by Liu Xiaobo
But if it used to take many days to bring in just a few dozen signatures, today, with the Internet, one can gather hundreds, even thousands, in a short time. Then one can send the statement to the whole world almost instantly.
There are four important ways in which the Internet has been a boon to civil society in China.
1. The Internet has given rise to “Web-based Rights Defense.” Because the Internet is fast, inexpensive, convenient, and able to reach all sectors of society, it makes organization of rights-defense efforts vastly easier than before. Activity has grown by leaps and bounds compared to what was possible in the bicycle-and-telephone era of the 1990s, and the new advantages have greatly lowered costs in time and effort. With the Internet, all of the major steps in producing an open letter can be done on a computer: drafting, discussion, editing, printing. A few clicks of a mouse, the exchange of a few emails, and it is done. Signature gathering, which used to be the hardest part, can be done through group email and at websites. A group email might pull in dozens or hundreds of signatures immediately, and a website dedicated to the receipt of signatures can gather names from across China and around the world. After that, all that one needs is oneself or another volunteer to maintain an updated list of signatures, collate comments and other incidental information—and the result is a rights-support effort that can have considerable reach, staying power, and influence. This process has given rise to many rights-defense websites, as well as to the important network called “Chinese Human Rights Defenders.”
2. The Internet has brought new strength to public opinion. The convenience, openness, and freedom of the Internet has given rise in recent years to a lively new kind of public opinion that can serve as a check on official behavior. Public opinion on the Internet tends to swell every time a major disaster arises, and these swells have effects—larger or smaller, as the case may be—both on the traditional media and on the attitudes of officials. The government is good at keeping the scandalous aspects of stories out of the traditional media, but it cannot keep them off the Internet, where news spreads quickly and public opinion usually follows close behind. Raging public sentiment can force the government to make at least some concessions to what the public demands; it can, in addition, force the traditional media to do better reporting, lest they fall behind what the Internet has to offer and lose credibility with the public. Whether a newspaper or television station can keep up with Internet news and opinion is already a standard by which the public evaluates the media.
One of the standard ways in which the government responds to Internet pressure is to release a limited amount of information on some topic. Higher officials often look for scapegoats among lower officials to take the rap in public opinion, and then those lower officials need to make open apologies to the families of victims and to the general public. The 2003 SARS crisis, a number of major mining accidents, and the 2005 chemical spill on the Songhua River all illustrate this pattern. More rarely, a very high official makes an apology himself. The first clear example of this pattern occurred in March 2001 at the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress. Shortly before this grand meeting occurred, forty-one people died in an explosion that had become famous on the Internet as “The Tragic Case of the Fanglin Elementary School.” The public outcry was sufficient that Zhu Rongji, China’s premier, made a public apology in his own name.
3. The Internet has made possible a kind of “freedom of assembly” in cyberspace. Unregistered groups are “illegal” under China’s current regime, and if the rulers see such groups as rivals to their power, they crush them. This is why Internet websites perform an important role in allowing people—virtually, if not physically—to come together, share ideas, debate, and hammer out consensus of the kind that benefits from the presentation of different points of view. “Virtual meeting” of this kind can also build a camaraderie that is impossible when people are kept atomized or are allowed to meet only in Party-approved gatherings. The camaraderie grows stronger when a virtual group takes up one or another case of injustice—perhaps only a small case, involving just one or a few people—and champions the victims. Such activity not only brings the pressure of public opinion to the aid of victims; it can also help the group itself by bolstering its spirits and its sense of mission. This happened, for example, in the 2003 “BMW Case” in Harbin [a parked BMW suffered a scrape from a farmer’s onion cart, after which the BMW owner used the car to run down and kill the farmer’s wife and to injure twelve others—Ed.]. It also happens when relatively unknown writers are sent to prison for what they write, as in the cases of cyberdissidents Du Daobin, Lu Xuesong, and Liu Di [on Liu Di, see “From Wang Shuo’s Wicked Satire to Hu Ge’s Egao,” pp. 177–187].
4. The Internet has generated “stars” outside the Party-state system. Before the Internet era there was only one avenue to public prominence in Communist China, and that was through the official Party-state system. Now, with the Internet, “stars” can appear in a variety of fields. Not only are there entertainment stars like the exhibitionist antiheroine “Sister Hibiscus”; we also have “rights defense stars,” “opinion leaders,” “moral exemplars” and “truth-telling heroes.” Some of these are middle-aged intellectuals—people who were famous before the Internet—but now they can extend their influence to a degree that would have been unimaginable before. (I am thinking here of Liu Junning, Xu Youyu, Qin Hui, Cui Weiping, Zhang Zuhua, and others.) In addition, a new generation, such as the charismatic writers Yu Jie and Wang Yi, are now prominent on the Internet. So are popular heroes such as Jiang Yanyong, the doctor known for his courageous truth-telling about the SARS epidemic; the farmer-turned-entrepreneur Sun Dawu, who was imprisoned on opaque charges, then released after a popular outcry; the rights-defense leader Feng Binxian; outstanding journalists like Cheng Yizhong, Lu Yuegang, and Li Datong; university professors Jiao Guobiao and Lu Xuesong; and, perhaps most important, China’s rising cadre of rights-defense lawyers, including Zhang Sizhi, Mo Shaoping, Pu Zhiqiang, Zhu Jiuhu, Gao Zhisheng, Guo Feixiong, Teng Biao, Xu Zhiyong, Li Baiguang, Li Heping, Li Jianqiang, and others. All these people owe their “stardom” to their rights-defense work and to the Internet. The appearance of so many larger and smaller stars in the Internet firmament does much to promote diversity of opinion in China’s society at large.
Chinese Christians say that even though Chinese people today generally do not have strong religious feelings and not many believe in a God that has been introduced from the West, still the universal grace of God has been extended to all Chinese in our suffering. After all, they say, He has given us the Internet. What better tool could we have for throwing off slavery and pursuing freedom?
At home in Beijing, February 14, 2006
Originally published in Minzhu Zhongguo (Democratic China), February 18, 2006
Translated by Louisa Chiang
IMPRISONING PEOPLE FOR WORDS AND THE POWER OF PUBLIC OPINION
I. County-Level Bullies and What They Do
China has a rich tradition of persecuting people for their words. Victims are strewn across Chinese history from the First Emperor of Qin (259 BCE–210 BCE) and his famous “burning of books and live burials of scholars” to Mao Zedong’s 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign and 1966–1969 Cultural Revolution. In these pogroms even family members and acquaintances of victims have been punished. Today, thirty years after the beginning of “reform and opening,” at least eighty journalists and online writers are in prison in China. The “glorious” 2008 Beijing Olympics are drawing near, but accounts of the imprisonments are banned from China’s media. Still, even with the ban in place, cases keep coming to light on the Internet. Here are some examples:
The Pengshui Poem Case In August 2006, Qin Zhongfei, a clerk in the Personnel Department of the Education Committee of the Pengshui County government, in the municipality of Chongqing, wrote a poem set to the rhyming scheme of “Springtime Seeping through a Fragrant Garden” in which he satirized county officials. He sent it out
as a text message on his mobile phone, and that was enough for Communist Party Secretary Lan Qinghua and County Chief Zhou Wei to throw Qin into jail on charges of “fabricating rumors and libel of county leaders.” After a public outcry, and with help from rights lawyers, Qin was released and awarded 2,125.70 yuan in compensation.
The Jishan Article Case In April 2007, Nan Huirong, Xue Zhijing and Yang Qinyu, three technology officials in Jishan County, Shanxi Province, wrote an article that expressed discontent with the situation in Jishan, criticized County Party Secretary Li Runshan in a number of ways, and adduced evidence to back their complaints. They sent it to thirty-seven local government departments, and ten days later police arrested them. Again the charges were “rumor-fabrication and libel.” The Party Secretary went so far as to require more than five hundred officials at the level of section chief and above to attend a “public warning meeting” at which the three authors of the offending piece appeared in handcuffs and were forced to criticize themselves and to confess.
The Danzhou Lyrics Case In July 2007, two high-school teachers, surnamed Li and Liu, who opposed the decision of the government of Danzhou City, Hainan Province, to move the senior high school grades of the Nada Number Two High School to the Dongpo branch of Hainan High School, wrote a folk song in the Danzhou dialect criticizing the move. The local police put the two teachers under administrative detention for fifteen days “on suspicion of personal attacks on city leaders and libelous defamation of city leaders.”
The Gaotang Internet Post Case In December 2006, Dong Wei, Wang Zifeng, Hu Dongchen, and others in Gaotang County, Shandong Province, posted comments about local governance in the “Gaotang” entry on the Internet site Baidu, and later the three were criminally detained “on suspicion of insulting and libeling County Party Secretary Sun Lanyu.” After a public outcry and help from rights lawyers, officials in the Gaotang county government decided on January 21, 2007, to withdraw the arrest warrants and release the suspects. The three later filed for compensation and were each awarded more than 1,700 yuan.
The Mengzhou Book Case In December 2007, six farmers in Mengzhou City, Henan Province, reported financial malfeasance at a village-owned brewery. They printed and distributed a booklet called An Appeal for Justice in which they criticized the deputy mayor of Mengzhou, the former deputy director of the United Front department of the Mengzhou Municipal Party Committee, and a few other officials. The six farmers heard no answer to their “appeal for justice,” but they did hear a judge at a local court sentence them to six months in jail for “libel.” Worse, they were escorted through the streets—twice—in the kind of public-shame parade that was standard in China’s imperial era.
The Zhu Wenna Case On January 1, 2008, People of the Law, a magazine published in Beijing by the state-owned Legal Daily, carried an investigative report by Zhu Wenna that criticized County Party Secretary Zhang Zhiguo in Tieling City, Xifeng County, Liaoning Province. On January 4, public security personnel from Tieling traveled to the offices of People of the Law in Beijing to detain Zhu on “suspicion of libel.” Later, after a strong public outcry, Tieling County Public Security withdrew its charges and issued an apology. The Tieling Party Committee announced that Party Secretary Zhang’s involvement in the decision to “go to Beijing to detain the reporter Zhu Wenna” and to file charges against her had shown “weak awareness of the law” and that Zhang had direct, inescapable leadership responsibility for the incident. On February 4, 2008, Zhang was obliged to acknowledge that responsibility. He wrote a thoroughgoing self-criticism to the Tieling Party Committee and resigned.
These examples of imprisoning people for words result from two factors: the primitive nature of our political system and the deterioration in quality of the officials who inhabit it. China’s autocratic political system has endured for millennia, and right up to today there has been no fundamental change in it. In ancient times the one who ruled “all under heaven” was an emperor, and challenging him was out of the question. (There were, to be sure, a few enlightened emperors who abolished laws that treated words as crimes. Emperor Wen of Han [202 BCE–157 BCE] abolished the crime of “black magic libel,” for example.) In today’s autocracy, it is the Party that rules “all under heaven,” and Party rule at times has been even tighter than premodern autocracy in its annihilation of dissent. High Maoism defined the extremes in treating words as crimes, and today, even after thirty years of reform, there is no change at all in the principle that Party power reigns supreme. The dominant official at every level of government, without exception, is the Communist Party secretary. Once a decision is made, people are free to applaud. In this the popular jingle gets it right:
The Party points the way,
The people all say “yea!”
The rulers make a move,
The ruled all say “approve!”
Local officials have always made “holding onto the scepter of rule” their highest priority in governance, and in recent years they have been growing more aggressive and arbitrary in their obsession with personal power. They launch large construction projects—which are riddled with corruption and wasteful of public resources—in order to accumulate records of “political performance.” The pursuit of boondoggles, in turn, entails that great effort and energy must be spent on “shutting people up.” The ostensible mission of “building wealth in a locale” turns into “going berserk in a locale” and finally into “bringing disaster to a locale.” Anyone who exposes corruption needs to be packed off to jail. Even if corrupt officials are caught and punished, it is rare for anything good to happen to a whistleblower.
The local bullying happens, moreover, in a context where the bully monopolizes all the resources. The media are not free, the judiciary is not free, and the police work for the “head honchos.” The country’s constitution states that citizens enjoy the right to free speech, but Article 105 of the Criminal Law provides that “inciting subversion of state power” is a crime, and when the two principles collide, Article 105 wins. This fact makes any criticism of the Communist Party or its officials at any level into a high-wire act and ensures that China’s prisons remain well stocked with prisoners of conscience. Even the Party Secretary in a peanut-sized county is an emperor on his own piece of turf, where he can block the sun with one hand if he likes. Offend this little emperor and you can go to prison.
Because Communist ideals have become completely hollow during the “reform” years, the Communist Party has turned into nothing more than a coalition of profit-seeking interest groups. Officials are corrupt and the quality of governance is in steady decline. The marriage of government and business is already well established, and in recent times we have seen an alliance between government and the underworld as well. In some locations this alliance is so tight that the two are practically indistinguishable. The underworld buys the government with bribes, and the government borrows the underworld to control troublemakers. Party officials increasingly behave like underworld godfathers who reject any kind of criticism or dissent. They can use the machinery of state power to cut your throat or their underworld tools to shut your mouth.
II. The Power of Public Opinion in “Low Sensitivity” Cases
In the eighteen years since the Tiananmen Massacre, China has seen many cases of “prison for words,” and they have occurred at many levels of government. Most of the victims have been either political dissidents or rights defenders, two categories about which China’s rulers are extremely sensitive, and for that reason news of their cases is routinely sealed from the media inside China, making it almost impossible for the public to come to the aid of such victims. The tiny number of political prisoners who do get released are normally the famous ones, because theirs are the cases that major Western countries know about and can complain about. “Hostage diplomacy” has by now become a standard practice in the Chinese government’s negotiations with other countries.
The persistence of political prisons in China might seem depressing, but ther
e is a brighter side to this issue as well. China has come a long way since the Mao era of “one voice fits all.” Today we live in a post-totalitarian state where values are more diverse than before and a hubbub of different voices grows louder day by day. “Rights awareness” is on the rise, civil society is growing, the space for expression of opinion is expanding, and concrete acts of rights-defense are popping up with increasing frequency. Now that we have the Internet, which provides both information and a platform for expression that ordinary people never had before, the hunger to say one’s piece has grown stronger, too. It looks for every crevice it can find, and when public opinion comes together on an issue it can gush forth in a great wave.
In recent years the Chinese public has been moving toward a consensus that sending people to prison for their words is wrong. The issue of freedom of expression was once something that only intellectuals and journalists worried about, but now it has spread to many other parts of society, where opinions are getting stronger every day. Absurd behavior by local officials (in the cases we noted above, for example) actually serves a useful purpose in building public consensus on the question of treating words as crimes. The consensus can be built because the victims in the grassroots cases are not big-name dissidents or rights defenders of the kind the regime brands as “enemy forces,” making people afraid to identify with them. The grassroots victims are just regular government clerks, run-of-the-mill reporters, and other ordinary citizens, and their criticisms are aimed not at the whole Communist system or its high-level officials but at county bosses and local government. In order to voice complaint about the treatment of a famous dissident, a person has to “jump the Great Firewall” of Internet censorship and do his or her talking out in international cyberspace; by contrast, these low-level cases, with their low political sensitivity, can be the basis on which ordinary people satisfy their hunger to express anger at officialdom, and they can do it inside the firewall. When they begin to do so, an additional benefit emerges, which is that the question of imprisoning people for words comes to seem a more normal issue, less “sensitive,” and in the long run this is a good thing for the big-name dissidents as well, because public opinion now begins to hold that “prison for words” is just plain wrong, regardless of the level at which it occurs.