speech President Obama should give when he meets President Hu Jintao

By Xiaorong Li
November 17, 2009


While President Barack Obama is in Beijing this week, he has an opportunity to address two key issues, climate change and human rights concerns, simultaneously. Here's the kind of speech the president should give:

"President Hu Jintao, ladies & gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be in Beijing.

My administration has put climate change at the top of our diplomatic agenda. This is especially true when it comes to our relationship with China. Our two large nations share the title of top consumers of energy and the biggest polluters on earth. None of us can escape the impact of climate change. The security and stability of our nations and our peoples - our prosperity, our health, our safety - are in jeopardy.

Yet, we cannot meet this challenge unless all the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, including China, act together. The U.S., as one of the developed nations that caused much of the damage to our environment over the last century, has a responsibility to lead. China, as a rapidly developing nation that will produce a large share of global carbon emissions in the decades ahead, must do its part.

I am proud to say that my administration is actively pursuing its agenda to promote clean energy and reduce carbon emissions. President Hu, I urge you to build on what your government has already done to combat pollution and promote alternative energy.

I also want to express my admiration for the independent environmental activists who have sprung up across China. In my country, activists have played a vital role in mobilizing public opinion, blowing the whistle on polluters and developing energy-saving measures. I salute them as part of the solution to environmental problems.

For this reason, I am concerned that they still cannot express their views freely. One of this country's most vocal environmentalists is behind bars. Wu Lihong, a farmer, should be released from prison where he is serving a three-year sentence in retaliation for exposing the illegal dumping of industrial waste in the famous Tai Lake. Another hero, Sun Xiaodi, is currently serving two years in a labor camp. He fought for recognition of the health problems caused by nuclear contamination among workers in a plant in Gansu Province.

In 2008, a plant producing harmful waste was constructed in the densely populated city Chengdu. Residents held a protest march. One organizer, Chen Daojun, is now serving three years in prison for 'inciting subversion of the state.'

Your honor, you told the U.N. General Assembly in September that your government will take bold actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such an ambitious plan calls out for the active participation of members of Chinese civil society. Free expression is a key to civil society participation. People who post their opinions on the Internet, like the writer Liu Xiaobo, should not be behind bars for voicing their political views.

It is also crucial to hold polluting businesses accountable through a fair and just judicial process. That is why I am concerned that Chinese lawyers have been stripped of licenses or, as in the case of the Beijing lawyer Gao Zhisheng, imprisoned, tortured and made to 'disappear.'

The United States is willing to engage China as an ally and partner in finding solutions. The American people are flexible and pragmatic, but they hold dear to their hearts respect for liberty and human dignity. They will not give these ideals up for expediency's sake.

I look forward to working with you to achieve our common purpose: a world that is safer, cleaner and healthier than the one we found; and a future that is worthy of the children in China, in the United States, and in the world. Thank you."

Xiaorong Li is a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park, who does consultant work for Chinese NGOs.

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

Václav Havel Honors a Chinese Prisoner

New York Review of Books, Volume 56, Number 7 · April 30, 2009

Letter to the editor

In response to China's Charter 08 (January 15, 2009)

A link to China's Charter 08

To the Editors:

Readers may be interested to know that Liu Xiaobo, a Beijing-based dissident now being held by Chinese authorities, and the other signatories of Charter 08, have received the 2008 Homo Homini Award in Prague. The award, which was presented by former Czech president Václav Havel on March 11 on behalf of the Czech-based organization People in Need, is given each year to someone who has "made an important contribution to promoting human rights, democracy and non-violent resolution of political conflicts."

For over three months, Liu has been held in incommunicado detention without access to a lawyer, in violation of Chinese law, for his involvement in the creation of Charter 08. Inspired by the 1977 Czech and Slovak protest movement Charter 77, of which Václav Havel was a founding member, Charter 08 is a document signed by more than eight thousand Chinese citizens that calls for greater respect for individual rights and democratic reform in China ["China's Charter 08," NYR, January 15]. Since Liu's detention, his wife has been able to pay him only two visits, under severely restricted circumstances. His current whereabouts are unknown.

The award was accepted on Liu's behalf by Xu Youyu, a political philosopher and writer, Cui Weiping, a literary critic, and Mo Shaoping, a leading human rights lawyer. In presenting the award, Havel said:

I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.

However, in our experience, not reckoning with that did pay in the end; we found that it was possible to change the situation after all, and those who were mocked as being Don Quixotes, whose efforts were never going to come to anything, may in the end and to general astonishment get their way. I think that is important. In a peculiar way, there is both despair and hope in this. On the one hand we do not know how things will end, and on the other, we know they may in fact end well.

...It is our experience—and this is perhaps more an appeal to our ranks—that international solidarity is very important and valuable. It helps, even if only as an encouragement to us, rather than as an argument convincing the powers that be. Having had firsthand experience with a totalitarian system and dictatorship ourselves, it is thus our duty to help those who are yet not able to enjoy freedom.[*]

Li Xiaorong
University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland
Notes

[*]The complete text of Havel's remarks and acceptance speeches by Xu and Cui.

Only a Matter of Speech? Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's China Blunder

Words can topple regimes or shatter lives. That is more so about words uttered at important occasions by public figures with clout. What President John F. Kennedy told the crowds at the Berlin Wall “Tonight, we’re all Berliners!” and what Martin Luther King declared on the National Mall “We have a dream, one day…” have made imprints in change of course in history.

What Hilary Clinton told journalists on Feb. 20, on her way to China for a first visit as the top US diplomat, cannot be cast away into thin air as merely words. She said that human rights “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.” For all sides, these words have weight because they indicate the Obama Administration’s yet-to-be articulated China police.

Ms. Clinton’s words were ostentatiously quoted in an official Chinese Xinhua News Agency editorial on Feb. 23. Xinhua couldn’t help comparing Ms. Clinton’s tip-toeing around human rights to her well-known strong words about human rights and women’s rights when she attended the World Forum on Women in Beijing in 1995 as the first lady of the US, and her call last year, as a senator from NY, for President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics to protest human rights abuses and repression in Tibet. Headlines across other official newspapers had the air of triumphantly celebration of the retreat of US pressure on human rights during Clinton’s two-day visit. Huanqiu (World), a hardliner newspaper run by the Ministry of State Security, had a long front page story titled “Clinton Visiting China Avoided Human Rights!”

Chinese human rights activists and dissident intellectuals, many of whom were put under house arrest or surveillance in and around Feb. 20-22, were indignant upon learning Ms. Clinton’s deliberate choices of words.
“I didn’t plan to meet her and now I have less interest in bothering her now since she has placed human rights at the bottom of her agenda!” said Weise, a Tibetan poet/writer who lives in Beijing.

“I told the police who followed me that I was going to my church, an officially banned house church, and Clinton was going to an officially hand-picked church – we had nothing to do with each other! Why you are wasting your time monitoring me? I bet she dared not to mention persecution of house-church Christians to avoid ‘interference’ with her talk here about N. Korea and trade problems!” said another Beijing dissident writer.

“I went over the list of women whom Clinton met. Except for Gao Yaojie, a veteran AIDS doctor, the others are all from pro-government or government-organized ‘non-governmental organizations’”, another Beijing intellectual told me. During the one-hour meeting with these women, Clinton said nothing about women’s rights or human rights, according to Ms. Gao, the AIDS doctor.
Glaringly missing from the women’s gathering were the Tiananmen Mothers who have been seeking justice for their loved ones killed twenty years ago by government troops who crushed pro-democracy protester in Beijing; also uninvited was Zeng Jinyan, an AIDS activist and the wife of Hu Jia, also an AIDS activist who is serving a three-and-half year sentence for “inciting sedition against state power;” and yet another woman who should have been invited is Liu Xia, an artist, who has been asking the police in vain for the whereabouts of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a dissident writer, who was detained on suspicion of drafting a widely popular manifesto of political reform known as “Charter 08.”

Ms. Clinton’s political postures on her China trip are painful to watch. They shamed us Americans. They signal a callousness to those Chinese who have suffered from their struggle for justice, freedom, and democracy – the values that define what America is about. Ms. Clinton’s usual compassion for injustice and for those who suffer is lost in crude calculations of political gains from the Chinese leaders.

What should concern us most may not be Ms. Clinton’s words of choice but the fact that it may have given substance to the unrevealed China policy of the Obama Administration. To be true to his inaugural speech, Mr. Obama should shun from thorny issues – human rights, Tibet, etc. – in dealing with the Chinese leaders, who by nobody’s stretch of imagination belong to the ranks of “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent”, those who are “on the wrong side of history”.

Feb. 26, 2009

Mr. Obama Must Respond to Chinese Civil Society’s Call for Change

It appears imprudent to call the new Obama administration’s attention to China’s human rights problems. The US, in economic recession and in deep debt to China, is apparently in no position to demand anything of China. Yet, although a power player in the global economy, China is not immune to its own economic problems, which have caused social and political headaches for its authoritarian regime. At this critical moment, there is reason to hope that the US and the international community can actually exert a positive influence on China by promoting democratization and respect for human rights.

Democracy advocates in China have given President-elect Barack Obama and his Secretary of State-select an opportunity to provide leadership on these issues. A civil society campaign for democratic reform, emulating the Charter 77 movement in Cold War era Czechoslovakia and partly inspired by Mr. Obama, deserves the new administration’s support.

The call for sweeping political reforms in China came in early December in an online petition titled Charter 08. Upon learning about this petition, police detained one prominent intellectual, Liu Xiaobo, and interrogated another co-signer for 12 hours, after raiding their homes. Mr. Liu has remained in detention and more than 100 signatories have been interrogated since December 8. Vaclav Havel, leader of Charter 77 and former president of the democratic Czech Republic, denounced the arrest in the Wall Street Journal. Supporters of Mr. Liu in China are asking, “Why hasn’t the US President-elect voiced concerns about the detention of Liu Xiaobo and demanded a halt to the crackdown on the signatories of Charter 08?”

More than 5000 residents on Mainland China have since signed Charter 08, and Netizens briefly outsmarted Chinese cyberpolice censorship on the internet, indicating a measure of popular support for the Charter’s demands -- human rights, democracy, rule of law, and 19 steps toward an overhaul of governance, including putting an end to the one-party rule and protecting the natural environment. Compared to similar petitions circulated since 1989, Charter 08 has garnered support from a much wider swath of the population, far exceeded the drafters’ expectations. As a result, it has shaken those in power.

Chinese authorities have reasons to be nervous. Huge declines in Chinese exports and growth have prompted the closure of manufacturing plants and layoffs. This is the year that may reveal what happens when the Communist Party is no longer able to deliver on its deal with the population, a deal that Deng Xiaoping struck 30 years ago when he introduced market reforms: prosperity and morsels of personal freedom in exchange for political acquiescence to the Party’s rule.

The current economic recession has seen China’s nouveau middle classes disillusioned and workers disproportionately burdened. The Chinese official press reported that 10 million rural laborers, migrated to cities to look for jobs, have found no work in factories and are trickling back home. But 20% to 30% of farmers have lost their land to developers and have hardly any means of making a living. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ 2009 Blue Papers put urban unemployment rates at 9.4%.
Many in the hard-hit social groups are angry, and many are demanding justice and rights. According to official press, in 2008, from January to October, there was a 93.52 percent increase in labor protests from 2007, in the same months. Compared to 2007, there were 300% more protests demanding unpaid salaries in a city in the industrial costal regions.

The recent Third Session of the Seventeenth Chinese Communist Party Congress made economic recession and social unrest its top concern. President Hu Jintao’s speech at the October gathering of senior leaders stressed “stability” as the Party’s “rock-hard mandate.” A national conference on political and legal affairs held in Beijing in med-December made containing “mass incidents” (social riots) its priority.

Unwilling to allow China’s citizens to peacefully express their views and hold demonstrations, the Chinese state habitually responds to workers’ strikes, rural protests, and political or religious demonstrations with brute force, as it did 20 years ago to crush prodemocracy protests in Tiananmen Square, as it did 10 years ago to suppress the spiritual sect Falun Gong, and as it did 9 months ago to quell monks’ demonstrations in Tibet. The Party has never failed to rule out free expression and participatory governance as means to a peaceful transition to a stable society based on less corruption and more justice -- especially in times of widespread discontent and a pervading sense of crisis.

2009 happens to be a year of anniversaries with huge political symbolism: the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen suppression, the 50th of the exile of the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, and the 60th of the Communist Party’s rise to power.
The new administration must respond to the current call from China’s non-state sectors for political change. The Obama presidency will be under pressure to gain China’s cooperation on matters of global importance like climate change, regional security, and nuclear proliferation. Yet it is in America’s long-term strategic interest to engage China in reforming its political system and ending repression. This is the only sensible way to ensure that China will respect international law, play according to rules, and cooperate on issues of global importance. As soon as possible, the new president should articulate a China policy that makes supporting civil society and promoting human rights and democracy a pillar, not a bargaining chip.

Mr. Obama should reach out directly to the Chinese citizenry, making clear to them that the American people want to support their pursuit of justice, democracy, prosperity and sustainable development. Soon after his inauguration, President Obama should announce U.S. intentions (1) to work with non-governmental sectors to strengthen civil society and support grassroots initiatives for democratic change; (2) to broaden exchange programs to include more civil society actors; (3) to work through multilateral organizations that have mechanisms for civil society participation, such as the newly established UN Human Rights Council, which is playing an active role in monitoring human rights and supporting rule-of-law reform in China and around the world; and (4) to restructure the recently resumed US-China “human rights dialogue” such that NGO participation, transparency, and measurable results are integral components of the bilateral efforts.

A 14-year-old boy in Beijing, the youngest of the signatories to Charter 08, remarked: “If Mr. Obama can be elected President of the United States, we too can change China!” Mr. Obama’s election has inspired much hope for democratic change in China and around the globe. He can keep that hope alive by firmly supporting civil society actors in their efforts to bring about this change. A crucial first step will be for Mr. Obama to call on President Hu Jintao to release Liu Xiaobo and to end the crackdown on thousands of signatories of Charter 08.