by Liu Xiaobo
Han Gaozu, founder of a dynasty
he invented a tale about his mother and a dragon
to inflate his family history
this ancient pattern continues
from the Ming Tombs to the Memorial Hall
butchers lie in state
in resplendent underground palaces
across millennia, tyrants and autocrats
exchange tips on dagger technique
while their entombed vassals
offer obeisance
In a few months’ time
amid glorious pomp
murder weapons will roll once again across this square
and the corpse in the Hall
and the butchers dreaming their imperial dreams
will look on with approval
while beneath the earth the Emperor of Qin
reviews his clay troops
Still that old ghost
mulls his past glories
while his heirs glut themselves
upon his legacy
with his blessing they wield scepters of bone
and pray the next century
will be even better
Amid tanks and flowers
salutes and daggers
amid doves and bullets
jackboots and expressionless faces
a century concludes
in blood-reek and darkness
and a new era begins
without a glimmer of life
4
Refuse to eat
refuse to masturbate
pick a book out of the ruins
and admire the humility of the corpse
in a mosquito’s innards
dreaming blood-dark dreams
peer through the steel door’s peephole
and converse with vampires
no need to be circumspect
your stomach spasms
will give you the courage of the dying
retch out a curse
for fifty years of glory
there has never been a New China
only a Party
In the labor camp, Dalian, June 4, 1999
Translated by Isaac P. Hsieh
Editor’s Postscript: In the 1950s the Communist Party promoted a song called “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.” In 1989, student protesters at Tiananmen sang the song, clearly intending a sarcastic second-level meaning of “without the Communist Party, there would be no (such disaster as) ‘New China.’ ” (Authorities could not stop them from singing it, because its first-level meaning was unobjectionable.) In the last two lines of this poem, Liu Xiaobo seems to push the students’ meaning one step further.
TO CHANGE A REGIME BY CHANGING A SOCIETY
This essay is one of six that were adduced at Liu Xiaobo’s trial on December 23, 2009, as evidence of his guilt of “the crime of inciting subversion of state power.” The phrase “to change a regime” was directly quoted several times.—Ed.
CHINA HAS NOW OFFICIALLY SEEN more than twenty years of “reform.” Yet because of the Communist Party’s continuing jealous grip on power, and because popular movements within society remain diffuse, there is no prospect that any organization will be able to muster a political force sufficient to bring regime change any time soon. There is also no sign within the ruling elite of an enlightened figure like Mikhail Gorbachev or Chiang Ching-kuo, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped turn the USSR and Taiwan toward democracy. For these reasons China’s transition toward a modern, free society must necessarily be gradual and tortuous, and the amount of time it will take might well be more than anyone estimates.
Resting beneath the mighty Communist regime is a civil society that remains weak. It doesn’t have much courage and is not very sophisticated. As a civil society it is still in a nascent stage, and this is why we must not expect it, in the near term, to produce a political organization that might replace the Communist regime. Given this situation, any plan, program, or action that aims at quick changes in China’s political system or in its current regime is little more than a mirage.
But none of the above should cause us to abandon hope for a free China in the future. The hope has a realistic basis because it is plain that in post-Mao China it is no longer possible, as it once was, for a single great dictator to block the entire Chinese sky. The sky now bears a distinct pattern of two shades, darkness and light, and both are always present. The relation between rulers and ruled is no longer one in which the people are held in regimented silence except when permitted, on cue, to shout “Long Live Somebody!” Today, the ossified language of the regime and the people’s rising awareness of their rights exist side by side; oppression from the authorities above and resistance from the people below also exist side by side. The political system remains autocratic, but people in society are no longer ignorant; officials are as tyrannical as ever, but a “rights-defense” (weiquan) movement is having effects in many places; the regime can still send a person to prison for what he or she writes, but the chilling effect on other writers is much less than it was before; the regime’s “enemy mentality” is quite the same as before, but it no longer has the effect of turning “politically sensitive” people into isolated figures whom the rest of society shuns like lepers.
The one-person dictatorship of the Mao era rested on the following four conditions:
1. A comprehensive nationalization of the economy that erased the very possibility of economic independence for citizens. The regime became, in effect, “nanny” to every citizen. There was little choice but to accept this nanny from cradle to grave.
2. An all-encompassing political organization that made personal freedom impossible. This organization was the sole basis of every person’s legal status. People were made to be utterly dependent on it. If one ventured outside it, the simplest task became a difficult chore. To live outside of it entirely was tantamount to living as an alien in one’s own homeland.
3. A culture of violence that the ruling authority imposed throughout society. Unbridled arbitrary rule by the dictator, combined with an “enemy mentality” in society, produced an atmosphere in which citizens were in effect used as soldiers and even came to resemble them. Monitoring became so ubiquitous and vigilance so unrelenting that virtually every set of eyes—be they in the workplace, the neighborhood, or even among family and friends—turned into the tools of state supervision.
4. A tyranny of the mind that arose from an ideology that claimed to explain everything and to possess all virtue, and which was reinforced by huge mass movements. An extreme personality cult of the great leader narrowed the source of public thinking until one master brain was deciding what everyone else should think. Anyone who strayed from the ideology could be labeled “deviant,” and this was a fate that led not merely to political, economic, and social demotion but to extremes of personal insult, public humiliation, physical abuse, and mental torture—or, in the officially approved phrase of the time, “attack to the point of collapse and stench.” Victims of such persecution normally buckled under its weight. Most agreed to perform rituals of self-humiliation.
But in recent times the Chinese people have been making great strides toward a society that is far more pluralist than it was during the Mao years. It is no longer possible for society to be utterly dominated by official power. The steady growth of private capital has eaten away at the regime’s onetime economic monopoly; increasingly diverse concepts of value are challenging the monopoly on “thought”; the expanding rights-defense movement is eroding the power of government officials to act on caprice; and advances in public courage have made the specter of political terror ever less frightening.
Three of the four pillars of totalitarian rule that I have sketched above have suffered considerable decay and collapse, especially in the years since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre. Personal dependence on the regime for livelihood is steadily giving way to economic independence. Now that ordinary people can live more directly f
rom their own efforts, they have a stronger material base for autonomous choice, and this trend has brought a new plurality of interests to the whole of society. The total dependence of citizens on “the organization” for personal identity has also been replaced by greater (if still limited) freedoms. The days when venturing outside the organization turned the simplest task into a chore are gone forever. Chinese society is seeing more and more freedom to move, to migrate, and to choose one’s own work.
On the thought-control question, the rise of independent thinking and the awareness of people’s rights have undermined the dominant ideology. Value systems that differ from the official ideology have been taking shape in society and have sometimes obliged the government to make adjustments in its official verbiage. To be sure, the government’s control of speech and its use of lies for the purpose of indoctrination continue, but the effectiveness of these methods has sharply declined. In particular, the information revolution ushered in by the Internet has given rise to a radical new variety in the ways in which Chinese people get information and express themselves. The regime’s traditional ways of blocking information and controlling political discussion are now largely obsolete.
Of the four pillars of Mao-era totalitarian rule, the only one that is still basically standing is the political monopoly with its bag of tools for repressing alternate views. But even that pillar is less than it once was. Recent years have made it clear that although officials at all levels still cling to power, moral authority, in the popular view, lies increasingly with the people. Today, a victim of terror no longer faces the double threat of prison that confines the body and humiliation that assaults the spirit. Political persecution can still bring economic loss and loss of personal freedom, but it can no longer destroy a person’s reputation or turn a person into a political leper. Indeed, today it can have the opposite effect—not merely failing to destroy one’s dignity or spirit but actually helping a person to achieve spiritual wholeness, and even, in the view of others, to rise to the status of “conscience of the people” or “hero of truth,” while the government’s bullying comes to be viewed as “dirty work.” Victims of persecution these days no longer must perform contrite self-denunciations, or beg the organization for forgiveness, or humiliate themselves in front of crowds. Today many are able to face down the regime’s pressure. We have seen cases where, speaking from a defendant’s dock in court, people deliver eloquent statements of self-defense that turn the tables, putting the regime and its courts on the moral defensive.
In parallel with these changes, a global trend toward freedom and democracy has been steadily gaining strength after the collapse of autocratic rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Human rights diplomacy in the world community and pressure from international human rights organizations have made the cost of maintaining a dictatorial system and a politics of terror increasingly high even as the effectiveness of such repression continues to decline. The world situation obliges the Chinese regime, both at home and abroad, to put on hypocritical “shows” of human rights and democracy.
These trends in China and in the world are all fundamentally grounded in humankind’s spiritual nature. The moral strength of nonviolence, which has been shown several places in the modern world, is grounded in the fact that human existence is not just physical but spiritual as well. The core of the human moral sense lies in recognition of the dignity of persons, and respect for this dignity is the natural source of humankind’s sense of justice. When a political system or a state makes it possible for people to live in dignity, people naturally offer it their allegiance. As Thomas Aquinas put it, virtuous government is not just the maintenance of order, but, more importantly, the establishment of conditions for human dignity; if a state fails in the latter cause, it will arouse all kinds of resistance, and opposition from people’s consciences will be in the lead among them.
The reason why liberal democracy is gradually replacing dictatorship in today’s world, and why the end of the Cold War can be seen, as Francis Fukuyama has written, as the “end of history,” is that liberal democracy acknowledges and respects human dignity while dictatorship negates it and defiles it. In transitions toward liberal democracy, the splendor and special strengths of nonviolent resistance are plain to observe: although people must still deal with tyranny and the suffering that it causes, they can respond to hate with love, to prejudice with tolerance, to arrogance with humility, to degradation with dignity, and to violence with reason. Through the power of sincerity and goodwill, victims can take a bold initiative: they can invite victimizers to come home to the rules of reason, peace, and compassion. This tactic can deliver everyone from the vicious cycle of forever replacing one ferocity with another.
Recognizing that there is no way, in the near term, to replace China’s dictatorial political system with something better, I can see the following ways for Chinese society to continue its healthy bottom-up transformation:
1. Short of attempting to take over political power, the nonviolent rights-defense movement can work to expand civil society and thereby provide people with space within which they can live in dignity. The movement can help people to change the ways in which they see their place in society, i.e., no longer to accept living in ignorance and timidity, hardly better than slaves. Wherever the social control of the dictatorship is weak, the rights movement can use nonviolent resistance to shrink the space that the government controls and to increase the price that it must pay in order to maintain its domination within that space. Popular power can grow an inch every time official power is obliged to retreat an inch.
2. Without pursuing a grand program of total societal transformation, the rights-defense movement can concentrate on putting freedom into practice in daily life. By changing the ways in which people think and express themselves in their everyday dealings with authorities—especially through the growing numbers of rights-defense cases—the movement can foster ethics in society, bring people together, and help people figure out how to cope. The overarching authoritarian structure can remain unchanged while the rights movement operates inside its belly, inside countless small environments. For example, the reason why senior news reporters Lu Yuegang and Li Datong at China Youth Daily recently were able to defy the state’s propaganda system had a lot to do with the health of the small environment at their own newspaper.
3. No matter how strong the freedom-denying power of the regime and its apparatus becomes, each individual person can still attempt to view him- or herself as a free person, i.e., to live an honest life in dignity. In any society governed by dictators, if people who pursue freedom state and practice this ideal publicly, and if they can find ways to act within their immediate daily contexts without fear, then ordinary daily life can become a force that undermines the system of enslavement. If you yourself believe that you have a human conscience and are willing to follow it, then expose your conscience to the sunlight of public opinion and let it shine there for all people to see, especially for the dictators to see.
4. While insisting on the basic principles of liberalism, we must also practice tolerance and support plurality of opinion. When people who engage in high-profile confrontation with the regime hear about people who are making different choices, perhaps pursuing matters in more low-key ways, the high-profile people should view the efforts of the low-key people not as errors but as contributions that are complementary to their own. People who are more confrontational are not necessarily great heroes who are therefore in a position to assign moral blame to others. This kind of aggressive moral blame is, to be sure, different from the regime’s aggressive political blame, but it is still far from the kind of tolerance that liberalism calls for. The decision by one person to pay a heavy price for the ideals he or she has chosen to pursue is insufficient grounds to demand that any other person make a similar sacrifice.
5. Regardless of whether a person is working inside or outside the system, or working to change things from the top down or from the bottom up,
we should promote everyone’s freedom of speech. Even words and actions that are couched in the styles of officialdom, so long as they do not harm the rights movement or free speech among the people, should be viewed as potentially positive contributions to our society’s transition and should have our full respect. People who favor top-down change should maintain healthy respect for those who are exploring possibilities from the bottom up. The whole project of finding a way to a successful transition to democracy will be easier if the advocates of “top down” and “bottom up” approach each other as equals and with respect. All roads lead to Rome.
However, this sort of tolerance in no way implies tacit compromise with tyranny or an acceptance of complete relativism. The liberal movement should maintain a nonnegotiable position of opposing all of the government’s techniques of forcible repression in whatever form, be it by intimidating people, buying them off, forcing them to express agreement, firing them, blacklisting them, or arresting them and charging them with crimes. None of this should be tolerated in the slightest.
6. We must face squarely, with no illusions, the fact that the dictatorial system will be with us for some time. We must do what we can to empower ordinary people rather than pinning hopes on the emergence of an enlightened ruler within the regime. In the push-and-pull between the ruling authority and civil society, official policies will change from time to time, but our own unchanging priority must always be to encourage and support the rights-defense movement and to protect the independence of civil society. Especially when sycophants are many and those who dare to speak against harsh government are few, we must commit ourselves to criticizing and opposing the dictatorial regime from our position outside of its system. When the official attitude is rigid, we should force it to soften; when it is soft, we should pursue the opportunity to expand civil society. While welcoming any enlightened decision that comes out of the system, we must maintain our “outside” position and make no change in our own standards.