by Liu Xiaobo
PART IV
DOCUMENTS
THE JUNE SECOND HUNGER STRIKE DECLARATION
On June 2, 1989, near the end of the spring demonstrations for democracy at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Liu Xiaobo and three friends—Zhou Duo, Hou Dejian, and Gao Xin—announced that they were beginning a three-day hunger strike to support the student protesters and to promote the democratization of China. At the same time they issued a Declaration, translated below, one of whose points was to warn the government to “correct its mistakes right now, before it is too late.” The point is poignant, because their hunger strike itself was cut short by a bloody military crackdown that the government began about 30 hours later.—Ed.
WE ANNOUNCE A HUNGER STRIKE. We protest, we implore, and we repent.
We seek not death, but to live true lives.
Faced with violent and irrational military repression of the kind that the Li Peng government is currently applying, Chinese intellectuals must end our thousands-of-years-old traditions of standing in docility before power. We can no longer use words alone while taking no action. We must, through action, resist martial law, declare the birth of a new political culture, and repent the mistakes to which our long-term weakness has given rise. All of us must bear responsibility for the backwardness in China today.
1. The Goals of Our Hunger Strike
The Democracy Movement that we see today is unprecedented in Chinese history. It has consistently used legal, nonviolent, rational, and peaceful methods in its pursuit of freedom, democracy, and human rights. The Li Peng government, in contrast, has chosen to muster several hundred thousand troops to repress unarmed students and citizens by force. Our hunger strike is not a “petition” to the authorities; it is a protest of their actions.
We advocate the spread of democracy in China through peaceful means and we oppose violence in any form. At the same time, we are unafraid of violence. Our aim is to show through peaceful means how the iron resolve of Chinese people who want democracy will in the end demolish an undemocratic order that maintains itself with bayonets and lies. The almost unimaginable stupidity of using martial law troops to repress students and citizens who are protesting peacefully has set an utterly deplorable precedent in the history of The People’s Republic of China. It brings tremendous shame to the Communist Party, the Chinese government, and the army, and it wrecks in a single blow ten years of “reform and opening.”
Thousands of years of Chinese history are filled with instances of hatred between adversaries and the use of violence to battle violence. By the dawn of the modern era an “enemy mentality” had taken root in Chinese political thinking, and after the Communist victory in 1949 slogans like “Take class struggle as fundamental” pushed the traditional hate psychology, enemy mentality, and battling of violence with violence to new extremes. The current martial law is a manifestation of “class struggle” thinking. By our hunger strike we appeal to our fellow Chinese to begin immediately to move away from, and eventually to completely abandon, the enemy mentality, hate psychology, and “class struggle” political culture. Hatred leads only to violence and dictatorship.
We must begin to build democracy in China in a spirit of tolerance and with conscious cooperation. A democratic society is not built on hatred and enmity; it is built on consultation, debate, and voting that are carried out on a basis of mutual respect, tolerance, and willingness to compromise. Li Peng, in his role as China’s premier, has made major mistakes. He should be held accountable for these mistakes through democratic procedures, and then should resign. But Li Peng is not our enemy. And even after he leaves office he should continue to enjoy the rights of a citizen, including, if he chooses, the right to continue to advocate his mistaken policies. We appeal to everyone—government and ordinary citizen alike—to let go of the old political culture and to embrace a new one. We call upon the government to cancel the martial law order immediately, and we appeal to both government and students to resolve their current standoff by reopening peaceful consultation, negotiation, and dialogue.
The current student movement has earned sympathy, understanding, and support from the whole of Chinese society in a way that is unprecedented, and the declaration of martial law only solidified this pervasive support. Still, we need to recognize that, for most people, support of the students has sprung from simple human sympathy for them and from a dislike of the government. It has not derived from modern consciousness of the political responsibilities of a citizen. This is why we are calling upon everyone in society to move away from the relatively simple role of sympathetic bystander and into the role of engaged citizen. The first rule for a citizen is the principle of equality. Every citizen should be confident that his or her own political rights are the same as those of the country’s premier. The second rule is that a citizen does not just “feel sympathy” or “sense injustice”; to be a citizen is to have a rational awareness of the responsibility to participate in politics. We call upon all our fellow citizens to exercise their rights, to participate in building democracy, and to be aware that each citizen shares responsibility for what the political decisions of a society will be. If these decisions are rational and legal, every citizen should share the credit; if they are irrational and illegal, each citizen should get part of the blame. It is the natural duty of every citizen to participate consciously in the politics of his or her society. Our fellow Chinese must realize that in democratic politics everyone is a citizen first, and only after that is a student, a professor, a worker, an official, a soldier, or something else.
For several thousand years, Chinese society has been caught in the vicious cycle of tearing down an old dynasty in order to set up a new one. History has shown, however, that the exit of a leader who has lost popular confidence and his replacement by a leader who has gained it is not a formula that can address China’s fundamental political needs. What we need is not the ideal savior but an ideal democratic system. That is why we are calling:
First, for the establishment throughout society of popular self-governing organizations that can gradually give shape to popular political forces that will serve as counterbalances to the central governing authority. We need this because checks and balances are the heart of democracy. We should prefer to see ten devils working within a system of checks and balances than to see one angel operating with unchecked power.
Second, for the gradual establishment of a system of recall of officials who have seriously abused their power. The questions of who enters office and who leaves it are not as important as the questions of how the enterings and leavings are determined. Undemocratic procedures lead inevitably to dictatorship.
Both the government and the students have made mistakes during the course of the current movement, and this is why we are calling upon both sides in the current standoff to take a square look at themselves.
The main mistake of the government has been to cling to the “class struggle” mentality in how it views the protesting students and citizens; this mentality casts the protesters as enemies and has led to continual escalation of the confrontation. Instead, the government could draw some painful but much-needed lessons from the fact that such a large democracy movement has arisen. It could learn to listen to what people are saying, to accept their constitutional rights to express themselves, and to learn techniques of democratic rule. The democracy movement could actually be the government’s teacher as it learns how to govern a society using democracy and rule of law.
The students’ mistakes have been mostly in the less-than-ideal internal workings of their organizations. Their efforts to build an edifice of democracy have used too many undemocratic bricks. For example, their theory is democratic but their handling of actual problems is not; and ends are democratic but means and procedures are not; effort is wasted because cooperation is poor. These problems have led to confusion in policy, jumble in finances, and material waste. Too many decisions are based in sentiment, not reason, and there is too much emphasis on special privile
ge, not equality.
In the end, though, there can be no question that the government’s mistakes have been the greater of the two. Marches and hunger strikes are entirely legal and rational ways for citizens to express their will; these tactics in no way constitute “turmoil,” and yet that is what the government, stuck in its autocratic thinking and ignoring citizens’ rights that are inscribed in our constitution, has declared such actions to be. From this mistake the government has gone on to make a whole series of related ones, repeatedly stimulating the student movement to further action and deepening the antagonism between the two sides. These government mistakes are the true seeds of “turmoil” (just as they were, by the way, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution). It is thanks only to self-restraint by the students, plus some powerful appeals from reasonable people in society (including people in the Party, the government, and the military) that we have avoided major bloodshed so far. It is imperative that the government recognize and correct its mistakes right now, before it is too late.
The struggles of the Chinese people for democracy over the last hundred years have stayed largely at the level of theory and slogans. They have focused on ideals, not practical techniques, and on goals rather than means, processes, and procedures. In our view the true realization of democracy will come only when means, processes, and procedures become the heart of the matter. We call upon our fellow Chinese to set aside democracy as expressed in slogans, or in goals alone, or in a simple ideological vision, and instead to pursue the democracy of process, means, and procedures; and then, by focusing on each concrete issue as it comes up, to turn a democracy movement that has centered on theoretical ideals into a movement of democratic processes in action. This is also why we call upon the students to take a second look at how they can better implement democracy in Tiananmen Square.
One of the government’s more eye-catching mistakes has been its description of the protesting students as “a tiny minority.” By our hunger strike, we want to make it clear to China and the world that the “tiny minority” includes us. We are not students. We are citizens who feel a political responsibility and who have joined a broad social movement in which students have taken a lead. Everything that we have done is rational and legal. Our aim is to use our thinking and our actions to bring the government to reflect upon and to repent what it is doing. Such repentance could arise in officials from their political culture, from personal character, or from moral principles, and it could lead to public acknowledgment of, and correction of, the government’s mistakes. Our other hope is that the students will run their organizations more democratically.
We should recognize that all Chinese citizens are strangers to the matter of running a country on democratic principles. All the Chinese people, including the top leaders of the Party and state, need to learn these principles from the beginning. As the learning proceeds, there are bound to be many mistakes among populace and officialdom alike. The key will be to recognize mistakes when they happen, to correct them, and to learn from them. If we proceed in this way, mistakes can be turned into good things. Through continual correction of errors we can learn, step by step, how to govern our country democratically.
2. Our Basic Watchwords
1. We have no enemies. We must not let hatred or violence poison our thinking or the progress of democratization in China.
2. We must reflect on our ways. China’s backwardness is everyone’s responsibility.
3. We are citizens before we are anything else.
4. We are not seeking death. We are seeking to live true lives.
3. Location, Time, and Rules of the Hunger Strike
1. Location: the base of The Monument to the Heroes of the People, Tiananmen Square
2. Time: from 4:00 p.m. on June 2 to 4:00 p.m., June 5, 1989
3. Rules: no food; boiled water only, and nothing with nutrition (sugar, starch, fat, or protein) in the water
4. The Hunger Strikers
Liu Xiaobo: Ph.D. in Chinese literature; lecturer in the Department of Chinese of Beijing Normal University
Zhou Duo: former lecturer, Sociology Research Institute, Peking University; currently Director of General Planning, The Stone Company
Hou Dejian: famous songwriter
Gao Xin: editor of The Normal University Weekly, member of the Communist Party of China
Original text available at http://www.ngensis.com/june4/june4a.htm
Translated by Perry Link
YOU • GHOSTS • THE DEFEATED
For my wife
My dear
all day you wander among tombs
and spirits of the dead in the wind
facing them in silence
you peer deep into each other
freezing the other’s blood
these, the completely defeated
have left no name, no history
At nightfall, the wine in your cup
gets tipsy and becomes a bonfire
for the lost spirits
you illuminate a small space
where they can tell of their lives
you listen well to their sufferings
and both sides are serene
like the two hands
of a child deep in sleep
From the treetop of the dream
again the tortoise-shell vine pushes out soft leaves
its suicide never succeeds
and you
this woman infatuated with the defeated
are yourself never defeated
because from the grins of corpses
you’ve learned
that it is only death
that never fails
Walking alone on a rainy night
without a shadow to talk to
and lies decorating the sunshine
everything glistens with rot
the day is even crueler than the night
and nobody can fix it
My dear
don’t close yourself off
don’t stay alone
envying the despair of the defeated
throw open your door
see defeat in me too and take me in
make of me
one of the miserable reasons that keep you going
and let undisturbed smoke
rise between the two of us
October 9, 1998
Translated by Nick Admussen
A LETTER TO LIAO YIWU
Liao Yiwu, a master writer on the lives of China’s common people (see The Corpse Walker, Pantheon, 2008), wrote a poem called “Massacre,” and a sequel called “Requiem,” following the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. In February 1990 he was detained and sent to prison for four years, during which time he wrote an account, called Testimony, of the horrible prison conditions he experienced and witnessed. He finished a draft in 1997 and in 1999 showed it to his friend Liu Xiaobo, who wrote him the following letter on January 13, 2000. Liao, who shaves his head, was wearing a beard at the time.—Ed.
DEAR BALDIE (or is it Beardie?):
Liu Xia and I have been reading your Testimony every night. She can take in ten lines at a time, but I have to chew on every word. Without prejudging how dumb you might be in the future, at least you know whom you’re hitting the hardest.
Compared with your years in prison, my three prison stints were pretty mild. During the first, at Qincheng [Beijing’s prison for elite prisoners, where Liu stayed from June 1989 to January 1991—Ed.], I had my own cell, and my living conditions were better than what you had to endure. Sometimes I was deathly bored, but that’s about it. In my second stint—eight months inside a large courtyard at the base of the Fragrant Hills outside Beijing—I got even better treatment. There, except for my freedom, I had just about everything. During the third—three years at the reeducation-through-labor camp at Dalian—I was again singled out for special handling. My three elite-prisoner experiences can’t compare in any way to your suffering; I probably shouldn’t even say mine were imprisonments, compared t
o yours.
Let’s face it, the only way to live in dignity, inside this depraved society that we inhabit, is to resist. That being so, to go to prison is really nothing more than to maintain simple human dignity; it’s really nothing to brag about. What we should be afraid of is not prison but the danger, when we get out of prison, of an uppity feeling that because the society owes us a blood debt we have the right to start ordering people around.
It has always bothered me that so many of the ordinary citizens who were arrested after the Tiananmen Massacre received heavier sentences than what we “famous” ones got, and that their prison conditions must be unthinkably squalid. But for me, until I read your Testimony, these were only things that I could imagine. Testimony put me in touch with the living pulse of those victims. Words cannot express the shame that I feel, and that shame is the reason I want to devote the second half of my life to those lost souls, those nameless victims. Everything else can pass, but the blood and tears of those innocent people are like stones that weigh incessantly in my heart. They are cold, heavy stones, and have sharp edges.
Your poem “Requiem” is a masterpiece, even better than “Massacre.”
In Testimony you offer a lot of critical observations about the people around you, and sometimes it’s hard for a reader to see the difference between objective criticism and personal complaint. Perhaps you were still too close to things; your personal pain may have colored your writing too much. Maybe you should reconsider those passages. To write “exactly as things were” is an impossible ideal, of course, but our writing should always have the inner strength to go as far in that direction as we can get it.
Compared to people in other nations that have lived under the dreary pall of communism, we resisters in China have not measured up very well. Even after so many years of tremendous tragedies, we still don’t have a moral leader like Václav Havel. It seems ironic that in order to win the right of ordinary people to pursue self-interest, a society needs a moral giant to make a selfless sacrifice. In order to secure “passive freedom”—freedom from state oppression—there needs to be a will to do active resistance. History is not fated. The appearance of a single martyr can fundamentally turn the spirit of a nation and strengthen its moral fiber. Gandhi was such a figure. So was Havel. So, even more, was that humble boy born in a manger two thousand years ago. Human progress is the result of the accident of birth of people such as these.