[Written for the Italian journal MicroMega's special issue on the Beijing Olympics, June 11, 2008; with minor modifications, Oct 8, 2008]
V. The Spirit of Political Dissent in Defiance
Ever since June 1989, the world has identified human courage and dignity in China with the “Tank Man” who stands alone in front of a long row of tanks to stop them with his defiant will. More than nineteen years later, another generation has grown up. Without easy access to information about the Tian’anmen pro-democracy movement and its tragic ending, has China’s younger generation forgotten that spirit completely, to show the world the achievement of the government’s effort to depoliticize the society? What does political situation mean to millions of ordinary people engaged in socio-political movements elsewhere in the world?
Ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tian’anmen massacre in 2004, Shi Tao, a young poet and journalist born in 1968, sent an e-mail message using his yahoo account to a New York-based pro-democracy online journal. In it he passed information about the government’s preparation for potential political disturbances at the anniversary, which he had learned from a meeting where no note-taking was allowed. At the same time, he produced a series of touching poems full of painful memories and burning passion. In at least two poems, he predicted his confrontation with plainclothes police and his own arrest. It eventually arrived. Shi Tao was sentenced to ten-year imprisonment for “subversion,” with evidence supplied by Yahoo to the Chinese police.
If Shi Tao acted explicitly on behalf of his comrades at Tian’anmen Square fifteen years earlier, some others took up causes of political dissent more recently. Like Wu Lihong, the peasant environmental activist by Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, many of them started as volunteers in social welfare charity work, but eventually fell out with local authorities and then with the political system as a whole.
Chen Guangcheng, born in 1971, was from a village near Linyi City in Shandong Province. He lost his sight in his childhood but nonetheless managed to train himself as a legal consultant and an activist for local villagers since the late nineties. He was prompted into determined action in early 2005 after learning about the thousands of cases of brutality against peasant women by local authorities forcefully carrying out the one-child policy. By late summer, the National Family Planning and Population Commission took up the issue and publicly recognized Chen’s effort. However, the commission does not have any real power over local governments, even though its policies were frequently taken as excuse by local officials to bully peasants or extort extra incomes. At the same time when the commission said Linyi officials related to the issue had been punished, Chen was put under house arrest by local police.
Complicating the situation were foreign journalists. Beijing just started to give greater freedom to foreign journalists to go around the country. They learned about Chen’s activism and the Time magazine already published an interview with him in the summer. Next year, Chen was named one of the 100 most influential persons of the world in 2006, together with the filmmaker Ang Lee and China’s Premier Wen Jiabao. Beijing was obviously not pleased with the publicity. In the following months, Chen was tried for “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic” and was sentenced to more than four years in prison. His three lawyers were beaten by local thugs, detained by police and prevented to attend the trial. When decision was to be announced on his final appeal in January 2007, members of a German television station were also physically abused in Chen’s village. Summer 2007, Chen was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in Manila, the Philippines, for emergent leadership. His wife was prevented from going to the award ceremony and put into house-arrest herself, together with a baby son not yet three-year-old.
While Chen was struggling, he and his wife were supported and cared after whenever they traveled to Beijing by a young couple, Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan. Born in 1973, Hu Jia had been an AIDS activist for years when he met Zeng. Ten years younger than Hu, Zeng at beginning was skeptical of the many tales Hu was telling her. She also had hesitation, uncertain if Hu should get himself into all those troubles with the authorities. Essentially, she was transformed into a determined activist by the experience of grieve anxiety, when Hu Jia “disappeared” for 41 days in early 2006 while police showed the ugly face of the state power. Here we see clearly that, with all internal contradictions, the Chinese education system is still capable of producing truly idealistic, courageous young people.
The years since they got married have not been an easy time for the young lady. Hu Jia was placed under house-arrestment for almost a whole year in 2006-2007. Both of them kept active networking with other activists and frequent writing on the Internet. While Hu was unable to leave home, Zeng attended training programs run by the Focus group in Thailand and the World Social Forum India in late 2006. Next year, she herself was named one of the 100 influential people of the world by the Time magazine. Bad omen. By the end of 2007, not long after she gave birth to their daughter, Hu Jia was taken away. He has since been sentenced to three-and-a-half-years into prison. Zeng herself has been under house-arrest for months by now, together with her infant daughter, helped mainly by her mother. When Zeng’s mother left Beijing earlier this year, police stepped up their surveillance and harassment. Neighbors and her baby’s nanny were all visited by police at home, checked with information of all their family members, and warned against letting their own babies to play with Zeng’s.
If anything, what shared by the case of Shi Tao, Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan are the followings. First, they might start with charity works, but they all held clear political visions and explicitly raised political demands. Second, in raising sensitive political issues, they focused their attention on the disadvantaged social groups. Third, their cases, particularly Chen Guangcheng and the Hu-Zeng couple, infuriated the Chinese government and its security forces the most by their connections to the outside world, be it foreign media or foreign activists. It has become inherent to the CCP’s political culture that official hierarchy is more important than anything else. For the CCP, bringing in foreign factors for the purpose of adding on political pressure is the greater crime than challenging authorities locally. For it breaks the rules of its own game. Thus, the punishment received not only by Chen and Hu, but also their wives and their young babies. Beijing shows its real color in these cases, when it deliberately courted world capitals and easily dismissed international solidarity of today’s grassroots socialist movement, such as those represented by the World Social Forum India and by the Magsaysay award in the Philippines.
Here we may recall the environmental cases in the cities of Xiamen and Shanghai, mentioned earlier, when citizens’ “collective walks” took place, as if there was no political intention, no organizer, and not one single individual to be taken responsible. The question and challenge to social movement worldwide would be this: Do we believe in political dissent? Do we accept substitution of valuing political dissent by prioritizing cooperation with political establishment? Do we believe that, under whichever kind of situation, improvement of living standard is always more important than promoting political consciousness? Chinese people hold unrealized political potentials with great energy that has not been relished yet. We might see a very different China once the people can openly, freely pick up political topics concerning the world as well as concerning their own lives.
-- Los Angeles, June 11, 2008
[1] Wang Hui, Qu zhengzhi hua de zhengzhi: Duan 20 shiji de zhongjie yu 90 niandai (Depoliticizing politics: The end of the short twentieth century and the nineties), Beijing, 2008, p. 7, 14, 15, 55-56.
[2] E.g., see ibid, pp. 15-20. Wang Hui’s discussion on theoretical debates in 1979-1983 (ibid, pp. 21-22) raises more questions that are beyond the scope of this paper. For views differing from Wang Hui’s, for instance, see Cui Weiping, "Weishenme meiyou chunfeng chuifu dadi" (Why there was no wind of spring over the land), http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=11741 , last visited on October 8, 2008; Sixiang (Reflextion), no. 6 (August 2007), Taipei, Linking Publishing.
[3] http://www.reviewing.cn/fact/2008/0606/article_520.html (in Chinese), last visited on June 10, 2008.
[4] http://ccdv.people.com.cn/GB/66982/5876850.html (in Chinese), last visited on June 10, 2008; and New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/asia/06pollute.html?ref=asia
V. The Spirit of Political Dissent in Defiance
Ever since June 1989, the world has identified human courage and dignity in China with the “Tank Man” who stands alone in front of a long row of tanks to stop them with his defiant will. More than nineteen years later, another generation has grown up. Without easy access to information about the Tian’anmen pro-democracy movement and its tragic ending, has China’s younger generation forgotten that spirit completely, to show the world the achievement of the government’s effort to depoliticize the society? What does political situation mean to millions of ordinary people engaged in socio-political movements elsewhere in the world?
Ahead of the fifteenth anniversary of the Tian’anmen massacre in 2004, Shi Tao, a young poet and journalist born in 1968, sent an e-mail message using his yahoo account to a New York-based pro-democracy online journal. In it he passed information about the government’s preparation for potential political disturbances at the anniversary, which he had learned from a meeting where no note-taking was allowed. At the same time, he produced a series of touching poems full of painful memories and burning passion. In at least two poems, he predicted his confrontation with plainclothes police and his own arrest. It eventually arrived. Shi Tao was sentenced to ten-year imprisonment for “subversion,” with evidence supplied by Yahoo to the Chinese police.
If Shi Tao acted explicitly on behalf of his comrades at Tian’anmen Square fifteen years earlier, some others took up causes of political dissent more recently. Like Wu Lihong, the peasant environmental activist by Lake Tai in Jiangsu province, many of them started as volunteers in social welfare charity work, but eventually fell out with local authorities and then with the political system as a whole.
Chen Guangcheng, born in 1971, was from a village near Linyi City in Shandong Province. He lost his sight in his childhood but nonetheless managed to train himself as a legal consultant and an activist for local villagers since the late nineties. He was prompted into determined action in early 2005 after learning about the thousands of cases of brutality against peasant women by local authorities forcefully carrying out the one-child policy. By late summer, the National Family Planning and Population Commission took up the issue and publicly recognized Chen’s effort. However, the commission does not have any real power over local governments, even though its policies were frequently taken as excuse by local officials to bully peasants or extort extra incomes. At the same time when the commission said Linyi officials related to the issue had been punished, Chen was put under house arrest by local police.
Complicating the situation were foreign journalists. Beijing just started to give greater freedom to foreign journalists to go around the country. They learned about Chen’s activism and the Time magazine already published an interview with him in the summer. Next year, Chen was named one of the 100 most influential persons of the world in 2006, together with the filmmaker Ang Lee and China’s Premier Wen Jiabao. Beijing was obviously not pleased with the publicity. In the following months, Chen was tried for “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic” and was sentenced to more than four years in prison. His three lawyers were beaten by local thugs, detained by police and prevented to attend the trial. When decision was to be announced on his final appeal in January 2007, members of a German television station were also physically abused in Chen’s village. Summer 2007, Chen was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in Manila, the Philippines, for emergent leadership. His wife was prevented from going to the award ceremony and put into house-arrest herself, together with a baby son not yet three-year-old.
While Chen was struggling, he and his wife were supported and cared after whenever they traveled to Beijing by a young couple, Hu Jia and his wife Zeng Jinyan. Born in 1973, Hu Jia had been an AIDS activist for years when he met Zeng. Ten years younger than Hu, Zeng at beginning was skeptical of the many tales Hu was telling her. She also had hesitation, uncertain if Hu should get himself into all those troubles with the authorities. Essentially, she was transformed into a determined activist by the experience of grieve anxiety, when Hu Jia “disappeared” for 41 days in early 2006 while police showed the ugly face of the state power. Here we see clearly that, with all internal contradictions, the Chinese education system is still capable of producing truly idealistic, courageous young people.
The years since they got married have not been an easy time for the young lady. Hu Jia was placed under house-arrestment for almost a whole year in 2006-2007. Both of them kept active networking with other activists and frequent writing on the Internet. While Hu was unable to leave home, Zeng attended training programs run by the Focus group in Thailand and the World Social Forum India in late 2006. Next year, she herself was named one of the 100 influential people of the world by the Time magazine. Bad omen. By the end of 2007, not long after she gave birth to their daughter, Hu Jia was taken away. He has since been sentenced to three-and-a-half-years into prison. Zeng herself has been under house-arrest for months by now, together with her infant daughter, helped mainly by her mother. When Zeng’s mother left Beijing earlier this year, police stepped up their surveillance and harassment. Neighbors and her baby’s nanny were all visited by police at home, checked with information of all their family members, and warned against letting their own babies to play with Zeng’s.
If anything, what shared by the case of Shi Tao, Chen Guangcheng, Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan are the followings. First, they might start with charity works, but they all held clear political visions and explicitly raised political demands. Second, in raising sensitive political issues, they focused their attention on the disadvantaged social groups. Third, their cases, particularly Chen Guangcheng and the Hu-Zeng couple, infuriated the Chinese government and its security forces the most by their connections to the outside world, be it foreign media or foreign activists. It has become inherent to the CCP’s political culture that official hierarchy is more important than anything else. For the CCP, bringing in foreign factors for the purpose of adding on political pressure is the greater crime than challenging authorities locally. For it breaks the rules of its own game. Thus, the punishment received not only by Chen and Hu, but also their wives and their young babies. Beijing shows its real color in these cases, when it deliberately courted world capitals and easily dismissed international solidarity of today’s grassroots socialist movement, such as those represented by the World Social Forum India and by the Magsaysay award in the Philippines.
Here we may recall the environmental cases in the cities of Xiamen and Shanghai, mentioned earlier, when citizens’ “collective walks” took place, as if there was no political intention, no organizer, and not one single individual to be taken responsible. The question and challenge to social movement worldwide would be this: Do we believe in political dissent? Do we accept substitution of valuing political dissent by prioritizing cooperation with political establishment? Do we believe that, under whichever kind of situation, improvement of living standard is always more important than promoting political consciousness? Chinese people hold unrealized political potentials with great energy that has not been relished yet. We might see a very different China once the people can openly, freely pick up political topics concerning the world as well as concerning their own lives.
-- Los Angeles, June 11, 2008
[1] Wang Hui, Qu zhengzhi hua de zhengzhi: Duan 20 shiji de zhongjie yu 90 niandai (Depoliticizing politics: The end of the short twentieth century and the nineties), Beijing, 2008, p. 7, 14, 15, 55-56.
[2] E.g., see ibid, pp. 15-20. Wang Hui’s discussion on theoretical debates in 1979-1983 (ibid, pp. 21-22) raises more questions that are beyond the scope of this paper. For views differing from Wang Hui’s, for instance, see Cui Weiping, "Weishenme meiyou chunfeng chuifu dadi" (Why there was no wind of spring over the land), http://www.xschina.org/show.php?id=11741 , last visited on October 8, 2008; Sixiang (Reflextion), no. 6 (August 2007), Taipei, Linking Publishing.
[3] http://www.reviewing.cn/fact/2008/0606/article_520.html (in Chinese), last visited on June 10, 2008.
[4] http://ccdv.people.com.cn/GB/66982/5876850.html (in Chinese), last visited on June 10, 2008; and New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/world/asia/06pollute.html?ref=asia
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