No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  All this could not happen without the Internet, which is where ordinary Chinese now go when they want to know what “really happened” in stories that they see in the state-run press, and is also where they go to say something if they want to. No major event in recent years in China has escaped frank public commentary on the Internet.

  The public outcry in the cases that I listed at the beginning of this essay could not have happened without the Internet. Those instances of outcry led, in turn, to long reports and commentaries in some of the more open of the official Chinese media, such as Southern Metropolitan Daily, Southern Weekend, and China Youth Daily. Even one of the Party’s standard mouthpieces, Xinhuanet, has published sharp words about the criminalization of speech. When an article called “Why Are the Culprits in Prison-for-Words Cases Always County Party Secretaries?” appeared on Xinhuanet under the pen name Wang Ping, many top websites scrambled to republish it. A search today on Baidu for comments on county-level imprisonment-for-words yields more than 100,000 results. The Wang Ping article alone gets 5,580.

  Any case of prison-for-words, whatever the details, draws a torrent of public comment if it ever hits the media, and public attention of this kind can provide protection for victims. The protection is not guaranteed, to be sure, and it does nothing to bring perpetrators to a court of law, but it can get certain other things done. It can spare the victims a trip to prison, and occasionally can leverage compensation from the government as well—as shown in the Pengshui Poem Case and Gaotang Internet Post Case, noted above. It can force perpetrators to retract decisions and make public apologies. Sometimes it can even oblige higher levels of government to impose punishments on offending officials, as in the Zhu Wenna Case, in which Party Secretary Zhang Zhiguo was ordered to resign.

  Governmental controls on public expression loosen and tighten from time to time in China, but the pressure from below for more free expression does not fluctuate. It just keeps growing. In the 1990s, petitions that protested cases of prison-for-words typically attracted only a few dozen signatures, and often less than that. A decade later, thanks mostly to the Internet, such letters get hundreds of signatures and sometimes thousands. In 2004 the open letter that was posted in the “Southern Metropolitan Case” [editors in that case were fired and criminally charged after exposing government cover-ups—Ed.] attracted more than three thousand signatures among media workers alone. Public pressure—including international pressure—eventually grew strong enough that two of the victims, Deng Haiyan and Cheng Yizhong, were released on grounds of “insufficient evidence” while the other two, Li Minying and Yu Huafeng, both saw the charges against them sharply reduced and their prison sentences greatly shortened. Li was released in 2007 and Yu in 2008. None of this would have happened without public pressure.

  The growing popular opposition to prison-for-words has been crucial in the rising “rights defense” movement. In an obvious sense, of course, opposition to prison-for-words is precisely about freedom of speech, but the importance of the issue goes beyond that. This is because the expression of public opinion, besides being good in itself, has become an indispensable tool in pursuing almost everything else in the rights movement. Rights in our authoritarian society are not protected by legal or administrative structures, so the role of public opinion becomes especially important. In a sense it doesn’t matter whether a fight is over a nasty law that affects everyone or just a single person’s case, because the side-effect of a controversy is always to raise popular awareness of rights. This is why step one for rights defenders is to expose facts to the light of day and let people know that they have the right to comment. This simple step can bring important results in relatively “unsensitive” grassroots cases. It can even do some good in cases of very high sensitivity, such as those of Liu Di, Du Daobin, Sun Danian, and “Freezing Point.”*

  The Chinese government has been doing everything it possibly can to control the Internet. It constantly announces new regulations and laws, sinks vast sums into building its “Great Firewall” against “anti-China” content, hires an ever-larger army of Internet police, and has been paying people to go online to write posts to “guide” public opinion in pro-government directions. And yet, despite all of that, it is losing. It cannot repress the burgeoning spread of citizen-run websites. Liberal-minded intellectuals, in particular, make good use of the Internet, where they run unofficial and semi-official websites of many kinds. Even websites of the mainline state media—“Building a Stronger China,” “New China Forum,” “China Youth Online,” “Southern Media Web,” and others—contain much criticism of China’s governing system and of policy decisions that top leaders have made. In short, an online civil society is taking shape, whether the government likes it or not.

  Moreover the regime’s efforts to block overseas online media are losing ground. “Wall-jumping” software has become easier to get in recent years, and the Chinese today enjoy a broader range of information than they have ever had before. International opinion is also beginning to influence Chinese popular opinion in unprecedented ways. Even the opinions of Chinese dissidents are reaching people inside China more than before because they are rechanneled back into China through international websites.

  Clever officials, perceiving the utility of the Internet in building public opinion, have begun to use it to burnish images of themselves as “caring for the people.” During the huge blizzard in winter of 2008, for example, several hundred thousand people became stranded outside the Guangzhou rail station, and the issue began to attract considerable attention in the media. On February 3, in an effort to soothe popular frustrations, Guangdong Provincial Party Secretary Wang Yang and Provincial Governor Huang Huahua used a news website called “Olympics First Net” to publish “A Letter to Our Guangdong Netizen Friends.” The letter showed unusual tolerance, even approval, of netizen criticism of the government, and was sprinkled with fashionable net-lingo to boot. You netizens, it said, are “well-informed, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and spirited.” You have offered many good opinions and suggestions about what to do in this unusual, disastrous blizzard, and your opinions “have become an important foundation that supports our decisions … We are willing to ‘rap on’ with you on topics of common concern. As for the imperfections in our decisions and our work, we are happy to see you ‘let it fly.’ ”

  The Chinese political system remains so untransparent that it is hard to say in any quantifiable way exactly how much the new prominence of public opinion actually affects government decisions. But the trend is certainly upward. On the Internet, 2007 was dubbed “the inaugural year of Chinese public opinion” because of several well-known cases in which the pressure of public opinion obviously had a major effect. These include the “Toughest Nail House Case,” in which one solitary family held out against forced demolition of their home; the “Brick Kilns Slave Labor Case” [see pp. 94–106 above]; the “Nie Shubin Case,” in which a young man was executed for a crime that (it was later shown) he did not commit; the “Pengshui Poem Case” and “Zhu Wenna Case,” both cited above; the “City Patrol Beating Death Case,” in which a man named Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after photographing police violence; and the campaign to abolish “Re-education through Labor.”

  In China today, control on expression by an authoritarian regime and pressure for greater latitude from an increasingly pluralistic society are both realities. It is a mistake to ignore either of them. Among the forces pushing for more freedom, there are heroic acts that challenge government power, but these are rare; much more common, indeed the mainstream of the resistance trend, are the low-key, practical ways in which people everywhere keep making small differences. These people have the principle of free expression in mind, but they are also tactically astute. They know how to get things done even as they devise clever ways to protect themselves. They are aware that the political regime is not going to change any time soon, so do what they can in their immediate environments. To purists, they can seem to be maki
ng too many compromises, but there can be no doubt they are a major part of the overall quest. The best hope for the future lies in the way civil society on the Internet continually eats away, inch by inch, at the government controls.

  In sum, the power of public opinion in China today is much greater than it was in the 1990s, to say nothing of the Mao era, and it is unlikely that China will ever revert to a situation where only the government speaks and everyone else shuts up. But we must recognize that the power of public opinion is not yet a formal part of the political system. It works here and there, now and then—and more and more—but only freelance, as it were, outside of the system. The regime can still simply “declare” an activity to be illegal whenever it wants to. We must look forward to the day when the rights of the people will have institutional guarantees. That day will come.

  At home in Beijing, February 19, 2008

  Originally published in Ren yu renquan (Humanity and Human Rights), March 2008

  Translated by Louisa Chiang

  * Du Daobin was arrested in October 2003 on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” on the Internet. Sun Dawu is a businessman sentenced in November 2003 for illegally accepting public funds. “Freezing Point” is the name of a supplement to China Youth Daily that was shut down in January 2006 for its criticisms of Communist Party officials and its support for non-Party interpretations of history. On Liu Di, see “From Wang Shuo’s Wicked Satire to Hu Ge’s Egao: Political Humor in a Post-Totalitarian Dictatorship” (pp. 177–187 above).

  PART III

  CHINA AND THE WORLD

  BEHIND THE “CHINA MIRACLE”

  IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING the Tiananmen Massacre of June 4, 1989, China saw economic growth that far surpassed what happened in the 1980s. Deng Xiaoping was attempting to recoup his authority and to reassert his regime’s legitimacy after both had melted away because of the massacre. He set out to build his power through economic growth, justifying the move with the slogan “development is the bottom line.”

  As the storm clouds cleared and the economy began to flourish, powerful officials saw an opportunity to make sudden and enormous profits. Their unscrupulous pursuit of profit became the engine of the ensuing economic boom. Their greed also set an example. It stirred a nationwide popular fever to get rich quick and to amass huge fortunes, and this dream of rags-to-riches fueled abnormally rapid growth. Growth rates of over 9 percent annually were called a “miracle,” and indeed they were, in a way.

  “Chinese Characteristics”

  The economic “miracle” happened because of marketization and privatization. Here “marketization” does not mean creating markets under the rule of law; it means marketization of political power, that is, allocating capital and other resources through political authority. And “privatization” has been neither lawful nor ethical; on the contrary, it has meant a robber baron’s paradise, a free-for-all. The opening of the real estate market created a platform on which tycoons did landgrabs, and “reorganization” of state-owned enterprises has allowed the power elite to serve themselves heaping portions of communal property. The most highly profitable of the state monopolies have fallen into the hands of small groups of powerful officials, and the government-manipulated financial markets have become a playground on which the power elite romps. In short, the changes in economic policy have opened a host of opportunities for the political elite, who can amass instant fortunes. It also created a group of young millionaires who, if not part of the political elite, were beholden to them.

  The income of the Communist regime has skyrocketed, far exceeding the growth rate both of the country as a whole and of the average citizen. High officials have begun to throw their weight around and to scatter money across the globe. Their private hoards could make those mighty capitalists of the Industrial Revolution look shabby. Stories of fabulous overnight wealth pervade the upper reaches of the power elite.

  An Extremely High Price

  The “miracle” came at the price of disregard for personal freedoms and the public good. The main beneficiaries of the miracle have been the power elite; the benefits for ordinary people are more like the leftovers at a banquet table. The regime stresses a “right to survival” as the most important of human rights, but the purpose of this truncated notion of rights—call it “human rights with Chinese characteristics”—in fact is to serve the financial interests of the power elite and the political stability of its regime.

  The Communist Party will stop at nothing to defend its power. Now that orthodox Marxism has fallen by the wayside, it has adopted a philosophy of sheer opportunism by which any action can be justified if it upholds the dictatorship or results in greater spoils.

  Governing Strategies

  The Communist Party in the post-Tiananmen era has consolidated its power using five interrelated strategies:

  First, it has used nationalism as its new public ideology.

  The Party has fused its rhetoric about “the rise of a great power” with anti-American, anti-Japanese, and anti-Taiwanese sentiment. It also idealizes the imperial glories of China’s past so that now the good-old-days of the dynasties have become a central theme in popular culture.

  It presents economic growth following years of severe turmoil as a chance for people to recuperate; it depicts the “modest living standard” of the future as sufficiency in food and clothing alone. Hu Jintao’s “harmonious society” is offered as an ersatz copy of the Pax Sinica of the past, and his “Eight Virtues and Eight Shames” (“Love the country, do it no harm … Observe law and discipline, be not chaotic or lawless,” etc.) are an appeal to the Confucian ideal of “rule by virtue.”

  Second, it has encouraged raw capitalism.

  Under the pressures of a devil-take-the-hindmost race to make money at all costs, the interests of the Party have crumbled into factional interests, national interests have broken down into the interests of various privileged groups, and those interests themselves have further divided into the interests of families and even individuals in the power elite.

  Profit-seeking is no longer taboo, and the Party has no compunctions about representing big capital. The drive for profit has replaced ideology as a social glue, and profit has become the standard by which government officials are judged. Abuse of power for personal gain is rampant, and has become a cancer within the body of the Party.

  “Money is the most important form of political power.” This has become the new guiding tenet of the Party. Only money can guarantee the stability of the regime and the interests of the power elite. Only with money can the Party maintain control of China’s major cities, co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight, and crush the resistance of any nascent rival group. Only with money can the Party wheel and deal with Western powers; only with money can it buy off rogue states and purchase diplomatic support.

  Third, the Party has encouraged extravagance in consumerism and frivolity in culture.

  Consumerism has been invigorated by a deluge of luxury goods—expensive cars and watches, sumptuous villas—and has given rise to a vapid mass culture that wraps itself in pretty veneers while it deals in illusions of prosperity. The selling of this mass culture dominates the cultural marketplace and has itself become a highly profitable enterprise. The triviality and philistinism of popular consumer culture fits perfectly with the shrill brayings of official injunctions. The authoritarian system actively indulges a hedonist culture in which crassness and barbarity can do as they like.

  Fourth, the Party has ruthlessly silenced all dissenting opinion, cracking down especially hard on any social group that dares to organize.

  People who have no connection with the Party or a government work unit can enjoy reasonable latitude in their private activities, but such people cannot organize or help to shape an independent civil society. They remain atomized, scattered, and isolated. They can form no independent group of any kind, let alone a group that might compete with the centralized, powerful, and high-organ
ized apparatus of the state.

  Fifth, the Party has bought off the intellectuals.

  The intellectual elite played a key role in the 1989 pro-democracy movement, and the Communists used two methods to be sure they stopped doing such things. First they terrorized them with a bloody crackdown, then they seduced them with material rewards. After a few years the intellectuals had been transformed into a pack of complacent cynics. In their hearts, many of them still reject the regime’s ideology and feel contempt for its actions. But the lure of material benefit on one side and the threat of political persecution on the other have channeled them into alignment with the regime. This leaves them openly professing their support for the status quo and cozying up to the power elite, grasping every opportunity to see if some of the money or status can fall to them. They no longer feel embarrassed at defending what the power elite does, and are often willing to serve as cosmeticians for the new capitalist-Communist regime. The result is a three-way alliance of intellectuals, officials, and capitalists, and for intellectuals this has offered a fast track into the moneyed elite.