[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 112 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ONE YEAR AFTER THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AWARD
TO LIU XIAOBO: CONDITIONS FOR POLITICAL
PRISONERS AND PROSPECTS FOR POLITICAL REFORM
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HEARING
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 6, 2011
__________
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
House
Senate
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, SHERROD BROWN, Ohio, Cochairman
Chairman MAX BAUCUS, Montana
FRANK WOLF, Virginia CARL LEVIN, Michigan
DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon
TIM WALZ, Minnesota SUSAN COLLINS, Maine
MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio JAMES RISCH, Idaho
MICHAEL HONDA, California
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
SETH D. HARRIS, Department of Labor
MARIA OTERO, Department of State
FRANCISCO J. SANCHEZ, Department of Commerce
KURT M. CAMPBELL, Department of State
NISHA DESAI BISWAL, U.S. Agency for International Development
Paul B. Protic, Staff Director
Lawrence T. Liu, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
CO N T E N T S
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Page
Opening statement of Hon Christopher H. Smith, a U.S.
Representative from New Jersey; Chairman, Congressional-
Executive Commission on China.................................. 1
Walz, Hon. Tim, a U.S. Representative from Minnesota; Ranking
Member, Congressional-Executive Commission on China............ 4
Link, Perry, Chancellorial Chair for Innovative Teaching,
Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, University of
California, Riverside; Professor Emeritus, East Asian Studies,
Princeton University........................................... 6
Li, Xiaorong, Independent Scholar................................ 7
Botsford Fraser, Marian, Chair, Writers in Prison Committee of
PEN International.............................................. 9
Gershman, Carl, President, National Endowment for Democracy...... 11
Chai, Ling, Founder, All Girls Allowed........................... 24
Wu, Harry, Executive Director, The Laogai Research Foundation and
Laogai Museum.................................................. 26
Littlejohn, Reggie, President, Women's Rights Without Frontiers.. 28
Fu, Bob, Founder and President, ChinaAid Association............. 30
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Link, Perry...................................................... 42
Li, Xiaorong..................................................... 47
Botsford Fraser, Marian.......................................... 49
Gershman, Carl................................................... 53
Chai, Ling....................................................... 55
Wu, Harry........................................................ 77
Littlejohn, Reggie............................................... 79
Fu, Bob.......................................................... 82
Smith, Hon. Christopher H........................................ 84
Submission for the Record
The Chen Guangcheng Report: Coercive Family Planning in Linyi,
2005, drafted by Teng Baio, submitted by Reggie Littlejohn..... 87
ONE YEAR AFTER THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AWARD TO LIU XIAOBO: CONDITIONS
FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS AND PROSPECTS FOR POLITICAL REFORM
----------
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2011
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 12:05
p.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon.
Christopher H. Smith, Chairman, presiding.
Also present: Representatives Tim Walz and Frank Wolf.
Also present: Anna Brettell, Senior Advisor and Paul
Protic, Staff Director, Congressional-Executive Commission on
China.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, A U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW JERSEY; CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-
EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Representative Smith. The Commission will come to order,
and good afternoon, everyone.
One year after the independent Nobel Committee awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, who as we all know is a
Chinese intellectual and democracy advocate, Liu remains
isolated in prison thousands of miles away from his wife, who
authorities are holding under house arrest in Beijing.
In February 2010, I led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in
nominating Liu Xiaobo for the prize, at the same time
nominating two other persecuted human rights advocates, Chen
Guangcheng and Gao Zhisheng, to be joint recipients as part of
an international tide of support for the awarding of the prize
to Liu Xiaobo.
The Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to
Liu Xiaobo for his ``long and non-violent struggle for
fundamental human rights in China.'' H. Res. 1717, which I
authored, congratulating Liu on the awarding of the prize
passed the House with a vote of 402 to 1 exactly one year ago.
Chinese authorities, on the other hand, tried Liu and
sentenced him to 11 years in prison for ``inciting subversion
of state power,'' the longest known sentence for that crime,
simply for exercising his internationally recognized right to
free expression.
According to Chinese authorities, Liu's conviction was
based on Charter 08 and six essays that he wrote. Liu Xiaobo
signed Charter 08, as we know, which is a treatise urging
political and legal reforms in China based on constitutional
principles. Charter 08 states that freedom, equality, and human
rights are universal values of humankind, and that democracy
and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for
protecting these values.
Characteristic of the Chinese Government, officials blocked
access to Charter 08. They have questioned, summoned, and
otherwise harassed a large number of Chinese citizens for
contributing to, or signing, that document. Chinese officials
apparently remained livid over the awarding of the prize to Liu
and they continue in their campaign to malign Liu and the Nobel
Committee.
In addition, they have nearly suspended political relations
with the Norwegian Government, claiming the awarding of the
Peace Prize to Liu had done ``great damage'' to the relations
between China and Norway. They blame the Norwegian Government
because it ``supported this wrong decision.''
The apparent violations of Chinese legal protections for
defendants that have marred Mr. Liu's case from the outset are
numerous and well documented. In addition, the United Nations
Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that the
Chinese Government's detention of Liu and the house arrest of
his wife are indeed arbitrary.
Mr. Liu's trial and sentence demonstrates once again the
Chinese Government's failure to uphold its international human
rights obligations and also its failure to abide by procedural
norms and safeguards that meet international standards. While
authorities did allow Liu to attend his father's funeral
memorial service in October, they continue to limit visits from
his wife. Over the past year, authorities have allowed her to
visit her husband only on a very few occasions.
Beijing authorities are holding Liu's wife in a de facto
form of house arrest. They have cut off telephone and Internet
service, and have made her house off-limits to visitors.
As we all know, sadly, Liu Xiaobo is not alone. As of
September 2011, the CECC's Political Prisoner Database, perhaps
the greatest database in the world, contained information on
1,451 cases of known political or religious prisoners currently
detained. Chen Guangcheng is one of those prisoners. Chen is a
blind self-taught legal advocate who advocated on behalf of
farmers, the disabled, and women forced to undergo abortions.
Authorities have held him under a form of house arrest in
Linyi County, Shandong Province, since his release from prison
in September 2011. In effect, Chen's prison sentence has not
ended. Chen served over four years in prison on charges of
``international destruction of property'' and ``organizing a
group of people to disturb traffic.''
His real crime, however, was publicizing the abuses of
local one-child-per-couple policy officials and trying to use
the Chinese legal system to seek justice for the victims of
those abuses.
For months officials have confined Chen and his wife in
their home, beaten them, and subjected them to 24-hour
surveillance. Officials have set up checkpoints around the
village where Chen lives to prevent journalists and ordinary
citizens from visiting him and his family.
According to one report, 37 people who tried to enter the
village in October were attacked by 100 thugs. Under great
pressure, authorities recently allowed Chen's elderly mother to
go out and buy groceries and other supplies and have allowed
his six-year-old daughter to go to school, flanked, of course,
by security, and have allowed Chen some medicines sent by
supporters, although they have not allowed him to see a doctor
about his egregious health problems.
These small concessions mean little in the big picture.
Publicly available laws do not seem to provide any legal basis
for holding Chen and his family as prisoners in their own home.
I would note parenthetically that as Chairman of this
Commission I, and members and staff of this Commission, tried
just a few weeks ago to meet with Chen on his 40th birthday. We
were denied a visa. We will attempt to obtain a visa to visit
China on a number of human rights issues, including visiting
Chen Guangcheng.
Then there's the case of Gao Zhisheng. Authorities'
treatment of the greatly acclaimed lawyer Gao Zhisheng is even
more shocking and illustrates the brutality of some officials.
Officials revoked Mr. Gao's law license in 2005 in response to
his brave efforts to represent fellow Christians accused of
``illegally'' distributing Bibles and to defend workers and
Falon Gong practitioners.
In 2006, officials sentenced Gao to three years in prison
on the charge of inciting subversion, but suspended the charge
for five years. The five years suspended sentence is set to
expire later this month. Today, however, there is no word about
Mr. Gao's whereabouts.
After Mr. Gao wrote an open letter to Congress in 2007
criticizing China's human rights record, officials brutally
tortured him for 50 days, beating him with electric prods,
abused him with toothpicks, and threatened to kill him if he
told anyone of the treatment.
Mr. Gao disappeared into official custody in February 2009.
When he resurfaced briefly in March 2010, he told friends that
he would ``disappear again'' if his statements about his
treatment by his captors since 2009 were made public.
After authorities disappeared him again, the press went
public about his torture, which included a beating with guns in
holsters, for a period of over two days, which repeatedly made
him feel close to death.
It does not seem appropriate to talk about political
reforms in China when there is so little progress in improving
civil and political rights and when authorities continue to
mistreat, abuse, and torture people like Liu, Chen, and Gao.
The political prisoners for whom we have names are just a tip
of the iceberg. No one knows how many citizens in China are
persecuted for their religious or political beliefs.
In mid-February 2011, Chinese authorities launched a broad
crackdown against rights defenders, reform advocates, lawyers,
petitioners, writers, artists, and Internet bloggers.
International observers have described the crackdown as one of
the harshest crackdowns on human rights advocates in years, if
not decades.
While authorities have released many of those people they
detained in February, the rapidity and severity of the
crackdown indicates Chinese authorities remain intolerant of
freedom of speech and religion, and a whole host of other
fundamental freedoms and rights.
Perhaps the drafters of Charter 08 have it right. The
Charter notes that China's policy of reform and opening has
increased living standards and economic freedoms in China, but
states that the ruling elite fights off any move toward
political change.
I'd like to yield to my good friend and colleague, the
Ranking Member from the House side, Mr. Walz.
STATEMENT OF HON. TIM WALZ, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM
MINNESOTA; RANKING MEMBER, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION
ON CHINA
Representative Walz. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank
you to all of our witnesses who are here. I can't tell you, as
I say every time, the Chairman's passion, his long history of
working on human rights unwaveringly, and the active nature of
this Commission now is something I'm very proud of.
The Commission staff, we have some of the best and
brightest. They're compiling some of the best database, as you
heard the Chairman say, on the issue of political prisoners of
anywhere in the world, and for that I'm very proud.
Probably most importantly, though, for the panelists who
come before this Commission are some of the most inspiring,
some of the most humbling people that I have ever been around
because of the experiences and the expertise that it brings
here, focusing on an issue that knows absolutely no political
differences on this Commission and has continued to move
forward on bringing the issue of human rights.
It's not just about China and that's our focus and that's
our Commission's mandate, but it's about setting the example,
especially for our own country, that these are the things that
are important to us. The Chairman's work has certainly
propelled this of importance in the Congress as a whole.
Once again, today we are blessed with several great panels
that I'm really looking forward to to give us some insight of
where we go next, because it truly is all about making sure
that everyone has the right to those basic human rights and
freedoms that we all care so deeply about.
So, Mr. Chairman, thank you again for convening another
great panel, and I yield back.
Representative Smith. Mr. Walz, thank you very much. And
thank you for your passion and for the knowledge you bring,
having lived in China, and your comments and your leadership is
greatly appreciated.
I'd like to now introduce our first panel. I would just
note, the picture on the right, which everyone will recognize,
the empty chair. When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, many of us, including many of our panelists, were there
in attendance, as was I. It was a moving moment beyond words
when not only was Liu Xiaobo not there, nor was his wife or
anyone else allowed to stand in his stead to receive that very
august prize.
So, we lift up that picture. A picture is worth a thousand
words. Let it go out from here, because all of you have been
steadfast in this fight for human rights in China from day one.
Liu Xiaobo and the others are not forgotten in the least. If
anything, we are ratcheting up our efforts to secure his
release and his freedom and that of people who have
courageously borne the scars of human rights advocacy in the
People's Republic of China.
So I'd like to now introduce Perry Link, who is professor
emeritus, East Asian Studies, Princeton University. He's
currently teaching at the University of California in
Riverside.
Dr. Link recently co-edited a book on Liu Xiaobo's essays,
which he just gave me a copy of and I deeply appreciate that,
``No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems,'' Liu
Xiaobo. He also did a book entitled, ``Empty Chair: Chronicling
the Reform Movement Beijing Fears Most.'' Previously he co-
edited the book entitled, ``The Tiananmen Papers,'' a
collection of documents leaked by high-level government
officials that helped chronicle events surrounding the 1989
Tiananmen demonstrations and their suppression.
Representative Smith. Then we'll hear from Li Xiaorong, who
is an independent scholar and human rights activist who has co-
founded and served on the boards of Chinese human rights non-
governmental organizations. She was a research scholar at the
Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy of the University of
Maryland, where she also taught graduate courses. She has
published a book on ethics and human rights and many academic
articles. Her research projects have won support from many
well-known foundations and organizations.
Then we will hear from Marian Botsford Fraser, who is chair
of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International. We all
know that Liu Xiaobo was a former president of the Independent
Chinese PEN Center. She is a Canadian writer, editor, and
broadcaster. She is the author of three acclaimed non-fiction
books. She has been an active member of PEN International since
1991, including serving as president of PEN Canada. She has
undertaken three freedom of expression missions on behalf of
PEN International, including one to China in 2011.
Then we'll hear from Carl Gershman, who has long been
before this Commission and a great leader for human rights and
democracy and is president of the National Endowment for
Democracy, a private congressionally supported grant-making
institution with the mission to strengthen democratic
institutions around the world through non-government efforts.
In addition to presiding over the endowments and grants
programs in many countries around the world, he has overseen
the creation of the Quarterly Journal of Democracy,
International Forum for Democratic Studies, the Reagan Fasell
Democracy Fellows Program, and the Center for International
Media Assistance.
So, welcome all four of our distinguished witnesses on
panel one.
Dr. Link, if you could begin.
STATEMENT OF PERRY LINK, CHANCELLORIAL CHAIR FOR INNOVATIVE
TEACHING, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND FOREIGN LANGUAGES,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE; PROFESSOR EMERITUS, EAST
ASIAN STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Link. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's an honor to be here
and I salute you and your colleagues on the Commission for your
wisdom and your passion, obviously, in holding this important
hearing.
Liu Xiaobo is one of those unusual people who can look at
human life from the broadest of perspectives and reason about
it from first principles. His keen intellect notices things
that others only look at, but do not see.
Hardly any topic in Chinese culture, politics, or society
evades his interest and he can write about upsetting things
with analytic calm. We might expect this kind of steadiness in
a recluse, a hermit poet, a cloistered scholar, but in Liu
Xiaobo it comes in an activist. Time and again, he has gone
where he thinks he should go and done what he thinks he should
do as if havoc and the possibility of prison simply were not
there.
Fortunately for us, his readers, he writes utterly free
from fear. Most Chinese writers today, including the best ones,
write with political caution in the backs of their minds and
under a shadow that looms as their fingers pass over their
keyboards: What topics should I not touch? What indirection
should I use? Liu Xiaobo does none of this. What he thinks, we
get.
His starting point almost always is deeply humane. For
example, in this book he analyzes China's obsession with
Olympic gold medals, those shining badges of state-sponsored
chauvinism, from the viewpoint of six-year-old divers whose
retinas are ruined for life by repeated impacts with the
water's surface. He points out that Confucius, for all his
fame, in fact, ranked pretty low among ancient Chinese thinkers
in his sympathy for the poor and the oppressed. Liu surveys the
political jokes that course through China today and notes that
``in a dictatorship, the grins of the people are the nightmares
of the dictators.''
At his trial for subversion two years ago, Liu said that
the bloody massacre on June 4, 1989, in Beijing, was a turning
point in his own life. Every year since then on that date he's
written a poem for the ``lost souls.'' In one of these he
writes that ``at that moment the watching world was as a
defenseless lamb/slaughtered by a blazing sun/Even God was
stupefied, speechless.''
Liu is different from most Chinese writers in his attention
to transcendent values. He praises the great Chinese writer Lu
Xun for an ability to look beyond mundane matters to problems
of isolation and despair in the human condition. He describes
how, on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
in 1988, he was suddenly overwhelmed to realize that his
preoccupations with the specific problems of China seemed petty
when measured against profound challenges to the human spirit.
Liu sees the roots of Chinese problems today in its
political system, not in people. He insists that no individual
person, including any who prosecuted or imprisoned him, is his
personal enemy. His ultimate goal is regime change, but done
peacefully.
On this point China's rulers, who charge him with
subverting their power, actually see him correctly. They are
also correct to perceive that his ideas would be broadly
popular inside China if they were allowed to circulate freely,
and that of course is why they are so eager to block them.
Liu writes that change in China will be slow, but he is
optimistic that unrelenting pressure from below from farmers,
petitioners, rights advocates, and perhaps most important,
hundreds of millions of Internet users, eventually will carry
the day.
Chinese people have always shown special reverence for
Nobel prizes in any field, and this fact has made Liu Xiaobo's
Peace Prize especially hard for the regime to swallow. When
China's rulers put on a mask of imperturbability as they
denounced Liu's prize, they are not only trying to deceive the
world but at a deeper level are lying to themselves.
When they try to counter Liu's prize by inventing a
Confucius Peace Prize and then give it to Vladimir Putin,
citing his ``iron fist'' in Chechnya, there is a sense in which
we should not blame them for their clownish appearances because
these spring from an inner panic that they themselves cannot
control.
Liu Xiaobo sits in prison, in physical hardship, but in his
moral core there can be no doubt that he is much more at peace
than the men who oppress him.
Thank you.
Representative Smith. Dr. Link, thank you very much for
your testimony.
Now I'd like to ask Li Xiaorong to proceed.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Link appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF LI XIAORONG, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR
Ms. Li. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to
speak at this special occasion. One year after winning the
Nobel Peace Prize, Liu Xiaobo continues to languish in a
Chinese prison without regular family visits. His wife, Liu
Xia, has been under illegal house arrest. Liu Xiaobo's family
has been under heavy pressure to keep silent, and only recently
was able to convey some information about his current situation
to the press.
One of Liu's brothers reportedly said that Liu Xiaobo was
allowed briefly out of prison on September 18 to mourn his
father's death, and that his brother and Liu Xia were each
recently allowed a rare opportunity to visit Liu at the Gingo
Prison.
Back in 2009, on December 25, Liu Xiaobo was convicted of
inciting subversion of state power by the Beijing Number One
Municipal Court. Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison, with
2 years' deprivation of political rights. It was one of the
longest sentences handed down for the so-called crime of
inciting subversion of state power in recent years.
Officials left no doubt that the legal system, despite any
promise of reform, was simply the Communist Party's tool to
stamp out its critics, and that the crime of inciting
subversion of state power is so vaguely ill-defined that it can
be conveniently used by the CCP to serve their political
purposes. Liu's conviction was based entirely on his writings,
expressions of his political opinions, and his non-violent
activities.
From the time of the arrival of a policeman at Liu's
apartment in Beijing on the evening of December 8, 2008, to his
imprisonment incommunicado today, the prosecution of Liu Xiaobo
has been marred at each step by violations of his legal
constitutional rights and international human rights.
For instance, from December 8, 2008, to June 23, 2009, Liu
was held under residential surveillance at an undisclosed
location in Beijing. Except for two police-escorted visits by
his wife, Liu had no contact with the outside world.
Once Liu's case was turned over to the Beijing municipal
prosecutor's office in early December 2009, his lawyers were
given very little time to prepare his defense. During the trial
of December 23, 2009, Mr. Liu and his defense lawyers were not
allowed to fully present their defense in court. The presiding
judge interrupted Liu Xiaobo and cut him short during his
prepared remarks.
Liu's two lawyers were given a total of less than 20
minutes to present their arguments. Liu's trial was essentially
closed to the public. With the exception of two family members,
all other spectators in the small courtroom were young males in
plainclothes, apparently put there to occupy the seats in order
to keep Liu's other family members and supporters and observers
from the diplomatic community out of the way.
Liu's wife, Liu Xia, was denied permission to attend the
trial. The practice of unlawful secret detention prior to Liu
Xiaobo's sentence has profound ramifications and a chilling
effect in the country's rapidly declining climate for rule of
law reform in the last few years.
Since then, the same kind of secret detention and forced
disappearances have been applied on multiple occasions, for
example, to many activists and lawyers during the government
crackdown and online calls for tradition-style Jasmine
revolution protests last February and to the artist Ai Weiwei.
In February, within a few weeks, a total of 52 individuals
were criminally detained and at least 24 were subjected to
forced disappearances, 5 were sent to reeducation through labor
camps, 4 were placed under illegal residential surveillance,
and 2 were held in psychiatric hospitals.
As we speak--a draft revision of the Chinese criminal
procedure law is under consideration in the National People's
Congress, the government is trying to legalize such secretive
detention or forced disappearances.
If anyone had expected that the government would take some
positive steps toward honoring the spirit of the Peace Prize
and improve the human rights situation in China as a result of
the historical decision, one would be very disappointed.
Awarding Liu Xiaobo the prize was no doubt a game-changer; it
drew unprecedented scrutiny to the government's systematic
human rights abuses since 1989.
After the Peace Prize, together with other precipitous
events, the once-popular argument that when it comes to China
there should be somehow double standards and human rights
concerns should not get in the way of U.S. trade and strategic
priorities has somehow seemed to be on the defensive.
The question remains, however, whether the international
community is doing anything effectively or doing enough to
support those Chinese who risk their own lives and liberty to
fight for democracy and human rights, such as Liu Xiaobo, Chen
Guangcheng, Gao Zhisheng, Liu Xianbin, Chen Wei, Wang Lihong,
Ni Yulan, and the many, many others.
Thank you.
Representative Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Li, for your
testimony.
I'd like to now ask Ms. Botsford Fraser to proceed. Let me
just note that we're joined by Chairman Frank Wolf, who is not
only a member of this Commission, but also co-chairs the Lantos
Human Rights Commission and is the subcommittee Appropriations
Chair for the justice and other agencies on the Appropriations
Committee. So we're glad to have him here.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Li appears in the appendix.]
STATEMENT OF MARIAN BOTSFORD FRASER, CHAIR, WRITERS IN PRISON
COMMITTEE OF PEN INTERNATIONAL
Ms. Botsford Fraser. Thank you, Chairman Smith, members of
the Commission. I am Marian Botsford Fraser and I chair the
Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International. I'm very
grateful to the Commission for the opportunity to reflect on
the situation of Liu Xiaobo, who is a PEN colleague and a
former president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center [ICPC],
and also on the prospects for greater freedom of expression in
China.
Since 1921, PEN International has been fighting for freedom
of literature and freedom of expression. We currently have 144
PEN centers in more than 100 countries worldwide.
In Liu Xiaobo's case and in all of our advocacy, PEN is
guided by the human rights norms that countries around the
world are required to uphold. The right to freedom of
expression is enshrined in both the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights created 63 years ago and the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR]. Only 19 nations
have not signed the ICCPR. The People's Republic of China is
among seven states that have signed the covenant but haven't
yet ratified it.
Liu was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison
for seven phrases extracted from his essays and from Charter
08, which he had helped to draft. In none of those phrases did
Liu call for the overthrow of the government. He expressed his
opinions, he offered critiques of current realities, and
considered ways to make life in China more democratic and more
just.
I was honored to be part of a PEN delegation at the Nobel
Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo last year. We were gratified by
the international recognition of Liu's efforts to promote
peaceful change in China, but we were saddened by the Chinese
authorities' response and the subsequent crackdown, which
included the arrest of Liu Xia.
That crackdown was followed early this year by another even
more severe wave of repression, this one targeting dissent
thought to have been inspired by uprisings in the Middle East.
This summer I was part of a PEN delegation that went to
Beijing to gauge the level of repression and current climate
for freedom of expression and to deliver a message of
solidarity to our colleagues. What we found was a mixture of
absurd restrictions and repression on the one hand, and
positive signs and hope on the other.
In Beijing, 11 of 14 writers invited to the U.S. Embassy
for a discussion about freedom of expression were prevented
from attending, many after visits and warnings from the guobao,
the security police. We could only assume that their telephone
and Internet communications were monitored and that the
Embassy's may have been as well.
Other private meetings with individuals we arranged were
also canceled after visits from the guobao. We had also hoped
to meet with Liu Xia, but with her Beijing compound guarded and
her communication lines cut, we were cautioned not to attempt a
visit, nor could we visit with Teng Biao and Ye Du, two other
members of ICPC who were rounded up earlier this year, also
being held incommunicado in their homes. This was discouraging.
We were appalled by the intrusiveness and sheer size of the
surveillance state and the severity of restrictions imposed on
our PEN colleagues. The Chinese Government still doesn't allow
the ICPC to function fully inside the country and Liu Xiaobo is
only 1 of 40 writers in prison in China whose cases PEN is
following today.
At the same time we were surprised by the widespread
dissatisfaction with the state of freedom of expression in
China. Many of the writers we met with, even those not
considered dissidents, decried the level of censorship and
self-censorship and the one-party system behind this
repression, censorship that extends its tentacles deep into the
literary life of China, into bookshops where bookshop owners
are beaten and prevented from holding literary events.
The frank expressions of those we met in Beijing seem to
mirror the aspirations of China's citizens. At the end of our
trip, a high-speed train collided with another outside the city
of Wenzhou, killing 40 people and injuring almost 200. The
government's attempts to cover up this tragedy, which included
literally trying to bury the train at the scene, sparked
outrage around the country. In five days, Chinese citizens
posted 25 million messages critical of the government's
handling of the accident on China's microblogs, or weibos.
That campaign, unprecedented in its breadth and tenacity,
has since been emulated in several other scandals and
tragedies. Similarly, Chinese citizens who want to comment on
the kinds of politically sensitive topics that dominate Liu
Xiaobo's essays are finding new ways to elude the censors,
using word-play, humor, satire, posting photographs of
themselves silently supporting political prisoners, as in the
dark glasses campaign for the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng.
Citizens are beginning to ask why this lawyer was being
confined inside his home after his release from prison. Murong
Xuecun, a well-known and popular writer, recently documented
his own attempt to visit Chen and the beating he got when he
did. In a harrowing account published in The Guardian he said,
``We just wanted to verify what it takes in this country, at
this time, to visit an imprisoned free man.''
This surge of activism, citizens simply asking the question
``why,'' lends hope that China is changing. People are coming
to realize, as Murong said of Chen Guangcheng, that ``at the
moment his freedom was arbitrarily being taken away, your
freedom came under threat.''
When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year
the Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, noted that the
severe punishment imposed on Liu made him more than a central
spokesman for human rights. Practically overnight he became the
very symbol, both in China and internationally, of the struggle
for such rights in China.
So on the anniversary of that date, PEN would like to
thank, again, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, this Commission,
and all governments, organizations, and individuals around the
world that have stood with Liu Xiaobo. We ask everyone to
redouble their efforts so that by this time next year he and
his wife Lui Xia are free.
Thank you.
Representative Smith. Ms. Botsford Fraser, thank you very
much for your testimony and for your leadership.
I would just note that if anyone has to leave, our
witnesses or anyone who is so interested, we hope to have
everyone who would like to sign that picture and when Liu
Xiaobo gets to accept his Nobel Peace Prize someday--God
willing someday soon--in person, when he makes his way to
Washington we would like to present him with that.
Carl Gershman?
[The prepared statement of Ms. Botsford Fraser appears in
the appendix.]
STATEMENT OF CARL GERSHMAN, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR
DEMOCRACY
Mr. Gershman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's wonderful to
see you again.
I've been asked to address, briefly, three issues: The
impact of China on global democratic trends, including the
significance of the so-called China model of authoritarianism;
the prospects for democratic reform in China, including the
necessary pre-conditions for democratic institutions; and,
finally, the influence of the Nobel Peace Prize on Chinese
society and official policy.
Regarding China's impact on global democratic trends, it's
now common knowledge that China exerts an anti-democratic
influence in world politics. Liu Xiaobo has said that China
serves as a ``blood transfusion machine'' for smaller
dictatorships in North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere.
In addition to providing economic and political support to
such regimes, it shares tactics bilaterally with autocrats such
as Lukashenko in Belarus, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Chavez in
Venezuela; and it cooperates multilaterally with Russia and the
Central Asian countries through the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization.
China also projects its system of authoritarian capitalism
as an alternative model to the system of democracy with a mixed
economy that exists in the United States, Europe, and many
other countries around the world. There are some people in this
country who are persuaded of this model's effectiveness. Just
last Thursday the SEIU's [Service Employees International
Union] former president, Andy Stern, published an article in
the Wall Street Journal entitled, ``China's Superior Economic
Model,'' that praised its system of central planning.
But this model is flawed for three fundamental reasons.
First, as Liu Xiaobo pointed out in his 2006 essay ``Changing
the Regime by Changing Society,'' two decades of reform have
eroded, to one degree or another, each of the four pillars of
China's totalitarian system. Comprehensive nationalization is
giving way to a system where independent economic activity
``has given individuals the material base for autonomous
choices.''
The system of ``all-pervasive organization'' that
eliminated all independent activity ``is gone and never to
return,'' according to Liu, and society is now ``moving toward
freedom of movement, mobility, and career choice.''
The ``mental tyranny'' of an imposed ideology has succumbed
to the information revolution that has awakened individual
consciousness and awareness of one's rights. While the fourth
pillar of political centralization and repression remains,
according to Liu people have lost their fear of repression and
the victims of persecution, far from being socially isolated
and humiliated, now ``inspire reference'' in the society and
are able to put their accusers ``into the moral position of
being defendants.''
The second reason the model is flawed, according to Yu
Jiangrong, the well-known Chinese scholar and sociologist, is
that it is characterized by ``rigid stability'' and
``dichotomized black-and-white thinking'' in which the
``expression of people's legitimate interests''--land issues
for peasants, wages for workers, homeowner rights for urban
residents, minority rights for Tibetans, Uyghurs, and
Mongolians--becomes a threat to the social order and is
adamantly opposed.
A rigid system, according to Professor Yu, is by definition
brittle and can break under stress. It lacks the resilience of
democracy where government is accountable and conflicts can be
resolved lawfully. Professor Yu indeed fears that without such
resilience, China will not be able to escape what he calls
``the tragic fate of two millennia of the cycle of alternating
chaos and order.''
The third flaw is that the Chinese regime lacks political
legitimacy. It has achieved a degree of performance-based
legitimacy by using market reform to generate material wealth.
But such legitimacy is inherently unstable since it is not
immune to the business cycle, which is why Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao, speaking after the National People's Congress in 2007,
described the economy as ``unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated,
and unsustainable.''
No wonder the recent spike in worker protests in Guangdong
has caused such alarm in Beijing. Without the authority that
derives from receiving popular consent, Andrew Nathan has
written, the Chinese regime lives ``under the shadow of the
future, vulnerable to existential challenges that mature
democracies do not face.''
Regarding the preconditions and possibility for China's
democratic transition, the picture is mixed. The brightest area
is media liberalization, with social media and the Internet as
a whole driving traditional media over the past five years. As
Liu Xiaobo noted, this has spread democratic values, including
rights, awareness, and the desire to hold the government
accountable.
Even though those most active with social media only
account for 40 percent of the Chinese Internet users and 14.2
percent of all Chinese, they are having an impact throughout
the society, and even workers using cell phones and social
networking platforms use it to organize informally, despite
official restrictions.
Less encouraging is the fact that civil-society
organizations continue to be highly restricted. The immense
Chinese countryside remains woefully underserved by civil-
society organizations. Most democrats now look to the rights
defense movement as a critical way to advance the possibility
of a transition. With increasingly broad participation and a
convergence between middle class and working class, this
movement strives to bring the struggle of workers and farmers
into the mainstream. It is pushing for concrete gains in the
rule of law and more distributive justice. But with the
government showing no interest in giving this movement space,
the conditions for a gradual and peaceful transition are
limited.
The concern of many Chinese activists is that increasing
repression will delay a regime transition for so long that,
when it does happen, which they think is inevitable, it will be
accompanied by bloodshed and social turbulence. Thus, the
probability of the regime surviving in its current form
dwindles, along with the possibility for a peaceful transition
and democratic consolidation.
Finally, regarding the influence of the Nobel Peace Prize,
I think it deepened the Chinese Government's legitimacy crisis.
For one thing, as The Economist noted at the time, Beijing's
disastrous response to the prize portrayed for the whole world
to see ``the government's insecurity at home.'' And it didn't
help when the audience of thousands rose in repeated standing
ovations as Liv Ullmann read ``I Have No Enemies,'' Liu's final
statement at his trial, with his empty chair of honor
constituting a powerful indictment of the regime.
With all its stirring symbolism, the Nobel ceremony
represented the confirmation by the international community of
the sentiments of a good part of the Chinese society. As Liu
himself said three years before the Nobel award, political
persecution ``has gradually turned into a vehicle for advancing
the moral stature of its victims, garnering them honors for
being the `civic conscience' or the `heroes of truth,' while
the government's hired thugs have become the instruments that
`do the dirty work.' '' Herein lies China's hope. May its
leaders begin to listen to such heroes before it is too late.
Thank you.
Representative Smith. Mr. Gershman, thank you very much for
your testimony.
I'd like to yield to Chairman Wolf, if he has any comments
to make.
Representative Wolf. Thank you, Mr. Smith. I believe you
were there in Oslo. Yes, I do have a question. Is that what
this is for?
Representative Smith. Or comments.
Representative Wolf. I'll wait for questions. Go ahead.
Representative Smith. Okay. Thank you.
Let me just ask a few opening questions, if I could. First
of all, thank you all for your very eloquent statements on
behalf of Liu Xiaobo and all of those who are languishing in
either the laogai or some detention center, being tortured,
mistreated because they espouse a human rights policy that
unfortunately the Chinese Government finds objectionable.
Paradoxically, Liu saw gradual and incremental change en
route to full and unfettered democratization, yet the highly
visible and unjust incarceration and detention ongoing, dissing
the entire free world that rallied around him and the others,
but certainly in Oslo--I mean, the sentiment, which continues
unabated, was extraordinarily strong.
But it seems to me that denying Liu the award, denying him
the release from prison underscores Beijing's insecurity and
weakness. I like what you said, Dr. Link, when you quoted him,
``utterly free from fear.'' The fear is in the government, it's
not in the Gulag.
It seems to me that this pushes China toward a tipping
point faster and I think the end of this dictatorship and the
matriculation of democracy is likely to happen sooner rather
than later because of this highly insecure government and the
way it has reacted. So I would like to ask you, at best the
Chinese Government has mismanaged this.
I mean, in broad daylight, with all eyes wide open, they
not only have kept him in prison, and others, but the way--and
those of us who were in Oslo were shocked, and maybe not
shocked, about how the Chinese Government went into overdrive,
propaganda-wise, to hurl insults and accusations against him,
against the Norwegian Government, and all the others.
So they have mismanaged it certainly from a public
relations point of view, as well as from a governmental point
of view. Is it that their arrogance is so high, are they so
insecure, or is it that they think there is no sustainable
penalties that might be meted out to them, particularly as they
go around the world with some nouveau cash in their pocket to
seemingly help some of the struggling countries in Europe and
elsewhere.
Why are they so brazen? Anybody like to take that? Carl?
Mr. Link. I think you're right about the insecurity, yes.
On the question of whether they feel there are no penalties
around the world out of a kind of an arrogance that money can
do anything for them, I think that's part of the answer, too. I
think ``both'' is the answer to your question. It's an inner
insecurity as well as a new-found confidence, if that's the
word, that money can do anything.
Liu Xiaobo has written about this as well, that the new way
to control everything in Chinese society now is money. In the
Mao era it was power and thoughtwork and so on, but money is
playing that role now. But still, it's a seal atop a twisting
ball, is the metaphor I like. I think they're constantly having
to adjust and feel insecure, so I think you're quite right
about that.
Mr. Gershman. I don't think it's unique. I think around the
world you have dictatorships that hold onto power and behave in
a very brazen way. China's brazenness is increased by its size.
It's a big country and has growing power in the world, and it's
throwing its weight around. But what I find remarkable is the
degree of its insecurity.
It derives from the fact that its economic performance is
creating divisions in the society, the feeling on the part of
the masses that they're not benefiting from the growing wealth.
And so you're seeing great disturbances as workers get laid
off. They don't have any means for representation.
The regime has also lost moral legitimacy, which we know
from past experiences is ultimately the most important thing. I
remember once Elena Bonner saying that back in the 1970s they
were just 11 dissidents with a typewriter, and look what
happened to the Soviet Union. This frightens regimes today.
Representative Smith. Yes.
Ms. Botsford Fraser. I think the level of desperation is
demonstrated also in the way in which the surveillance state is
functioning within the country and the degree to which it
hampers people at the most ordinary levels of life. For
example, one of the people that we met with in Beijing who was
allowed to come to the U.S. Embassy meeting, hasn't actually
done anything bad since 1998. He has not been detained and he
has never been accused of anything, and yet he's under constant
surveillance all the time.
So I think that this indicates a level of a sort of almost
haphazard and kind of frantic, desperate sort of surveillance,
sort of just scattershot, really.
Ms. Li. I would just add to that, insecurity, arrogance,
mismanagement, and panic. It was a profound sense of
unpreparedness and shock that this small country, Norway, a few
people on the Nobel Peace Committee, would dare to do this to
China. So I think this has provoked a certain soul-searching
and it is an indication that the regime, as Carl said, is
degenerating into a sort of profound lack of moral legitimacy,
both in society and within the government.
Representative Smith. I appreciate that.
Mr. Gershman, you mentioned Elena Bonner. Twice, she
testified here, right where you sit, and made very similar
comments about the importance of a few people having a profound
impact when they stand firm. But they do need the support of
other countries like the United States, like our European
friends, like friends in Africa, Latin America, and everywhere
else in the world who cherish and believe in fundamental human
rights.
I am wondering if, one year later, we have done enough to
ensure that Liu Xiaobo is, (A) not forgotten in any way, shape,
or form; and (B) that his cause and the cause of the others is
kept front and center. I would note parenthetically that we had
a press conference and hearing to express great disappointment
that when Hu Jintao was here, many people in this room raised
the case of Liu Xiaobo and Gao and Chen, and many others, very
strongly and with great detail, including the Commission,
including the Human Rights Subcommittee, which I chair, and it
was never even mentioned, publicly at least--maybe privately.
But the Associated Press asked a great question, and all of
a sudden there is a problem with communications at the joint
press conference with President Obama and Hu Jintao and he
couldn't answer it for some reason. The President said
something that I hope he retracts, President Obama, that they--
they, being the Chinese--have a different culture and they have
a different political system.
That rubbed even the Washington Post profoundly the wrong
way, which did a huge editorial, ``Obama Defends Hu Jintao on
Rights Issues.'' A different culture? Harry Wu spent 20 years
in the laogai being tortured. Bob Fu spent time there as well,
who will testify later. They understand perfectly human rights
and democracy. The culture is profoundly in favor of these
rights, so I do hope our own administration does more and in a
much more visible way.
Your comments on that? I mean, this is a bipartisan
Commission. We speak out. Right before the Olympics when
President Bush was being not as strong as he could be--as a
matter of fact, weak, to some extent--on human rights in China,
Mr. Wolf and I went to China right before the Olympics, brought
the Commission's list of prisoners, and were very unhappy with
our own ambassador, and even Condoleeza Rice, who was talking
about what venue they wanted to attend, was it swimming, was it
track and field, rather than going to prisons and trying to
promote the reform agenda. So there's no partisanship here. I
would hope the administration would do more. Any comments you
might want to have on that?
Mr. Gershman. I recall, Mr. Chairman, that at the NDI
[National Democratic Institute] dinner at the beginning of
November, Secretary Clinton, talking about the Arab Spring,
said that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. In other
words, we can support democracy even as we work on the very
practical issues that the Administration must address with the
governments in the Gulf, or in this case, China.
I think striking that balance is key. We recognize that the
United States has great interests with China--economic
interests, political interests, and so forth. But that in no
way should prohibit us from also expressing the strongest
support for democracy and human rights. There's no
contradiction there. The Administration has said it themselves.
I think they're increasingly following it in their policies,
and I hope they'll continue to do that.
Representative Smith. Well, I would just take one
disagreement with the ``continue.'' I hope they will do it. I
mean, Mrs. Clinton did say that she was not going to allow
human rights to ``interfere'' with climate change and peddling
U.S. Treasury debt. And I say that with respect to the
Secretary of State. This man, and all of these men and women,
are suffering irreparable harm to their bodies and minds in
these horrific Gulags and we need to be much more visible and
louder.
Mr. Walz?
Representative Walz. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll
probably piggy-back a bit on that. I absolutely refuse to
believe that we need to capitulate our stances on human rights
with this false choice of upholding human rights versus
economic growth. I think that's a trap. I don't believe it. I
think you can certainly do both and we can demand that of our
trading partners.
I think what we're trying to understand, and I said when I
came to this hearing that I think, unfortunately, maybe the
Chairman is right, this is one of the small outposts of this
being spoken of. Sometimes this type of discussion is not
accepted in polite company in Washington because we may offend
someone over our trade policies. I think we need to reset that.
We need to reset that approach to it. It certainly doesn't mean
that we live in our own glass house and understand that we need
to do things ourselves, but it's this quest to try and get
human rights to the forefront.
My question to all of you is one that I always try and
understand on these panels. This discussion here can be for
domestic consumption, but what I'm most proud of is that door
is open and we're quite aware that this ends up getting back.
We hope it gets back to folks in China who maybe somewhere down
along that bureaucratic line, listen a little bit.
What are our best approaches to this? What are the best
ways to ensure--what I'm always trying to understand, and I
tell this story, I did spend some time living in China in the
1980s and I traveled back--I always say 34 times, but because
it's China, every time I went I learned a little bit less and
I'm one trip from knowing nothing about China, because I'm
always trying to understand the people, and this dichotomy I
have with a regime that doesn't seem to honor those ideas, but
a people who do on an individual and a community basis. I'm
trying to figure out, what can we do?
What is the best way? What are the things the Chairman is
talking about, of asking the administrations, regardless of
politics? How do we best help people like Liu Xiaobo and how do
we help the average person who is not a Nobel Prize recipient,
but is sitting there in their home thinking things could be
different? Can any of you help me try and--from your experience
and understanding?
Mr. Link. I'm madly flipping through the book here because
Liu Xiaobo himself addresses this question. If I can find the
quote in a few minutes, I'll read it to you.
Representative Walz. Okay.
Mr. Link. But he, in receiving a prize in San Francisco in
2002, where he was barred from going but he sent a statement,
said--and this isn't verbatim, but his idea was--it's
profoundly uplifting for us to hear the goodwill expressions of
human beings in other parts of the world in support of our
work.
I would argue that it's not only to the dissidents that it
means a lot, but precisely because of the Elena Bonner
phenomenon. You have a few people at typewriters who are called
``dissidents.'' In fact, they are spokespeople for much larger
groups of people who don't dare to speak out. After all, what
is it that makes a dissident? It's the willingness to put your
head on the line.
Everybody else is watching, and when the principle can be
articulated people who otherwise are silent feel enthusiasm
from within. So I think the short answer to your question is
that human beings everywhere, including us and our government,
ought to make clear moral statements about what's going on.
Representative Walz. I couldn't agree more.
Mr. Link. And have it be out there, and it'll be heard by
people who don't dare to speak. Lots of people who don't dare
to speak.
Representative Walz. Thank you.
Do you dispel this myth that the sociological factor that
the Chinese quest for stability in some cases outweighs that
quest for individual personal justice? This idea of, don't rock
the boat, because when the boat's been rocked in the past we've
had decades of unrest. Do you reject that as a reason that the
Chinese--we hear this sometimes, that the Chinese public is not
themselves as concerned with pushing this as are the diaspora,
for lack of----
Mr. Link. Yes. I think that's a technique of the ruling
elite. If you look at the history of the Communist experience
in China and ask the question, where has chaos originated----
Representative Walz. Yes.
Mr. Link. From the top. Mao Zedong created more of it than
anybody else. The Tiananmen massacre was from the top. The
wealth gap between rich and poor that Carl refers to as
creating so much stability is because the power elite hangs on
power and wealth.
Representative Walz. Yes.
Mr. Link. The causes of chaos and instability are from the
top, not ordinary people. So I think that's an utterly false
argument. It's very smart for the regime to use it in their
ruling techniques. I mean, they could have read Machiavelli on
``The Prince'' on how to do this. But should we take it
seriously? No, not at all.
Representative Walz. If I could ask Ms. Botsford Fraser,
what's being passed around amongst Chinese people that they're
reading, if you know, of things that are inspiring them? I
watched this, having worked in being with my friends for some
time, and it would be after work drinking a beer and then they
would tell the jokes.
I found it--I tried to listen to the Chinese political
jokes. One of the problems was, they many times relied on a
play on words of the Chinese language, and my Chinese was so
weak that I laughed out of courtesy, not because I got it. But
I found that those jokes, when I did understand them, were very
telling, how people were seeing it. I am wondering from a
writer's perspective or how you see it, what are they saying?
Ms. Botsford Fraser. Certainly when we were there we had
the impression of a very deep and very rich and very lively
literary culture and a very sophisticated literary culture, and
it's one where individual writers understand the need to speak
both to the citizens of China and also the outside world, and
they're quite strategic in how they decide to manage that, to
manage their own careers in terms of the kinds of books that
they publish.
So I would say that it's a very rich culture. I am not a
Chinese speaker and I don't know the literature, but I
certainly had that sense of a very dynamic culture. But I think
the other aspect of this is the changes in technology and the
way that social media and the way that figures like Ai Weiwei,
for example, have dramatically changed the way that Chinese
citizens are speaking to one another and the kinds of--you
mentioned the political jokes, the imagery, the satire, the
ways that all of these things are sort of spreading across
social media and become the sort of--the language of how people
understand their situation.
And I think for a lot of people one of the turning points
is not only the issues such as freedom of expression, which has
now become an issue that affects everybody because everybody
wants to have a cell phone and be able to use it, and suddenly
freedom of expression isn't an abstract thing, it's about me
being able to use my cell phone and me being able to read the
Internet in countries all around the world.
But it is also about the identification that people like Ai
Weiwei have introduced into the broader culture, the younger
culture, where people get it. They get those kinds of visual
images.
Representative Walz. Yes, that's the thing. And Mr.
Chairman, thank you for indulging me. I'll leave you with this.
I was thinking right prior to June 4, I remember it just stood
out for me. I thought it was a very funny short joke and I
thought it really exemplified what was happening prior to the
spring revolution. This must have been in 1988.
Someone told me it was President Reagan--it dates you on
this--but President Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping all got the
opportunity to meet God. And President Reagan said, when will
America be truly free and democratic and open? And God said,
oh, 25 years, and President Reagan cried. President Gorbachev
says, when will the Soviet Union, Russia, become truly free and
open? He said, it'll be 50 years, and President Gorbachev
cried. And then Deng Xiaoping said, when will China be truly
open and free? And God cried.
The issue at the time was, and you could tell, there was
something happening in the society. I just say this as a small
thing, and it's a writer's piece of it, in honoring someone
like Liu, that there's a profound understanding of the culture
that we need to understand and what we can do to facilitate
that. So, thank you for indulging me, Mr. Chairman, and thank
you.
Representative Smith. Thank you.
Chairman Wolf?
Representative Wolf. Thank you, Mr. Smith. I'll thank both
of the members for their comments and questions. I have been
encouraged by listening to your comments. They express the
feelings that I have, but I think you all have forgotten more
about China than I will ever know, so you validate some of the
things that I think are going to happen or are happening.
To ask you a couple of questions, does Liu's wife--can she
have visitors? If someone were to fly there and just say, we're
going to take a cab over, can you visit? Can you knock on the
door? Can you go inside?
Ms. Botsford Fraser. When we were there we were told no,
that we absolutely would not be able to. I will say that the
diplomatic community in Beijing tries very hard to visit Liu
Xia. They make a point of going to her compound and asking
permission to visit her and they are denied permission to visit
her. This happens over and over again, and it is done by almost
all--not all, but a large number of the embassies in Beijing
make this effort.
Representative Wolf. Has the American Embassy ever made the
effort?
Ms. Botsford Fraser. Yes, they have. All of the embassies
do this on a regular basis. They see this as part of their
mandate there.
Representative Wolf. Second, where do you think we are in
the timeline if we had to compare China with the Soviet Union?
And we know how it collapsed. I think you could do this in an
appropriate way. If you recall, Ronald Reagan said--in 1983, he
said, ``Tear down this wall,'' and then he goes to the Danilov
Monastery and gives a very powerful speech, and yet Gorbachev
comes to his funeral.
So you don't have to be just--you can raise human rights
and religious freedom concerns in an appropriate way. But where
do you think we are in China compared to the Soviet Union
today? Are we in 1979? Are we 1983? Are we 1986? Where do you
think we are? Not hope we are, think we are.
Mr. Gershman. Mr. Chairman, no one can really precisely
answer that question. Most people didn't anticipate the fall of
the Soviet Union, and there are significant differences with
China, one being China's economic success today. That's a
significant difference. The second is the nationalities issue.
The Soviets had a much larger nationalities problem than the
Chinese have.
However, I come back to this issue of stability. They're
worried about it. I quoted Yu Jianrong earlier, that they don't
have real stability, the stability that comes with resilience.
China has a very brittle system. If they go through an economic
crisis, if this growth doesn't continue, it could break and we
do not know when that's going to happen.
The other major difference between the two periods is the
Internet. During the Soviet time, as I said, it was 11
dissidents with a typewriter; you remember, smuggling around
carbon copies of manuscripts and what have you. Now some 400 or
500 million people are on the Internet, and the struggle over
the Internet is going to be very critical.
We can practically help not only by helping to get
information in, but by helping people inside break through the
restrictions that the government is putting on the Internet.
It's terribly important to keep the Internet as open as
possible for the people in China. That's a very powerful
factor, and I think it contributes to the instability of the
situation.
Ms. Li. I would add by saying that China is in a place
where the Soviet Union has never been. This brings not much
certainty about when something would happen, but it also
challenges us to think more creatively. I also want to add that
nobody predicted what would happen in the Arab Spring: in
Tunisia and Egypt.
I want to get back to the question of, what the U.S.
Government or this administration could do in the short term. I
think the administration or the U.S. Government should be
consistent, at least, when it comes to human rights, whether
violations took place in Libya or Syria, Iran or Burma, or
China. There shouldn't be double standards because of China's
economic power status.
The upcoming visit by the Vice President of China to the
United States would be one advocacy opportunity to press for
the release of Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng, and Gao
Zhisheng, and all other political prisoners, because the Vice
President, as we know, is the heir apparent to the throne of
the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. It's important to put him on
the spot.
President Obama himself, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
certainly should do more to obtain the immediate and
unconditional release of his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate,
Liu Xiaobo. The Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was
under house arrest for almost 20 years. We hope with all our
efforts and the admirable efforts by this Commission, we would
see Liu Xiaobo free sooner.
Mr. Link. I want to answer Congressman Wolf's question
about ``where is China now? '' by reinforcing what Mr. Gershman
said about the Internet. Five years ago, my view of the rising
Chinese Internet was that it was an open question whether or
not this could be the first medium in the history of Communist
China that breaks free.
Now, I really think that the Internet is going to win. I
don't think they can keep the lid on. The consequences of that
are something that the regime clearly fears, and I think it's
an open question, but it makes me, today, much more optimistic
about change in China than I was three or four years ago.
There are two of Liu Xiaobo's essays that say that the
Internet, in his view, is ``God's gift to China.'' It's partly
tongue-in-cheek, but very serious at another level.
I found the sentence that I was looking for and I'd like to
read it because I think it's a good coda for this whole effort
that you people are making.
He writes, ``I should emphasize that for people like me who
live inside a cowardly dictatorship, which is a prison of its
own kind, every little bit of good-hearted encouragement that
springs from the human nature of people who live in other
places, even if the encouragement is small, causes us to feel
gratitude and awe.''
Representative Wolf. Well, you know, Sharansky used to say,
when he knew that people in the West--Congressmen, Senators, or
people who were just advocating for him--he was inspired by
that, and even in the Gulag knew that it was taking place. I'm
going to ask you for one thing, but before that I have one last
question that I want to ask on this. Does Liu know of this
interest? Are there ways that he knows that this hearing--will
he find out that this hearing took place? Do you believe that
he and his wife know of the interest in the West? Just yes or
no.
Ms. Li. In some ways, the general efforts to seek the
release of Liu Xiaobo or support prisoners of conscience like
him by the international community is known among Chinese
activists. Whether this particular hearing, when the
information will reach them, I cannot answer that question.
Representative Wolf. Okay.
Ms. Li. My understanding is the house arrest of his wife,
Liu Xia, has been done in such a way that if she would not go
out of her way to try to talk about her situation, she would be
given a certain chance, for example, for a prison visit. We
cannot confirm any prison visits by her had actually taken
place, but there have been some reports to that effect.
Representative Wolf. So would it be helpful if Members of
Congress, when they went to Beijing, tried to visit Liu's wife
who is under house arrest?
Ms. Li. As Marian just said, I also heard the same, that
diplomats have been trying to visit her at her compound. The
first barrier they face are the security guards at the
compound.
Representative Wolf. I understand that. But would it be
helpful if, when Members were there--if we wrote Members of
Congress who are always going to China and said, when you're in
Beijing, go and try to visit Liu's wife. You know, try.
Ms. Li. Yes. Yes.
Representative Wolf. You may not get there, but try. Ask.
Ms. Li. Yes.
Representative Wolf. Don't listen to the American Embassy
telling you not to do it. But try. Would it be helpful if they
tried?
Ms. Li. Yes.
Representative Wolf. Okay. That's----
Ms. Li. The more such attempts to visit as we know in the
case of Chen Guangcheng under house arrest in his village, the
more attention that such attempts can draw to the individuals,
the better.
Representative Wolf. So we'll do a letter to every Member
of Congress saying, when you go to Beijing, try--try--and if
Member after Member tries and tries, you know, someone will get
through.
The last question is, if you could give Mr. Smith a letter
with some recommendations that we can get to Ambassador Locke.
When he was nominated--I opposed his nomination. He came up to
me after testifying before my subcommittee and said, ``You
know, when I go to China''--and I think Ambassador Locke is a
good man. Let the record show he said, ``I'm not going to let
you down.''
So if I can say to Ambassador Locke, we had four
distinguished witnesses before this Commission and they
recommended that you, Mr. Ambassador, do X, Y, and Z, that
would be helpful. So if you all could just draft something to
Mr. Smith and then we will get it to the Ambassador to say we
had the four of you here, and they thought that if you do this,
because he's getting very good coverage--good coverage and bad
coverage, showing him with his backpack and buying ice cream,
and they're sort of confused by him. If we give him this
opportunity and we set a standard, then I think we can give
these to the Ambassador to say these four distinguished
witnesses before this Commission recommended this, and I
respectfully request that you do these things. Thank you very
much.
Mr. Smith, thank you for the hearing. It's a great hearing.
Representative Smith. Li Xiaorong, you mentioned a double
standard. Would the other three witnesses agree that there has
been a double standard of the United States toward China,
especially as it relates to places like Libya, as you pointed
out, Iran?
Mr. Gershman. You know, I think it's more than a double
standard. The Arab Spring has so fixated American consciousness
on the Middle East that people are just not looking anywhere
else right now, at least not sufficiently. That's why I think
this hearing is so really incredibly important.
Congressman Wolf, you know, when you asked, ``Does Liu
know, will he know? '' My answer is, ``They knew in the Gulag
in the old days.'' If they could know in the Gulag, at a time
when half the population is connected to the Internet in China,
it's inconceivable to me that Liu doesn't know. I would only
say, in terms of what can be done, Saturday is the anniversary
of the Prize.
Representative Smith. That's why we're having the hearing.
Mr. Gershman. It would be wonderful, even if Ambassador
Locke just issued a statement in China, just a simple
statement, congratulating Liu Xiaobo on the anniversary of the
award and expressing concern about his freedom. I think that
would be extraordinary, if that could be done on Saturday.
Ms. Li. Such gestures do make rounds in China among friends
and the general population. I would mention the former
Ambassador, John Huntsman, who appeared in Wangfujing on the
day of the ``Jasmine Revolution'' protest in Beijing, and all
such gestures do get noticed.
Representative Smith. Dr. Link?
Mr. Link. I agree that there has been a double standard. I
like Mr. Gershman's suggestion immensely of, on the
anniversary, our Ambassador making a statement. In general,
again, if I wasn't clear before, I am in favor of public
statements. It's a mistake to say behind closed doors we're
going to say this privately and expect that it's going to do
anything.
Representative Smith. So why not President Obama in
addition to our Ambassador?
Mr. Link. Of course. Of course. That would be even better.
Mr. Gershman. Yes, especially because of the Nobel
connection.
Mr. Link. Yes.
Ms. Botsford Fraser. I think all Western democracies have
suffered from the curse of the double standard in terms of
China and also in terms of other emerging democracies as well.
I think it's our job to make sure that they're called to
account for that double standard. It's not fair, and I think
the standard that should be applied is, what are the needs and
wishes of the people of China, not the government of China, and
that should be the standard by which we measure our actions and
our statements.
Representative Smith. Thank you.
Let me thank our witnesses. Anything you want to add before
we go to the second panel?
[No response].
Representative Smith. Thank you so much for your
leadership. Please be sure to sign the picture, because we will
give it to him when he is free.
I'd like to now move to panel number two, beginning with
Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed. She is the founder of
that organization, an NGO focused on raising awareness of human
rights issues in China, especially as it relates to coercive
population control, forced abortion, forced sterilization,
gendercide, and the missing girls who have simply been
eliminated, exterminated, because they happen to be female.
Chai was a student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square
movement. She was on the government's 21 Most Wanted Students
list. She escaped from China in 1990 and became a successful
businesswoman. She has been previously nominated on two
occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize and she just completed and
published her memoir, ``A Heart for Freedom,'' just a few
months ago.
We'll then hear from Harry Wu, executive director of the
Laogai Research Foundation. It's a foundation established in
1992 to gather information on, and raise public awareness of,
the Chinese laogai system. Harry Wu spent almost 20 years in
the infamous Gulag system known as the laogai in China, and
years ago--almost 20 years ago I held the first hearing ever on
survivors of the laogai. We had six individuals: Catherine Ho,
Paul Dingiatsu, of course the great Harry Wu, and they told us
what actually went on in those concentration camps.
One of those who testified, Paul Dingiatsu, a Buddhist
monk, brought some of the implements of torture routinely
employed against people in the laogai and the security
downstairs wouldn't even let him in the building. We had to go
and escort him. When he held up the cattle prod and said this
is what the Chinese Secret Police use against people in the
laogai, you would have heard a pin drop in this hearing room.
So Harry, thank you for your tremendous work.
Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women's Rights Without
Frontiers. Reggie is a lawyer and president of the Women's
Rights Without Frontiers, a nonpartisan international coalition
opposed to coercive population control and sex slavery in
China, as well as an expert on China's one-child-per-couple
policy, and she has been arguing very passionately for Chen
Guangcheng's release and will speak to that, and other issues
during her testimony.
And then fourth, Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid
Association. He was a leader in the 1989 student democracy
movement, again, in Tiananmen Square, along with Chai Ling. He
later became a house church pastor and founder, along with his
wife. After being persecuted for their work, after being
incarcerated for their work, they escaped to the United States
and in 2002 founded ChinaAid and monitors and reports on
religious freedom in the People's Republic of China.
I know she has to leave, but Sophie Richardson from Human
Rights Watch, I want to thank her for her leadership. She will
be submitting testimony for today and was in Oslo, as so many
of us, during that very uplifting but heartbreaking ceremony
when we all witnessed the empty chair.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Richardson appears in the
appendix.]
Representative Smith. Ms. Chai?
STATEMENT OF CHAI LING, FOUNDER, ALL GIRLS ALLOWED
Ms. Chai. Well, Chairman Smith and Ranking Members of the
Commission, thank you for hosting this important hearing to
give honor, respect, and much-needed attention to Mr. Liu
Xiaobo. His bravery and perseverance continue to set an example
for all of us when we consider our Nation's relationship with
China.
My experience with Liu Xiaobo began at Tiananmen Square in
1989. From the beginning, we approached the movement with
different strategies and ideas toward a common goal to request
dialogue with the Chinese Government to urge peaceful reforms.
However, on the night of the massacre we reached very powerful
unity. After that, I went through 10 months in hiding until I
was able to reach America. Unfortunately, Liu Xiaobo was sent
to prison in China, where he still is today.
Charter 08 and China's three reforms are necessary for
China's democracy and freedom. During the 1989 movement, the
leader Hu Yaobong--who led the movement--died. He had advocated
for three reforms, economic, political, and spiritual reform.
Zhao Ziyang, the premier, who was eventually sentenced to
house imprisonment for his disagreement with Deng Xiaoping,
advocated for two reforms, political and economic. But Deng
Xiaoping only wanted one, economic reform, and that's what
China has today. So Charter 08 is the effort of advocating for
political reform in China.
Today, of the 303 initial signers who signed the first
round of Charter 08, 156 of them have suffered severe
persecution, such as prison sentences, arrest, house arrest,
and forced disappearances on sensitive dates such as the Nobel
Peace Prize award ceremony. It is really important and
necessary to also remember them as well.
Charter 08 advocated for many rights, including freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, and property rights for average
Chinese people. Today, China has used its corruption and power
and authority and has taken many average, helpless people's
properties, millions of those.
We recently were informed of a case of this lady, her name
is Nie Lina. I wanted to point out her situation because it's
urgent, and she was detained in April due to her petition for a
loss of housing. The government punished her by sentencing her
to a forced abortion, and here we see the picture of her being
strapped down, going through detainment. So we sent out an
urgent prayer request, and 48 hours later that prayer was
answered and she was set free. So five months later she was
able to give birth to her baby.
Unfortunately, this saga continues. This brave woman, a new
mother, returned to petition again, and she was imprisoned
again. Yesterday morning our staff and partner, Zhang Jing, got
an urgent call from her. She and her three-month-old infant and
her 70-year-old mother are being detained in a black jail
somewhere in Beijing.
For more than 10 days, she was given very little nutrition,
so she didn't have enough milk to feed her baby. So we do want
to use this opportunity to advocate for her immediate release,
her, her baby, and her mother.
So this is just one of many cases. We cannot fight in every
single case, but we can advocate for freedom and justice by a
much more broad approach, looking at U.S.-China policy. When we
talked last year, when five Nobel Peace Prize committee members
were able to take a stand, through their enormous courage to
take on the whole of China, it inspired the rest of the world.
It was awesome to see, Chairman Smith, you and Nancy
Pelosi, then-House Speaker, Mr. Gershman, Professor Perry Link,
all there. It was a beautiful reunion. However, the lack of the
presence of President Obama was heartbreaking for many of us,
and this symbolizes a consistent problem between U.S.-China
policy. It's a lack of leadership, lack of conviction, lack of
moral authority.
Particularly, a statement like that, such that we cannot
let human rights interfere with our economic crisis and
security issues in dealing with China, that has become the root
cause for the deterioration of China's human rights conditions
and the decline of America.
Two years ago, I was invited to know Jesus Christ, so today
I can no longer talk about China's situation without mentioning
God. So that is also the reality in China, that a third of the
Chinese Tiananmen generation has come to know Jesus, and has
been given renewed courage and determination to fight for
freedom and democracy for China.
I do want to come to Scripture to see what should be the
basis of the U.S.-China relationship. The God who founded
America through the forefathers is clearly a God who loves
justice, hates robbery, and iniquity. He's a God who gave the
following decree: Curse the man who withholds justice from the
aliens, the fatherless, and the widow.
So when we uphold justice to do what God requires us to do,
to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord our
God, there are severe consequences, as the Bible clearly lists.
You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
As we know today, America is paying 42 cents of interest on
every dollar we spent as a government. The following picture
serves as a chilling reminder to start doing right. It is said,
``A people that you do not know will eat what your land and
labor produce. You will have nothing but cruel oppression all
your days. The sights you see will drive you mad.'' It
continues, ``He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to
him. He shall be the head and you shall be the tail.'' In many
ways this reminds us of the current economic and debt situation
we have in China.
I know my time is running out. I would like to be able to
finish the rest of the story later in the question and answer
time. I would like to request that all the information we
provide, including the many names of the Chinese people who are
in detention, our report on the one-child policy, and our urge
to have H.R. 2121 to be passed, all that information to be
included in this hearing record.
Representative Smith. Without objection, so ordered. And
you also have the names of the people with Ms. Nie Lina?
Ms. Chai. Nie Lina. Yes. I forgot to mention that. Yes.
Appendix 1 is the names of the officials who are responsible
for Nie Lina's detention.
Representative Smith. I appreciate that. It's amazing that
you have that list.
Ms. Chai. Yes. We'd like to include them in the record and
ask Ambassador Locke to bar them and their family members from
entering this country. That would send a very strong message.
Representative Smith. I appreciate that. Thank you.
Ms. Chai. Yes. Thank you.
Representative Smith. Thank you, Chai Ling.
Harry Wu?
[The prepared statement of Ms. Chai appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HARRY WU, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE LAOGAI RESEARCH
FOUNDATION AND LAOGAI MUSEUM
Mr. Wu. I wish my testimony could become part of the record
of this hearing.
Additionally, I want to make four points. The first point
is, it has been one year since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize, and now he's still in the jail. In 1960, I, too,
was put into the Chinese laogai camps because of my ideas. I
was there 19 years. But 50 years later, the Chinese regime has
not changed how it handles dissidents' opinions.
Liu Xiaobo has sent over 260 articles to our Web site,
Observe China. We published it. But Liu Xiaobo's articles did
not get published inside China. But the Chinese Government
picked three of these articles in the verdict--the three
articles are: No. 1, ``Can It Be That the Chinese People
Deserve Only Party-led Democracy? ''; No. 2, ``The Many Aspects
of CPC's Dictatorship''; and No. 3, ``Changing the Regime by
Changing the Society.'' This is the so-called crime, ``intent
to subvert the government.'' Unfortunately, inside, the people
cannot read these articles, but they try to.
Point number two: last year I was in Oslo. I was surprised
to see a message from John Chambers, the CEO of the Cisco
Systems. He noted that Cisco has been a sponsor of the Nobel
Peace Prize Concert since 1999, and that ``Cisco is working to
help individuals, companies, and countries to use the Internet
to collaborate, educate, empower, and further the ideas and
innovation inspired by Alfred Nobel and his legacy.''
But we do know, in the last decade, Cisco cooperated with
Chinese security systems very well. They signed a number of
contracts with the security systems to upgrade their military,
upgrade their Internet systems. So today, the Chinese Internet
system very well protects their market. It's called the Golden
Shield Project.
Number three: We published two Chinese-language Liu Xiaobo
books. Unfortunately, today there's only two Chinese versions,
but we will soon publish an English version and it's only
written by Liu Xiaobo. We sold about 2,000 copies of these
Chinese versions. We collected more than US$16,000. But we
cannot send the money back to Liu Xiaobo. Even from 2006 until
today, every month we financially supported Liu Xiaobo. But in
February 2011, we had to stop because Liu Xia, his wife, also
disappeared.
But I have a photo here. This is the so-called Jinzhou
Prison. But, so far as I know, Liu Xiaobo was not in this
prison. Just as you know, in 1995 when the Chinese Government
arrested me, they put me in a retirement center. When the
American consulate came to visit me, interview me, they removed
me to the Wuhan No. 1 Detention Center. Supposedly, Liu Xiaobo
is in the Jinzhou Prison, this is not the truth. He is in a
secret location.
The last issue, I want to remind you, we should not talk
about ``political reform'' because this is telling the Chinese
Communist Party that he is not forgotten, that his vision of a
better future will not be quietly fading away. Is there any
Communist Party today--since 1917 until today, is there any of
them that can be reformed? No. Not any Communist Party can be
reformed.
You remember the Polish leaders, the East German leaders
talking about reform. But since Deng Xiaoping talked about
political reform, what's going on? I was there in the prison
camp 50 years ago, and Liu Xiaobo is there again. I want to
remind the people here, today at this hearing, some people said
the Internet will be open as soon as possible. And some people
say the Internet is going to win.
Let me remind you of a story. Thirty years earlier in 1980,
I was in China. I heard an American entrepreneur. He said, we
want to help China--only help the Chinese produce the color TV
for each family to have a color TV. I thought this was
wonderful because at the time only a few families had black-
and-white, small TVs--televisions. If everybody had a color TV,
that means the communication, the media will be free. But today
you know the Chinese, almost every family has a color TV, but
the media is entirely controlled by the Communists.
Today China has more than 300 million Internet users, but
Liu Xiaobo's articles only can be published outside. If the
inside people want to see it, you have to cross over the
firewall. Don't expect that the Internet can be free while the
Chinese Communists are still over there. Thank you.
Representative Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Wu.
I would just note at this point that tomorrow I will be
introducing the Global Online Freedom Act and its new,
enhanced, beefed-up version of a bill that I had introduced a
couple of years ago. It will require disclosure to the
Securities and Exchange Commission of all U.S.-listed
corporations, and that would include Chinese corporations like
Baidu and others.
Light is a great disinfectant. Hopefully that will shine a
bright light on what they are doing, or not doing. Second, it
also has a regimen of export controls, a modest attempt to try
to open up the Internet and similar technologies in China.
Thank you, Mr. Wu.
Ms. Littlejohn?
STATEMENT OF REGGIE LITTLEJOHN, PRESIDENT, WOMEN'S RIGHTS
WITHOUT FRONTIERS
Ms. Littlejohn. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the
Commission. It is a humbling opportunity to testify on behalf
of one of the most courageous individuals not only in China,
but in the entire world, the blind self-taught lawyer, Chen
Guangcheng.
I begin by commending the Chairman, Congressman Christopher
Smith, for your recent attempt to visit Chen Guangcheng and
your tireless efforts to raise the visibility of his case and
other cases. Your efforts are having an impact.
Chen Guangcheng had helped farmers and the disabled, but he
was arrested in 2006 for helping to expose the Chinese
Communist Government's massive and systematic use of forced
abortion and involuntary sterilization to enforce its one-child
policy in Linyi City, as opposed to Linyi county, in 2005.
Time Magazine named him one of 2006's Top 100 People Who
Shape Our World, and he was given the 2007 Magsaysay Award
known as Asia's Nobel Prize.
Simultaneous with this testimony I'm submitting a report
from Chen Guangcheng's 2005 investigation team. This team was
investigating coercive family planning in Linyi in 2005, and
this report, which contains extensive witness statements from
various people who have experienced untold atrocities, was
drafted by, himself a celebrated lawyer, Teng Biao.
So this report basically contains like a slice of life, a
snapshot of Chen's investigative team and the kinds of
atrocities they were finding right prior to his imprisonment.
In this report are detailed accounts of the following: A woman
forcibly aborted and sterilized at seven months following the
detention of 22 of her relatives; villagers sleeping in fields
to evade family planning officials; a family planning official
who broke three brooms over the head of an elderly man because
his daughter was not home when they came to grab her for forced
sterilization; family planning officials who forced a
grandmother and her brother to beat each other; the use of
quota systems and the practice of implication; the detention,
fining, and torture of the extended family of so-called one-
child-policy violators; the institution of something that he
called the Family Planning Learning Class in which extended
family members are detained and tortured, and then charged a
fee, which they called tuition; the account of a farmer who
committed suicide because his family and his neighbors were
detained and tortured because his son had had an extra child;
and then there is a report here of the harassment of Chen
Guangcheng and his team as they were trying to document these
cases.
The Chen Guangcheng report makes this clear, that the
spirit of the Cultural Revolution lives on in China's family
planning death machine. Women's Rights Without Frontiers has
chosen to release the names of the perpetrators of these crimes
against humanity so they may be held accountable before the
world under H.R. 2121.
This report was drafted in 2005, however, conditions have
not improved in Linyi since 2005. Earlier this year, family
planning officials stabbed a man to death, and a woman six
months pregnant recently died during a forced abortion in Lijin
county, also in Shandong Province.
As the Chairman has indicated, for exposing these
horrendous crimes against humanity, Chen Guangcheng was jailed,
tortured, denied medical treatment. For more than four years
he's now languishing under house arrest. Foreign journalists
have been forcibly denied access to him and lawyers who try to
help Chen Guangcheng have been beaten and detained.
I speak specifically of Jiang Tianyong, who I testified
with in 2009, and Teng Biao. In February they were both
detained for more than 60 days. This fall, leading up to Chen
Guangcheng's 40th birthday, people from all over China streamed
in to try to see him and try to visit him, and they were,
without exception, repelled by thugs at the crossroads of his
village.
Women's Rights Without Frontiers and the ChinaAid
Association are spearheading an international effort to free
Chen Guangcheng. Thus far, we have collected more than 6,400
signatures from 28 countries on our petition.
In early October, we received an unconfirmed report that
villagers had said that Chen Guangcheng had died. This was
after we had received a video that was released through
ChinaAid about the horrific conditions of Chen Guangcheng's
house arrest, and also a letter from his wife, Yuan Weijing,
saying that she was concerned that he might not survive because
of his medical condition.
However, even though the many visitors to Chen Guangcheng's
village have been repelled, Relativity Media was able to gain
access to Linyi in order to film the feature film comedy ``21
and Over.'' When challenged on its choice of Linyi out of the
thousands of possible locations in China and urged to apologize
for its lack of sensitivity to Chen Guangcheng and human
rights, Relatively Media issued a statement defending its
action. Women's Rights Without Frontiers has called for an
international boycott of the film ``21 and Over.''
Just this weekend, a source inside China contacted me and
gave me a credible report that Chen Guangcheng is alive, and in
fact that his condition has improved slightly. She attributes
this, the fact that he's alive and that his condition has
improved, to the fact that Chen's situation has ``gotten
exposed and gotten huge public attention,'' in her words.
So part of that public attention was the stream of
visitors. Part of it also was an international campaign called
the Sunglasses Campaign, which was a collaboration between
Women's Rights Without Frontiers in the West and the Dark
Glasses Campaign in the East. Other members of this panel have
talked about how effective political cartoonists are and the
person in China that is spearheading this campaign is the
political cartoonist, Crazy Crab.
You can see the image that he came up with there, which is
the image of Chen Guangcheng made up of the images of
supporters who have taken their sunglasses portraits and sent
them in to our Web sites from China and the United States,
representing visually the collaboration between China and the
United States that has been effective in helping Chen
Guangcheng.
We would also like to say that it would be very effective
for Ambassador Locke to attempt to visit Chen Guangcheng. The
Chinese Communist Party has attempted to silence Chen, but they
cannot silence the voices of millions in China crying for his
freedom. The report that Chen Guangcheng is alive and in
slightly improved condition should not be a reason to relax
efforts on his behalf. To the contrary, these efforts are
having an impact and should be intensified. Chen, we will not
stop until you are free.
Thank you.
Representative Smith. Thank you very much, Ms. Littlejohn,
for your very eloquent and very strong statement and for your
advocacy that has made a huge difference. Thank you so much.
Pastor Fu?
STATEMENT OF PASTOR BOB FU, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, CHINAAID
ASSOCIATION
Mr. Fu. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just one year ago, you and I were sitting at the Oslo City
Hall, witnessing that historic but sad moment of the empty
chair. One year later, the empty chair is still there. The fact
that human rights and the rule of law and religious freedom in
China have all seriously deteriorated in 2011 is already well-
known to all. So on the one-year anniversary of the awarding of
Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, it's very highly significant.
Based on our own incomplete statistics we know that about
100 lawyers, rights activists, and dissidents have been
disappeared, tortured, imprisoned, and even sentenced to prison
terms in the first 11 months of this year. From February to
July alone, more than 1,000 rights activists and dissidents
across the country, invited to ``drink tea,'' were being
threatened.
Although most of the freedom of religion measures that
Charter 08 calls for are guaranteed in Article 36 of China's
own Constitution, but in practice and in reality the
implementation falls far short.
Broad discrimination against and persecution of independent
religious groups and people of faith has been increasing in the
past 12 months. Just last week we received reports that at
least 11 Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
were detained, and 4 were placed under criminal detention. What
crime did they commit? They were accused of so-called engaging
in illegal religious activities because they were reading the
Koran in their own homes without permission.
Since April 10 of this year, numerous members of Beijing's
Shouwang Church, with over 1,000 members, an independent house
church, have experienced weekly detention, harassment, and
abuses for 35 weeks in a row. The entire church leadership has
been under house arrest without freedom of movement the entire
time.
Many believers have lost their jobs and have been evicted
from their rented apartments. Why? Again, it is because they
have been accused of engaging in illegal religious activities,
in their case by worshiping in a public space. Never mind that
they were forced to worship in an outdoor public arena because
the government forced the church out of its rental worship
place and made it impossible for it to move into its own
purchase of the facility.
In 1989, I was also participating with the students'
movement with the ideal that we want to reform the Communist
Party by urging the system to change and reform. Of course, it
ended with a massacre. I was very disappointed later on during
the interrogation time. Even some of my fellow comrades
betrayed me by telling lies in order to show their loyalty to
the Communist Party.
So I went from disappointment to disillusioned, and I was
thinking in despair to commit a suicide bomb campaign. I wanted
to kill my enemies and end my own life. But it was at that time
that I found my faith in Jesus Christ, and later on became a
member of the house church and engaged in the religious freedom
defense movement.
Of course, ever since the fall of Communism in the former
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Chinese Communist Party
has acted as though mafia groups could be tolerated, but not
independent religious believers. The treatment of house church
Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, and
Tibetan Buddhists has been far worse than other so-called
unstable social elements. Torture and brainwashing with drugs
has been used to achieve what the authorities called
transforming the mind-set of these believers.
In terms of recommendations, I want to----
Representative Smith. Mr. Fu, if you could just suspend for
one second.
Mr. Fu. Yes.
Representative Smith. I would ask you to complete your
statement. I would ask if our distinguished witnesses would
mind waiting for about 15 minutes or less. There's three votes
on the floor and there's about a minute and a half left on the
first.
Mr. Fu. Yes. Yes.
Representative Smith. Then we'll reconvene. But we'll take
a brief respite and then come back.
Mr. Fu. Thank you.
Representative Smith. So if you could just hold that, then
we'll come back to it.
Mr. Fu. Sure.
[Whereupon, at 3:54 p.m. the hearing was recessed.]
after recess [4:28 p.m.]
Representative Smith. The Commission will resume its
sitting. I'd like to return to Pastor Bob Fu to complete his
statement.
Mr. Fu. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
In terms of recommendations, I want to point to two things.
First, I think the U.S. Government should make a very
consistent, coherent human rights policy and all the--you know,
from the top down, and every delegation, from trade to
intellectual property, to other delegations to China to have a
human rights agenda.
Second, I think Congress, like, Mr. Chairman, you have
campaigned for the Vietnamese, you know, the Human Rights Law
Act, to have the State Department and the administration to
report to Congress about the improvement or the procedures the
administration has taken on the human rights record in Vietnam.
I think the same standards should apply to China, too.
By doing so, I think with a consistent and coherent foreign
policy on human rights, I think it will produce results.
Remember, just a few weeks ago on November 3, Feng Xia, the
wife of one of China's most prominent Internet freedom
democracists, Mr. Ding Mao, was sitting right behind me. She
quit her job and came here just to explain her husband's
innocence and tried to explain to the international community
and asked for help.
It was this Committee, including, Mr. Chairman, yourself,
that has taken action immediately. The chairwoman took a photo
with her and Congressman Wolf and Congressman Pitts immediately
wrote letters and made phone calls on that Friday to the State
Department, and it resulted, of course, on the Sunday when Ms.
Feng Xia arrived in her hometown airport in Chengdu the U.S.
Embassy sent an official and met with her and they had tea
together, and the next day, on Monday, she was driven to the
U.S. Consulate compound for a one-hour meeting. Happily, of
course, as you already know, last Friday her husband was
released after nearly 10 months in illegal detention.
Of course, he already served over eight years previously.
That's a very unusual release of Mr. Ding Mao that is a bright
spot, I think, that can be used as a good example, that
persistent diplomacy still works, even in the face of the
largest stronghold, the last stronghold of the Communist
country, China.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Fu appears in the appendix.]
Representative Smith. Thank you very much, Mr. Fu. Thank
you for that update, encouraging in what is otherwise a very
discouraging set of events that are occurring in China.
Let me just ask a couple of questions. First, starting with
the issue that I raised with the previous panel about double
standard, just so that the record is clear from this panel
whether or not you think the United States, our European
allies, other democracies around the world have, for reasons
that might be economic or otherwise engaged in a double
standard when it comes to China.
It seems to me that in countries like Burma, where there
are not huge economic interests, it's always that much easier
for the United States to be very aggressively promoting the
human rights agenda. Is there a double standard?
Harry Wu?
Mr. Wu. Well, I was complained to by Cuban dissidents
because the Cubans--even their country's president Fidel
Castro--cannot obtain an American visa. But with the Chinese
president, it's not only the visa, but he can become the White
House's honored guest. So this is a double standard. China's
the only country, with the so-called publish and control, to
only allow one child for each family.
It doesn't happen in Cuba, it didn't happen in Vietnam. But
did we really condemn this national policy? No. Okay. Roman
Catholicism, until today, is illegal inside China--but it is a
kind of freedom in Cuba. But what did we do? We did nothing,
okay? And China executed many people, and organ transplants--
this is very unique. It only happens in China. But I suppose
because China is a very large country, so we just forget about
it. Let's talk about the market, talk about economy, the labor
force. It's not really talking about human rights at all.
Ms. Littlejohn. If I might respond, Mr. Chairman. I think
that the double standard that is applied between China and the
United States was very evidence in Vice President Biden's
statement that he made when he was in China, that he fully
understands, but does not second guess, China's one-child
policy.
So in other words, he fully understands that China's one-
child policy is enforced through forced abortion, forced
sterilization, and infanticide. He fully understands that girls
are selectively aborted. He fully understands that this
gendercide has caused a situation where there are 37 million
more men than women in China today.
He fully understands that this gender disparity is driving
human trafficking in sexual slavery in China. He fully
understands that the oppression of women, because of the one-
child policy, is a factor in the fact that China has the
highest female suicide rate of any country in the world, and
yet he's not second-guessing it.
What does that mean? If it's not okay in the United States
it's not okay in China either, and I just think that, again,
that statement really undermined the moral credibility of the
United States on the world international scene.
Mr. Fu. Yes, Mr. Chairman. There's definitely a double
standard over there. As a former prisoner born and educated in
China, I wish, when President Obama made his speeches during
the Jasmine Revolution time, during the crisis with Libya,
these names of Libya and Tunisia could be replaced with China
and look at the standards.
I mean, the horrifying--you know, from gendercide to the
torturing and the forced disappearance of prisoners. I think it
all makes sense, I mean, that there is a double standard and
that's why we advocate for a coherent, consistent, and
persistent foreign policy on human rights.
Ms. Chai. Yes, I do want to agree with all the three
witnesses, that the U.S.-China relationship definitely has a
double standard, double moral standards. I would like to focus
to help the American Government establish its singular standard
by seeking justice as a foundation of its foreign policy.
Recently we visited Rome, and in preparation to visit Rome we
studied Pope Benedict XVI's letter on September 22, 2011, to
Germany's Lower House of Parliament and I found that message
really enlightening and would like to share if that's okay.
He said, ``Allow me to begin my reflections on the
foundation for law with a brief story from the sacred
Scripture. In the first book of the Kings it is recounted that
God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the
throne to make a request. What would a young ruler ask for at
this important moment? Success? Wealth? Long life? Destruction
of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he
asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God's people
and discern between good and evil.'' This is 1 Kings 3:9.
``Through this story the Bible wants to tell us what should
ultimately matter for a politician.'' I would really like
President Obama to listen to this and the future presidents or
the leaders in the U.S. Congress as well.
``His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work
as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material
gain''--which is 100 percent opposite from what our Nation has
been doing in the past 22 years.
``Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has
to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace.
Naturally, a politician will seek success, without which he
would have no opportunity for effective political action at
all. Yet, success is subordinated to the criteria of justice,
to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of
what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open
up the path towards falsification of what is right towards the
destruction of justice.''
`` `Without justice, what else is the state but a great
band of robbers? ' as St. Augustine once said.'' Our America is
very much like a band of robbers in U.S.-China policy. We
should check the record, we should check the history and we
should figure out what is the right thing to do and move
forward.
I want to go back to the Pope's words again: ``We Germans
know from our own experience that these words are no empty
specter. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how
power opposed right and crushed it, so that the state became an
instrument for destroying right--a highly organized band of
robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it
to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against
the dominion of wrong is, and remains, the fundamental task for
the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired
previously inconceivable power, this task takes particular
urgency.''
``Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He
can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their
humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern
between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may
appear right? Even now Solomon's request remains the decisive
issue facing politicians and politics today.''
As the Pope pointed out correctly, the foundation of a
listening heart is to seek justice, not success. Today we need
to have a listening heart to confront injustice in China. As
Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ``Injustice anywhere is injustice
everywhere.'' So that's my recommendation.
Representative Smith. I appreciate that. Very profound
words and sentiments.
Let me ask, with regard to the whole sense of
accountability, when Liu Xiaobo--when the announcement was made
that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize we all rejoiced. It was
like, maybe this is a tipping point moment. Maybe the Chinese
Government will finally, at long last, realize at least some of
the errors and some of the egregious behavior that they're
engaged in.
Yet, they went precisely in the opposite direction, calling
the Nobel Peace Prize award obscene, attacking the Norwegian
Government and all other governments that were in accord with
this very fine selection, and I am very worried, frankly, that
there has been, at least in some quarters, silence over the
last year with regard to Liu Xiaobo.
I mentioned earlier President Obama's silence, at least
public silence, when his jailer, Liu Xiaobo's jailer, was right
here in town and we failed to raise the question of a Nobel
Peace Prize winner being incarcerated and his wife, de facto,
being under house arrest. It was an opportunity lost.
Now, if the lesson learned from the countries, including
the United States, is to go silent, we will only be, perhaps
unwittingly, but certainly enabling the dictatorship to be even
more grievous in its mistreatment of people. I'm wondering what
you would recommend that we do to be very clear, transparent,
strong. Wei Jingsheng once said, and I know Harry Wu agrees
with this, that when we're quiet they beat people more in the
prison, in the laogai. It seems to me that there has been some
silence in some quarters.
Saturday certainly is a day that everyone, every government
leader including the President and Ambassador Locke, as was
recommended previously by Carl Gershman, put out a very clear
statement. We need those statements everywhere so the Chinese
Government does not take the wrong sense of what is either fear
or indifference or looking the other way.
We need to ratchet up, redouble our efforts, as Ms. Li said
in her testimony earlier. Your views on that? It seems to me we
have to do much more, because over the last year, other than
present company excluded, we seem to have done little or
nothing.
Ms. Littlejohn?
Ms. Littlejohn. Well, Mr. Chairman, I would completely
agree with your statement. I believe that one of the reasons,
perhaps the primary reason that Chen Guangcheng is alive and
that they have even improved slightly his condition, is because
so much attention has been focused on his case, both inside of
China and outside of China.
The brave people inside of China who have been visiting
him, even though they know they're going to be beaten and
detained, and then the people outside of China, the Sunglasses
Campaign, your own efforts to go and visit him, have all
contributed to the fact that he is alive and not dead, and also
that his situation has improved.
Now, as I'm sure you know, there was a piece that was
written in the New York Times recently saying that perhaps we
should mute ourselves, because if the international community
puts too much pressure on China then China will not accede
because they don't want to be seen to be bending to
international pressure.
I completely disagree with that, and I think that the
people on this panel would disagree with that approach, that
consistently, when pressure is applied, conditions improve.
When people are quiet, when we try to kowtow to the Chinese
Communist Party, then they just use that as a license to
descend farther and farther and farther into atrocities.
Chen Guangcheng himself urged people to take a stand. In
the video that was released he said what we need to do is to
overcome terror and to expose their egregious acts that lack
any sense of conscience. He, himself, has urged people within
China and the international community to take a stand against
the atrocities in China, and I can think of no better approach
than the one that is espoused by Chen Guangcheng.
Representative Smith. Thank you.
Mr. Fu. I think Harry would agree with me on this point,
but I echo what you said, to speak publicly and loudly and
repeatedly. I think it is very important. Many times, even
myself, when I know a cell phone number of the Public Security
Chief who detained prisoners, house church leaders, I just call
them and let them know my name, and in several cases by the
next day they were released.
I think the Chinese Government, the leaders know that this
Congress, the administration officials, from the President, the
Cabinet members, they do care. But raising the names of Liu
Xiaobo, Liu Xia, on every occasion when they meet with Chinese
officials, I think that will make a difference.
Representative Smith. Okay. With regard to accountability,
I want to thank Chai Ling for--even in the case of Nie Lina--
listing the names of people that need to be held to account. It
seems to me that 31 years of doing human rights work, even the
most brutal dictator and dictatorship fears an ultimate
accounting for the atrocities they've committed. We saw it with
Milosevic, we saw it with the people in the former Yugoslavia,
including Karadzic and Maladic, all of whom resisted with every
fiber of their being, being held to account.
We saw it with Charles Taylor and Joseph Kony, who was
still on the loose with the so-called Lord's Resistance Army,
naming people, ICC [International Criminal Court] indictments,
and certainly the barest minimum, denying a visa to people who
have committed atrocities, which H.R. 2121 would do, as you
pointed out, Ms. Chai, in your statement.
But I think the more chronicling of perpetrators is
accomplished by the Chinese themselves and certainly when
there's a penalty phase, it does sharpen the mind no matter
where you are, including in a dictatorship. So, Chai, did you
want to respond to that?
Ms. Chai. I'd love to add to that, yes. So, thank you so
much for confirming. We're still going to move forward to push
for--and advocate for the U.S. Congress to pass H.R. 2121. We
believe that's a very effective way to influence, deter, and
change the behaviors of human rights abusers in China.
Recently, our attention was brought to this man, Li Qun,
who came to the United States in 2000. He was given a visa to
study at the University of New Haven. He interned at the
mayor's office, and went back to Linyi. He is largely
responsible for Chen Guangcheng's imprisonment and torture, and
is largely responsible for implementing the 130,000 forced
abortions and forced sterilizations.
So that just draws attention to say, one, I absolutely
agree with Reggie Littlejohn and Bob Fu's statement that we
need to talk. We need to speak more, rather than be silent, not
just at the government level, but at all levels.
Every time we meet with a Chinese official, every time we
meet with Chinese visitors, we should tell them about the
values of America, talk to them about forced abortions, forced
sterilizations, talk about ending gendercide. That would help
them open their eyes, open their mind, and change their heart.
Recently we did a little bit of investigation when we
discovered about Li Qun's appearance in America. Supposedly his
record in America is short, but really boasts of his record
being Chinese Government. Now not only is he going to be
demoted, he was promoted to potentially be a Party leader in
charge of the entire Shangdong Province, and he's posted his
resume for his experience in America.
So we see China is sending loads of these bureaucrats,
cadres of officials to America, for short-term, six-month
business administration and training. Again, the business
administration and training does not talk about human rights,
morality, values.
When they go back, they say we learned how to govern our
country better from America, and by the way, they emphasize, to
further oppress their people. That's not what America is all
about and not what it should be all about. Thank you.
Ms. Littlejohn. Mr. Chairman, I'd like to bring up another
aspect of accountability, which is not simply the
accountability of the human rights atrocities and perpetrators
in China, but also corporate responsibility of people who are
investing in China. For example, I brought up the example in my
testimony of Relativity Media.
Relativity Media is a huge film company. They have many
films that have won multiple Academy Awards. They really touted
the fact that they had this big partnership with Chinese
Communist Party officials in Linyi county to film in Linyi
county, so that they were filming this comedy about a young man
who goes wild on his 21st birthday right next to where Chen
Guangcheng is languishing near death under house arrest.
I believe that companies need to exercise social
responsibility and a conscience for human rights and do their
due diligence in terms of figuring out where they're doing
business and with whom they are doing business, because it is
likely that some of the same officials that were forging this
deal with Relativity Media are also the ones who are signing
off on the orders to torture Chen Guangcheng. I personally hope
that the film ``21 and Over'' that they filmed in Linyi is
going to be a huge commercial failure and would urge people to
boycott that film.
Mr. Fu. Just one more point about Internet freedom. I
completely agree with what Harry just mentioned about the Cisco
problem, or almost pandemic. I think the Cisco CEO should be
subpoenaed to come here to testify on what they have been doing
to nurture the dictatorship.
I think the State Department should have an all-out
campaign with the congressional appropriation funding to build
software to break the so-called Great Firewall. I think that
will, itself, serve as a real instrumental door for freedom in
China.
Representative Smith. The Chair recognizes Anna Brettell,
who is our senior staffer who helped do a great deal of work on
this particular hearing, and I want to thank her for that.
Anna?
Ms. Brettell. Thank you, Congressman. Thank you all for
coming here, from quite far distances, some of you.
I have just one question. I'm curious about the lawyers
that were affected by the 2011 crackdown. Did their experiences
affect their work or the way that they approach legal cases?
Are they still taking human rights cases?
Mr. Fu. Some of the lawyers that we have been working with
were totally silenced. They were silenced because of the
tremendous torture they experienced and with the continuous
threats they faced, even up to now. So they're not able to take
up cases or speak up even now. But some are regrouping.
For instance, with lawyer--attorney Jiang Tianyong, who
bravely received interviews and spoke up. Because, he said, he
would go crazy if he did not speak up about the torment he had
experienced during his 60 days of forced disappearance.
I still see hope that some other human rights lawyers that
we have been working with are still actively taking up cases,
so these are the three different situations for human rights
lawyers.
Ms. Chai. Anna, I'd like to add that, regarding your
question, thank you again for putting this great hearing
together. I know you worked really hard. I think at one of the
hearings we shared about Ma Jihong's murder. She was seven
months pregnant with her second baby. She was forced, dragged
into a forced abortion clinic, and by 9 o'clock p.m. she was
gone, together with her seven-month-old baby.
The human rights attorneys we are working with inside
China, are able to take this case, to file a lawsuit against
the abusers. So despite the fact that some human rights lawyers
are being silenced, many more are moving forward with
determination and courage to seek justice for the helpless
people.
Ms. Littlejohn. I'd like to add that this Arab Spring
crackdown, I believe, was more or less an excuse or pretext for
cracking down on lawyers. Many of these lawyers had already
experienced tremendous oppression and abuse.
I'll never forget testifying with Jiang Tianyong in 2009 at
the one-child policy hearing, and then we gathered in, Mr.
Chairman, your office afterward. And as we were leaving, Jiang
Tianyong said, ``If anything happens to my wife and my child,
would you please help me? '' And we all immediately prayed for
him, but then when he got back to China, in fact, very shortly
thereafter, he was dragged off right in front of his daughter
and detained and beaten. We had a press conference for him.
These people have unbelievable courage.
As an attorney in the United States, I look at the human
rights attorneys in China with awe, but also at the Chinese
Communist Party and the way that they are targeting human
rights attorneys for torture, for forced disappearance. I
believe that they are deliberately turning people who were the
defenders of victims of human rights atrocities into victims
themselves and trying to disable the entire human rights legal
community in the nation of China.
Representative Smith. Thank you very much for that answer.
Is there anything you would like to add as we close this
hearing? Do you have any realistic expectation that Liu Xiaobo
will be free in the near term?
Ms. Chai. Yes, I do.
Mr. Fu. We pray for his release.
Ms. Chai. I would love to. Can we?
Mr. Fu. Just one more appeal for understanding, since Dr.
Brettell mentioned about these lawyers. Many were seen as
silenced in the public square, but just like lawyer Tang
Jitian, for a lawyer being captured secretly and put in the so-
called Tiger Bench naked, having water poured on them with high
volume, and electricity, lying for 24 hours in a closed-door
room for days and weeks--like Dr. Teng Biao, a legal scholar
and professor of law who was both handcuffed and shackled and
was chained in a torture chair for a couple of months. For
getting food he has to do this. Using the toilet room, he has
to jump. This is not just one day or one week, it's for a few
months, with a death threat to his own family members.
So I just want to appeal for understanding. I think for
those who are not able to speak up so far, I think we have
experienced so much more than we had previously even thought.
Representative Smith. Thank you so very much for your
testimony, for your leadership, which has been extraordinary.
Chai, did you have something?
Ms. Chai. Yes, I'd like to.
Representative Smith. Oh, I'm sorry.
Ms. Chai. I'd love to. I just want to conclude that in the
past two years I experienced something very profoundly in
dealing with China, that when I see suffering and sadness, if I
start seeing it from God's perspective I see power and glory.
In the Bible, the Lazarus story, God allowed Lazarus to die and
then, even though He wept with him and Jesus, he was able to
bring him from death to life and to bring more glory to God. We
have such a strong sense that the freedom and democracy for
China is very near. I cherish this promise during Jesus' Sermon
on the Mount, saying ``Blessed are the poor in spirit for they
are the kingdom of God; blessed are those who mourn, for they
will be comforted; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit
the Earth; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they will be filled,'' and Liu Xiaobo is one
of those, ``blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown
mercy; blessed are those who are pure in heart, for they will
see God; blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called
the sons of God; blessed are those who are persecuted because
of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.'' We
have seen something very new and never used before, and that's
the power of prayer in dealing with China's human rights
situation. So I would like to invite anyone who is a believer
who wants to try that, and you can either raise a hand or just
be in agreement with me silently as we conclude this hearing in
a prayer. Would that be okay?
Dearest Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus, we just thank you for
this beautiful, amazing time to testify about the suffering in
China, and also your heart to seek justice and set people free.
Lord, I thank you for Chris Smith, for his 30 years of faithful
service to you. He's such an exemplary example and hero and
inspires all of us. Thank you for the new leadership brought by
Paul and many other courageous staff from the CECC.
Lord, we believe in your promise. We, today, proclaim
according to your Scripture, freedom for Liu Xiaobo and Chen
Guangcheng, Nie Lina, and the many others who suffer
imprisonment for pursuing righteousness, for there is no
imprisonment in the kingdom of Heaven. We proclaim comfort for
those who mourn under the one-child policy and the gendercide,
for the end is coming and they will be given the oil of
gladness instead of the spirit of despair.
We proclaim mercy and forgiveness for the Chinese leaders
and oppressors, for if they choose to be merciful then they
will be shown mercy. We proclaim riches and prosperity for the
486 million poor in China, for they will be given the
opportunity to inherit the Earth.
We proclaim righteousness for America's Government, for if
they truly hunger and thirst for righteousness, America will be
blessed as a Nation. It will be filled with everlasting joy.
Please join me and let this year be proclaimed to be the year
of the Lord's favor. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Representative Smith. Amen.
Ms. Chai. Thank you so much.
Representative Smith. Thank you.
The hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:01 p.m. the hearing was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of Perry Link
december 6, 2011
I am honored to be here and I salute the Commission for its wisdom
in holding this hearing.
Liu Xiaobo is one of those unusual people who can look at human
life from the broadest of perspectives and reason about it from first
principles. His keen intellect notices things that others also look at,
but do not see. It seems that hardly any topic in Chinese culture,
politics, or society evades his interest, and he can write with
analytic calm about upsetting things. One might expect such calm in a
recluse--a hermit poet, or a cloistered scholar--but in Liu Xiaobo it
comes in an activist. Time after time he has gone where he thinks he
should go, and has done what he thinks he should do, as if havoc,
danger, and the possibility of prison were simply not part of the
picture. He seems to move through life taking mental notes on what he
sees, hears, and reads, as well as on the inward responses that he
feels.
Fortunately for us, his readers, he also has a habit of writing
free from fear. Most Chinese writers today, including many of the best
ones, write with political caution in the backs of their minds and with
a shadow hovering over their fingers as they pass across a keyboard.
How should I couch things? What topics should I not touch? What
indirection should I use? Liu Xiaobo does none of this. What he thinks,
you get.
Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. For about two
decades, the prize committee in Oslo, Norway, had been considering
Chinese dissidents for the award, and in 2010, after Liu Xiaobo had
been sentenced to eleven years in prison for ``incitement of
subversion''--largely because of his advocacy of the human-rights
manifesto called Charter 08--he had come to emerge as the right choice.
Authorities in Beijing, furious at the committee's announcement on
October 8, 2010, did what they could to frustrate celebrations of it.
Police broke up parties of revelers in several Chinese cities. The
Chinese Foreign Ministry pressured world diplomats to stay away from
the Award Ceremony in Oslo on December 10. Dozens of Liu Xiaobo's
friends in China were barred from leaving the country lest they head
for Oslo. Liu Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia, although charged with nothing,
was held under tight house arrest. Liu himself remained in prison, and
none of his family members could travel to Oslo to collect the prize.
At the Award Ceremony, the prize medal, resting inside a small box, and
the prize certificate, in a folder that bore the initials ``LXB,'' were
placed on stage on an empty chair. Within hours authorities in Beijing
banned the phrase ``empty chair'' from the Chinese Internet.
Liu was the fifth Peace Laureate to fail to appear for the Award
Ceremony. In 1935, Carl von Ossietzky was held in a Nazi prison; in
1975, Andrei Sakharov was not allowed to leave the USSR; in 1983, Lech
Walesa feared he would be barred from reentering Poland if he went to
Oslo; and in 1991, Aung Sang Suu Kyi was under house arrest in Burma.
Each of the latter three prize-winners was able to send a family member
to Oslo. Only Ossietzky and Liu Xiaobo could do not even that.
Chinese people have always shown special reverence for Nobel
Prizes, in any field, and this fact has made Liu Xiaobo's Peace Prize
especially hard for the regime to swallow. Two people born in China
have won the Nobel Peace Prize--Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama. One is
in prison and the other in permanent exile. When China's rulers put on
a mask of imperturbability as they denounce these Nobel prizes, they
not only seek to deceive the world but, at a deeper level, are lying to
themselves. When they try to counter Liu Xiaobo's Nobel by inventing a
Confucius Peace Prize, and then give it to Vladimir Putin citing his
``iron fist'' in Chechnya, there is a sense in which we should not
blame them for the clownish effect, because it springs from an inner
panic that they themselves cannot control. Liu Xiaobo sits in prison,
in physical hardship. But in his moral core, there can be no doubt that
he has more peace than the men who persecute him.
Liu was born December 28, 1955, in the city of Changchun in
northeastern China. He was eleven years old when Mao Zedong closed his
school--along with nearly every other school in China--so that
youngsters could go into society to ``oppose revisionism,'' ``sweep
away freaks and monsters,'' and in other ways join in Mao's Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Liu and his parents spent 1969 to 1973
at a ``people's commune'' in Inner Mongolia. In retrospect Liu believes
that these years of upset, although a disaster for China as a whole,
had certain unintended benefits for him personally. His years of lost
schooling ``allowed me freedom,'' he recalls, from the mind-closing
processes of Maoist education; they gave him time to read books, both
approved and unapproved. Moreover, the pervasive cynicism and chaos in
the society around him taught him perhaps the most important lesson of
all: that he would have to think for himself. Where else, after all,
could he turn? In this general experience Liu resembles several others
of the most powerfully independent Chinese writers of his generation.
Hu Ping, Su Xiaokang, Zheng Yi, Bei Dao, Zhong Acheng, Jiang Qisheng,
and many others survived the Cultural Revolution by learning to rely on
their own minds, and for some this led to a questioning of the
political system as a whole. Mao had preached that ``rebellion is
justified,'' but this is hardly the way he thought it should happen.
Chinese universities began to reopen after Mao died in 1976, and in
1977 Liu Xiaobo went to Jilin University, in his home province, where
he earned a B.A. in Chinese literature in 1982. From there he went to
Beijing, to Beijing Normal University, where he continued to study
Chinese literature, receiving an M.A. in 1984 and a Ph.D. in 1988. His
Ph.D. dissertation, entitled ``Aesthetics and Human Freedom,'' was a
plea for liberation of the human spirit; it drew wide acclaim from both
his classmates and the most seasoned scholars at the university.
Beijing Normal invited him to stay on as a lecturer, and his classes
were highly popular with students.
Liu's articles and his presentations at conferences earned him a
reputation as an iconoclast even before he finished graduate school.
Known as the ``black horse'' of the late 1980s, seemingly no one
escaped his acerbic pen: Maoist writers like Hao Ran were no better
than hired guns, post-Mao literary stars like Wang Meng were but clever
equivocators, ``roots- seeking'' writers like Han Shaogong and Zheng Yi
made the mistake of thinking China had roots that were worth seeking,
and even speak-for-the-people heroes like Liu Binyan were too ready to
pin hopes on ``liberal-minded'' Communist leaders like Hu Yaobang (the
Party chair who was sacked in 1987). ``The Chinese love to look up to
the famous,'' Liu wrote, ``thereby saving themselves the trouble of
thinking.'' In graduate school Liu read widely in Western thought--
Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek, and
others--and began to use these thinkers to criticize Chinese cultural
patterns. He also came to admire modern paragons of nonviolent
resistance around the world--Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,
Vaclav Havel, and others. Although not formally a Christian, or a
believer in any religion, he began to think and write about Jesus
Christ.
Around the same time, he arrived at a view of the last two
centuries of Chinese history that saw the shock of Western imperialism
and technology as bringing ``the greatest changes in thousands of
years.'' Through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries,
China's struggles to respond to this shock cut ever deeper into China's
core. Reluctantly, Chinese thinking shifted from ``our technology is
not as good as other people's'' in the 1880s and early 1890s to ``our
political system is not as good as other people's'' after the defeat by
Japan in 1895 to ``our culture is not as good as other people's'' in
the May Fourth movement of the late 1910s. Then, under the pressure of
war, all of the ferment and struggle ended in a Communist victory in
1949, and this event, said Liu, ``plunged China into the abyss of
totalitarianism.'' Recent decades have been more hopeful for China, in
his view. Unrelenting pressure from below--from farmers, petitioners,
rights advocates, and, perhaps most important, hundreds of millions of
Internet users--has obliged the regime, gradually but inexorably, to
cede ever more space to civil society.
The late 1980s were a turning point in Liu's life both
intellectually and emotionally. He visited the University of Oslo in
1988, where he was surprised that European Sinologists did not speak
Chinese (they only read it) and was disappointed at how naive
Westerners were in accepting Chinese government language at face value.
Then he went to New York, to Columbia University, where he encountered
``critical theory'' and learned that its dominant strain, at least at
Columbia, was ``postcolonialism.'' People expected him, as a visitor
from China, to fit in by representing the ``the subaltern,'' by
resisting the ``discursive hegemony'' of ``the metropole,'' and so on.
Liu wondered why people in New York were telling him how it felt to be
Chinese. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Was ``postcolonialism''
itself a kind of intellectual colonialism? Liu wrote in May 1989 that
``no matter how strenuously Western intellectuals try to negate
colonial expansionism and the white man's sense of superiority, when
faced with other nations Westerners cannot help feeling superior. Even
when criticizing themselves, they become besotted with their own
courage and sincerity.'' His experience in New York led him to see his
erstwhile project of using Western values as yardsticks to measure
China as fundamentally flawed. No system of human thought, he
concluded, is equal to the challenges that the modern world faces: the
population explosion, the energy crisis, environmental imbalance,
nuclear disarmament, and ``the addiction to pleasure and to
commercialization.'' Nor is there any culture, he wrote, ``that can
help humanity once and for all to eliminate spiritual suffering or
transcend personal limits.'' Suddenly he felt intellectually
vulnerable, despite the fame he had enjoyed in China. He felt as if his
lifelong project to think for himself would have to begin all over from
scratch.
These thoughts came at the very time that the dramatic events of
the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing and other Chinese cities
were appearing on the world's television screens. Commenting that
intellectuals too often ``just talk'' and ``do not do,'' Liu decided in
late April 1989 to board a plane from New York to Beijing. ``I hope,''
he wrote, ``that I'm not the type of person who, standing at the
doorway to hell, strikes a heroic pose and then starts frowning in
indecision.'' Back in Beijing, Liu went to Tiananmen Square, talked
with the demonstrating students, and organized a hunger strike that
began on June 2, 1989. Less than two days later, when tanks began
rolling toward the Square and it was clear that people along the way
were already dying, Liu negotiated with the attacking military to allow
students a peaceful withdrawal. It is impossible to calculate how many
lives he may have saved by this compromise, but certainly some, and
perhaps many.
After the massacre, Liu took refuge in the foreign diplomatic
quarter, but later came to blame himself severely for not remaining in
the streets--as many ``ordinary folk'' did, trying to rescue victims of
the massacre. Images of the ``souls of the dead'' have haunted him ever
since. The opening line of Liu's ``Final Statement,'' which he read at
his criminal trial in December 2009, said, ``June 1989 has been the
major turning point in my life.'' Liu Xia, who visited him in prison on
October 10, 2010, two days after the announcement of his Nobel Prize,
reports that he wept and said, ``This is for those souls of the dead.''
The regime's judgment of Liu's involvement at Tiananmen was that he
had been a ``black hand'' behind a ``counterrevolutionary riot.'' He
was arrested on June 6, 1989, and sent for a bit more than eighteen
months to Beijing's elite Qincheng Prison, where he was kept in a
private cell, but not severely mistreated. ``Sometimes I was deathly
bored,'' he later wrote, ``but that's about it.'' Upon release he was
fired from his teaching job at Beijing Normal University.
He resumed a writing career, but now wrote less on literature and
culture and more on politics. He could not publish in China, but sent
manuscripts to Hong Kong publications such as The Open Magazine and
Cheng Ming Monthly, as well as U.S.- based magazines such as Beijing
Spring and Democratic China. In May 1995 the government arrested him
again, this time for seven months. No reason was specified for the
arrest, but it came in the same month that he released a petition
called ``Learn from the Lesson Written in Blood and Push Democracy and
Rule of Law Forward: An Appeal on the Sixth Anniversary of Tiananmen.''
On August 11, 1996, barely half a year after his second stint in
prison, Liu joined with Wang Xizhe, a well-known dissident from the
southern city of Guangzhou, to publish a statement on the sensitive
topic of Taiwan's relations with mainland China. Earlier that year the
Chinese military had fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait, in an
apparent attempt to intimidate Taiwanese voters on the eve of
presidential elections in which the issue of a formal declaration of
independence from the mainland was at stake. In their statement, Liu
and Wang wrote, ``Is the government of the People's Republic of China
the only legitimate [Chinese] government? In our view, it is both
legitimate and not completely legitimate.'' Less than two months later,
on October 8, 1996, Liu was arrested again and sent for three years to
a reeducation-through-labor camp in Dalian, in his home province of
Liaoning. (Wang fled the country right after the declaration was issued
and has since settled in the United States. He has never been back to
China.)
The story of Liu Xiaobo's courage from the mid-1990s on cannot be
separated from his wife, Liu Xia. Four years younger than he, Liu Xia
is a poet and art photographer whom Liu Xiaobo has known since the
1980s and with whom he was living after his release from prison in
January 1996. During his labor-camp incarceration, Liu Xia was allowed
to visit him once a month, and, not missing a single month, made the
1,100-mile round-trip from Beijing thirty-six times. Shortly after
Xiaobo entered the camp, Liu Xia applied to marry him. Camp
authorities, puzzled at her request, felt that they needed to check
with her to be sure she knew what she was doing. She reports answering
them by saying, ``Right! That `enemy of the state'! I want to marry
him!'' A wedding ceremony inside the camp was impossible, and
regulations forbade Xiaobo from exiting the camp, so the two married by
filling out forms. On April 8, 1998, it was official.
It was during the three years at the labor camp that Liu Xiaobo
seems to have formed his deepest faith in the concept of ``human
dignity,'' a phrase that has recurred in his writing ever since. It was
also the camp environment that gave rise to many of his best poems.
Many of these camp poems are subtitled ``to Xia,'' or ``for Xia,'' but
that does not make them love poems in the narrow sense. They span a
variety of topics--including massacre victims, Immanuel Kant, Vincent
Van Gogh, and others--that the poet addresses with Liu Xia standing
beside him, as it were, as his spiritual companion. Liu Xia has
prepared a book of her art photographs, which are deeply probing in
what they suggest about China's moral predicament in contemporary
times, and she subtitles her book ``accompanying Liu Xiaobo.''
On October 8, 1999, Liu Xiaobo returned from the reeducation camp,
unreeducated. He resumed his writing career with no alteration of range
or viewpoint, and lived primarily off his manuscripts, for which he was
paid the equivalent of about US$60 to $90 per one thousand Chinese
characters. In November 2003 he was elected chair of the writers' group
Chinese PEN, and served in that post until 2007. During those years the
rise of the Internet in China began to make a huge difference for Liu
Xiaobo as well as for China as a whole. Finding ways to evade the
government's ``Great Firewall,'' Liu now could access information,
communicate with friends, organize open letters, and edit and submit
his manuscripts all much easier than before. He also watched with great
satisfaction as the numbers of Chinese Internet users passed 100
million in 2006, giving rise to what he saw as ``free assembly in
cyberspace'' and ``power of public opinion on the Internet'' that have
turned into autonomous forces pushing China in the direction of
democracy. In October 2006 Liu took over editorship of the Internet
magazine Democratic China from his friend Su Xiaokang, who had been
editing it from Delaware, and greatly expanded its reach inside China.
Charter 08, which was conceived in conscious admiration of
Czechoslovakia's Charter 77 of the 1970s, and which became the main
piece of evidence against Liu Xiaobo at his criminal trial, did not
originate with Liu Xiaobo. A number of his friends had been working on
a draft for several months in 2008 before he chose to join them. I do
not know why he at first stood aside, but my surmise is that he felt
the project was unlikely to get anywhere. When he did join, though, his
efforts were crucial, and became increasingly so in the weeks and days
immediately before the charter was announced. He insisted that the
charter not be a ``petition'' to the government; it was a way for
citizens to address fellow citizens about shared ideals. He persuaded
his friends to remove certain confrontational phrases so that a wider
range of people would feel comfortable endorsing the charter, and this
judgment was vindicated when more than twelve thousand people
eventually signed. He personally did more than anyone else to solicit
signatures, but his most courageous move in the days before the
unveiling of the charter was to agree to present himself as its leading
sponsor. He was already known as the most prominent ``dissident''
inside China; taking primary responsibility for this text would only
put him more in the government's spotlight and at greater risk for
punishment.
He was not the only person punished for Charter 08. In the days
right before and after it was unveiled, several others who had worked
on drafting it saw their homes raided, or received from the police
``invitations to tea'' (i.e., interrogation) of the kind one is not at
liberty to decline. Then came a nationwide campaign to suppress the
charter itself. But even in this context, the eleven-year prison
sentence that Liu received surprised many observers for its severity.
Liu himself said of the ruling, which arrived on Christmas Day 2009,
only that it ``cannot bear moral scrutiny and will not pass the test of
history.'' In his ``Final Statement'' he thanked his captors for the
civil treatment he had received during his detention and declared that
``I have no enemies.'' Then he appealed the ruling--not because he
expected it could possibly be overturned, but because he wanted ``to
leave the fullest possible historical record of what happens when an
independent intellectual stands up to a dictatorship.''
When the police came to remove Liu from his apartment late at night
on December 8, 2008, they took him to a police-run hostel at an
undisclosed location in Beijing for six months of ``residential
surveillance.'' (Chinese law says that ``residential surveillance''
happens at a person's residence, but for Liu this was not the case. He
was allowed two monitored visits with Liu Xia during this time, but
those occurred at a third location, neither his home nor the secret
place where he was being held.) On June 23, 2009, he was formally
arrested and charged with ``incitement of subversion of state power,''
after which he was held at the Beijing Number One Detention Center. He
continued to be held there after his trial in December 2009, and on May
24, 2010, was transferred to Jinzhou Prison in his home province of
Liaoning. (By custom, notable Chinese criminals are sent home for
punishment.) Liu Xia has been granted occasional, but closely
monitored, visits at the prison.
We know very little of his prison conditions. Chinese Human Rights
Defenders has reported that--as of late 2010--he was sharing a cell
with five other inmates (although veterans of Chinese prisons suspect
that these five, real inmates or not, are there to report on him). The
other five are allowed weekly visits from family members, but Liu is
allowed only monthly visits. Whether or not these visits can be from
his wife depends on his behavior, on hers, and on the political
``sensitivity'' of the times. (A Nobel Prize and an Arab Spring are the
kinds of things that generate great sensitivity.) Liu eats low-quality
prison food. His cell mates are allowed to pay the prison to get
specially prepared, better food, but Liu is denied this option. He has
chronic hepatitis and stomach problems, but receives only cursory
medical attention. He gets two hours each day to go outdoors. He can
read books that Liu Xia has brought to him, but only if they are books
published and sold in China. There is a television set in his cell, and
the prison authorities control which programs he can watch--but not, of
course, how he understands them.
This statement is based on my Introduction to No Enemies, No
Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo (Harvard University
Press, 2012).
______
______
Prepared Statement of Marian Botsford Fraser
december 6, 2011
Chairman Smith, Co-Chairman Brown, Members of the Commission:
My name is Marian Botsford Fraser, and I am the Chair of the
Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International. Founded in 1921 and
headquartered in London, PEN is the world's oldest human rights and
literary organization. Our programs to celebrate literature and promote
freedom of expression are carried out by 144 centers in more than 100
countries, including PEN American Center in New York and PEN USA in Los
Angeles, and our global membership includes many of the United States'
most distinguished writers. PEN International is a non-political
organization and holds consultative status at the United Nations.
I am proud to chair the flagship program of PEN International, the
Writers in Prison Committee, which in 2011 celebrated its 50th year of
advocacy for persecuted writers and freedom of expression around the
world. We work especially closely with our colleagues who are engaged
in on-the-ground campaigning in countries where creative freedom and
free expression are at risk. Among them are the members of Independent
Chinese PEN Center, which just this year celebrated its own 10th
anniversary and is one of the only NGOs still tolerated, though
severely restricted, in China today. Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace
Prize laureate, is a former president of that center, and securing his
release from prison is one of PEN's highest priorities.
In Liu Xiaobo's case and in all our international advocacy, we are
guided by the human rights laws and norms that countries around the
world are required to uphold. The right to freedom of expression is
enshrined in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was
created 63 years ago this Saturday, and the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which nearly all states are
party but for 19 U.N.-recognized states which have neither signed nor
ratified it. The People's Republic of China is among seven states that
have signed the covenant but have not yet ratified it.
The freedom of expression clause is nearly the same in both
instruments, and is represented under the same article, Article 19.
Article 19 of the ICCPR states that:
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this
right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart
information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers,
either orally, in writing or print, in the form of art, or
through any other media of his choice.
Since China hosted the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics--games it had
secured by pledging to the world to expand protections for the human
rights of its citizens--the Chinese government has carried out three
successive crackdowns on its citizens' right to freedom of expression;
the first beginning with Liu Xiaobo's detention on December 8, 2008, in
connection with Charter 08, the document that he and 302 co-signers
planned to release two days later, on International Human Rights Day.
Three years later, Liu Xiaobo's ordeal stands as a glaring example of
China's failure to uphold its citizens' universally-guaranteed right to
freedom of expression.
On December 25, 2009, a Beijing court convicted Liu of ``inciting
subversion of state power'' and sentenced him to 11 years in prison.
The verdict offered as evidence of this crime seven phrases that he
penned from 2005 until his detention--all either quotations from his
many essays or from Charter 08, which Liu had helped draft. In none of
these phrases did Liu call for the overthrow of the government. He
merely expressed opinions, offered critiques of the current state of
affairs, and propounded ways to make life in the People's Republic of
China better, more democratic, and more just.
Earlier this year, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
reviewed Liu's case and ruled that he is being arbitrarily detained in
violation of three critical tenets of international law, including
Article 19. In its responses to the Working Group's questions about his
treatment, the Chinese government argued that the charges and
conviction did not violate Article 19's guarantee of freedom of
expression because Article 19 also states that freedom of expression
carries ``special duties and responsibilities'' and therefore may be
``subject to certain restrictions,'' including the protection of
national security or public order.
The working group, however, emphatically rejected this argument,
noting that the proportionality that applies to these restrictions was
not satisfied in this case, and ordered the Chinese government to free
Liu Xiaobo immediately.
We welcome this clear decision by the U.N., as we have welcomed the
strong denunciations of Liu's imprisonment from a number of
distinguished organizations and bodies, including this commission. PEN
has been doing everything we can to win Liu Xiaobo's immediate and
unconditional release from Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning Province, and
secure the right of all Chinese citizens, our writer colleagues
included, to express themselves freely without fear of censorship,
imprisonment, or harassment. PEN centers around the world have raised
Liu's case with their own governments, urging them to join the
international condemnation of this clear human rights violation. Our
members have brought his plight and his voice to prominence and into
the public eye through readings, rallies, articles, letters, petitions,
and events. Some of our most prominent members around the world, like
Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Tom
Stoppard, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo, were the first to speak on
Liu's behalf, signing an open letter calling for his release in January
2009.
We are proud to note that PEN American Center President Kwame
Anthony Appiah was among the influential figures who nominated Liu for
the Nobel Peace Prize in January 2010, and even more proud that these
endeavors succeeded. In Oslo, on December 10, 2010, I was honored to be
part of a PEN delegation that was invited to attend the ceremony where
Liu was awarded the prize in absentia. But as gratified as we were by
this international recognition of our colleague's efforts to promote
peaceful change in China, we were shocked and saddened that the Chinese
authorities responded to the award with a second crackdown, this one
including the extrajudicial house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia, who has
been unable to communicate with the outside world since shortly after
the Nobel Committee announced its selection of Liu Xiaobo last
October..
This crackdown was followed early this year by yet another, even
more severe, wave of repression, this one targeting dissent thought to
have been inspired by the revolutions in the Middle East and affecting
a number of PEN members in China. Ye Du, the Independent Chinese PEN
Center webmaster, was detained on February 21, 2011, and placed under
``residential surveillance'' at an unknown location in Guangzhou
Province for more than three months. Teng Biao, a renowned lawyer and
the legal consultant for ICPC's Writers in Prison Committee, was
disappeared on February 19, and mysteriously freed two months later.
Neither has yet spoken of his ordeal, and it was only recently that
each began speaking out for freedom of expression in his country once
again through social media.
It is worth noting that these arrests and disappearances violate
not only international law, but China's own constitution as well.
Article 35 guarantees that ``citizens of the People's Republic of China
enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of
procession, and of demonstration.''
This summer, deeply concerned over this series of crackdowns, but
equally impressed by the incredible endurance of our colleagues, who
continue to assert their rights despite constant harassment, PEN sent a
delegation to Beijing to gauge the level of repression and the current
climate for freedom of expression, and deliver a message of solidarity
to our colleagues. What we found in the weeks leading up to the trip
and, more importantly, on the ground in China, was a mixture of absurd
restrictions and repression on the one hand, and positive signs and
hope on the other.
Professor Appiah, a very public nominator of Liu for the Nobel, was
denied a visa for the trip. During his first attempts, his passport was
inexplicably ``lost'' by consular officials. He got a new one, and
applied again. Consular staff members then found his passport, but he
was still denied, very likely for his nomination and activism on Liu's
behalf, including his own testimony before this commission last
November. Another American staff member's visa application was denied
after consular officials held her passport for three weeks. She
traveled to Hong Kong to lend real-time support while we were on the
ground in the mainland.
In Beijing, we were incredibly thankful for the support of American
embassy officials, who offered space and time for a roundtable
discussion with a number of our Chinese colleagues. Of the 14 writers
the embassy invited to the meeting, however, only three were able to
come. Many were visited by the guobao, or security police, and received
warnings not to attend. We could only assume that their telephone and
Internet communications were monitored, and that the embassy's may have
been as well. Other, private meetings with individuals we arranged
ourselves in private telephone conversations were canceled after visits
from the guobao as well, suggesting our own communications were also
being monitored.
One of our primary ambitions on the trip was to meet with Liu Xia
at her apartment in Beijing, but with her compound still guarded by
authorities and her Internet and telephone service still cut, we were
cautioned not to attempt a visit. Nor could we visit with Teng Biao,
who was still under a virtual gag order following his release, or Ye
Du, with whom the PEN community has an especially strong bond thanks to
his presence at our international meetings, and who indicated he would
welcome a visit. We were told that, though he had returned home from
months of detention, he was still under house arrest, and security
police required him to check in several times a day at a guardhouse
erected outside his residence, making it impossible for anyone to
visit.
This was all extremely discouraging. We were frankly appalled by
the intrusiveness of the surveillance state and the severity of the
restrictions imposed on many of our PEN colleagues, even ones who are
not alleged to have committed crimes. At the same time, we were
surprised by the widespread--indeed, almost universal--dissatisfaction
with state of freedom of expression in China. Many of the writers that
we were able to meet with, even those not considered ``dissident''
writers or associated with ICPC, decried the level of censorship, the
self-censorship necessary for publication, and the one-party rule that
has allowed this kind of repression to flourish.
These frank expressions seem to mirror the aspirations of China's
ordinary citizens. On the tail end of our trip, a high-speed train
collided with another outside the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province,
killing 40 people and injuring almost 200. The government's attempts to
cover it up--which included trying to literally bury the train at the
scene--sparked outrage around the country; in five days, Chinese
citizens posted 25 million messages critical of the government's
handling of the accident on China's microblogs. That campaign, which
seemed unprecedented in its breadth and tenacity, has since been
emulated in several other scandals and tragedies. These widespread
criticisms of course caught the eye of censors, but not before the
government was forced to reverse course and, in some instances,
apologize.
Similarly, those who attempt to comment on the kinds of
``politically sensitive'' topics that dominate Liu Xiaobo's essays, and
even Liu Xiaobo himself, have discerned new ways to get past the
censors, utilizing homonyms (``river crab'' for ``harmonize,'' for
example), taking and posting photographs of themselves silently
supporting political prisoners, as in the ``Dark Glasses'' Campaign for
the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and using humor and satire. New forms
of expression are being found to express bold new ideas throughout the
country, despite the government's heavy hand.
The Chinese government still does not allow the Independent Chinese
PEN Center to function fully inside the country. Members are still
monitored, gatherings are stopped, and members living outside the
country are often prevented from visiting. After our time in Beijing,
we celebrated ICPC's 10th anniversary in Hong Kong. As the American and
international delegates were preparing to leave, three ICPC members--
including its president, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and prominent writers and
ICPC founders Ma Jian and Bei Ling--were stopped at the border in
Shenzhen and interrogated on their activities and their writings. And,
of course, ICPC's own Liu Xiaobo still lives inside a Chinese prison,
one of four ICPC members still in jail, and one of more than 40 writers
whose cases PEN is following today.
Still, there is an increased awareness of the plight of political
prisoners within Chinese society, and a new questioning of the reasons
for imprisoning these people in the first place. This fall, as the
``Dark Glasses'' campaign for Chen Guangcheng spread on China's
microblogs, ordinary citizens began to ask why this lawyer, who
defended villagers in rural areas and exposed the persecution of those
who defy China's one-child policy, was being confined inside his home
after his release from prison, his young daughter prevented even from
attending school. Reports that thugs were keeping outsiders from
entering his village in Linyi, Shandong Province, spread, and prompted
some to try to visit Chen to see for themselves.
Murong Xuecun, a well-known and popular writer who we were lucky to
meet while we were in Beijing, recently documented his own journey to
Dongshigu village, and the beating that followed at its gates. Murong
had advocated on Chen's behalf on microblogs, but it was at the
prompting of one of his students that he first seriously considered
attempting to visit. He and his group of three other men and one woman
decided that no matter what, they would not raise their fists if the
guards raised theirs. In a harrowing account of the group's encounter
with the violent cadres that guard Chen that was published in The
Guardian last month, he said ``We just wanted to verify what it takes
in this country, at this time, to visit an imprisoned `free man.'''
Many others have done the same.
Chen Guangcheng still remains imprisoned in his own home, as does
Liu Xia, and countless others are still watched closely, taken for tea,
warned, harassed, and beaten. Liu Xiaobo sits quietly behind bars in a
prison near the border with North Korea, and not many even know that
one of their own won the Nobel Peace Prize. But this surge of activism,
of citizens simply asking the question ``why,'' of seeking and
imparting information, regardless of frontiers, lends hope that China
is changing, and that change has begun with the people and their
exercise of their internationally-protected, inalienable right to
freedom of expression. People are coming to realize, as Murong said of
Chen Guangcheng, that ``at the moment his freedom was arbitrarily taken
away, your freedom came under threat.''
One year ago this week, in his speech officially awarding Liu
Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize, Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman
Thorbjorn Jagland noted that ``There are many dissidents in China, and
their opinions differ on many points''; but that ``the severe
punishment imposed on Liu made him more than a central spokesman for
human rights. Practically overnight, he became the very symbol, both in
China and internationally, of the struggle for such rights in China.''
He went on:
But as Liu also writes, ``An enormous transformation towards
pluralism in society has already taken place, and official
authority is no longer able to fully control the whole
society.'' However strong the power of the regime may appear to
be, every single individual must do his best to live, in his
words, ``an honest life with dignity.''
On the anniversary of that important day, PEN would like to thank,
again, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, this commission, and all the
governments, organizations, and individuals around the world that have
stood with Liu Xiaobo--and by standing with him, standing with all the
citizens of China who share this most fundamental aspiration--and we
ask everyone to redouble their efforts, so that by this time next year,
he and his wife Liu Xia are free.
______
Prepared Statement of Carl Gershman
december 6, 2011
I have been asked to address briefly three issues: The impact of
China on global democratic trends, including the significance of its
so-called ``China model'' of authoritarianism; the prospects for
democratic reform in China, including the necessary preconditions for a
democratic transition; and finally, the influence of the Nobel Peace
Prize on Chinese society and official policy.
Regarding China's impact on global democratic trends, it is now
common knowledge that China exerts an anti-democratic influence in
world politics. Liu Xiaobo has said that China serves as ``a blood
transfusion machine'' for smaller dictatorships in North Korea, Cuba
and elsewhere. In addition to providing economic and political support
to such regimes, it shares tactics bi-laterally with autocrats such as
Lukashenko in Belarus, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Chavez in Venezuela; and
it cooperates multilaterally with Russia and the Central Asian
countries through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
China also projects its system of authoritarian capitalism as an
alternative model to the system of democracy with a mixed economy that
exists in the United States, Europe, and many other countries around
the world. There are some people in this country who are persuaded of
this model's effectiveness. Just last Thursday, the SEIU's former
President Andy Stern published an article in The Wall Street Journal
entitled ``China's Superior Economic Model'' that praised its system of
central planning.
But this model is flawed for three fundamental reasons. First, as
Liu Xiaobo pointed out in 2006 in his essay ``Changing the Regime by
Changing Society,'' two decades of reform have eroded, to one degree or
another, each of the four pillars of China's totalitarian system.
Comprehensive nationalization is giving way to a system where
independent economic activity ``has given individuals the material base
for autonomous choices.'' The system of ``all-pervasive organization''
that eliminated all independent activity ``is gone, never to return,''
according to Liu, and the society is now ``moving towards freedom of
movement, mobility, and career choice.'' The ``mental tyranny'' of an
imposed ideology has succumbed to the information revolution that has
awakened individual consciousness and awareness of one's rights. While
the fourth pillar of political centralization and repression remains,
people have lost the fear of repression, and the victims of
persecution, far from being socially isolated and humiliated, now
``inspire reverence'' in the society and are able to put their accusers
``into the moral position of defendants.''
The second reason the model is flawed, according to Yu Jianrong,
the well-known Chinese scholar and sociologist, is that it is
characterized by ``rigid stability'' and ``dichotomized, black and
white thinking'' in which the ``expression of people's legitimate
interests''--land issues for peasants, wages for workers, homeowner
rights for urban residents, minority rights for Tibetans or Uyghurs--
becomes a threat to the social order and is adamantly opposed. A rigid
system, according to Professor Yu, is by definition brittle and can
break under stress. It lacks the resilience of democracy where
government is accountable and conflicts can be resolved lawfully.
Professor Yu fears that without such resilience, China will not be able
to escape what he calls ``the tragic fate of two millennia of the cycle
of alternating chaos and order.''
The third flaw is that the Chinese regime lacks political
legitimacy. It has achieved a degree of performance-based legitimacy by
using market reform to generate material wealth. But such legitimacy is
inherently unstable since it is not immune to the business cycle, which
is why Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking after the National People's
Congress in 2007, described the economy as ``unstable, unbalanced,
uncoordinated, and unsustainable.'' No wonder the recent spike in
worker protests in Guangdong has caused such alarm in Beijing. Without
the authority that derives from receiving popular consent, Andrew
Nathan has written, the Chinese regime lives ``under the shadow of the
future, vulnerable to existential challenges that mature democracies do
not face.''
Regarding the preconditions and possibility for China's democratic
transition, the picture is mixed. The brightest area is media
liberalization, with social media and the Internet as a whole driving
traditional media over the last five years. As Liu Xiaobo noted, this
has spread democratic values, including rights awareness and the desire
to hold government accountable. Even though those most active with
social media only account for 40 percent of all Chinese Internet users
and 14.2 percent of all Chinese, they are having an impact throughout
the society, with even workers using cell phones and social networking
platforms to organize informally, despite official restrictions.
Less encouraging is the fact that civil-society organizations
continue to be highly restricted. The immense Chinese countryside
remains woefully underserved by civil-society organizations. In
addition, the divide between rich and poor is growing, and a large part
of the population now sees China's touted economic growth as being at
their expense. Many have lost faith in rule of law as a result of
recent government decisions to give more power and funding to the
security apparatus and to bar independent candidates for district-level
elections.
Most democrats now look to the rights defense movement as a
critical way to advance the possibility of a transition. With
increasingly broad participation and a convergence between the middle
class and the working class, this movement strives to bring the
struggle of workers and farmers into the mainstream. It is pushing for
concrete gains in rule of law, more distributive equity, better human
rights protection, and more freedom of association and speech.
However, the government has to date shown little interest in giving
this movement the space it needs to foster the conditions for a gradual
and peaceful transition. The concern of many Chinese activists is that
increasing repression will delay a regime transition for so long that,
when it does happen, which they think is inevitable, it will be
accompanied by bloodshed and social turbulence. Thus, the probability
of the regime surviving in its current form dwindles along with the
possibility for a peaceful transition and democratic consolidation.
Finally, regarding the influence of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think
it deepened the Chinese government's legitimacy crisis. For one thing,
as The Economist noted at the time, Beijing's ``disastrous'' response
to the Prize betrayed for the whole world to see ``the government's
insecurity at home.'' And it didn't help when the audience of thousands
rose in repeated standing ovations as Liv Ullmann read ``I Have No
Enemies,'' Liu's final statement at his trial, with his empty chair of
honor constituting a powerful indictment of the regime.
With all its stirring symbolism, the Nobel ceremony represented the
confirmation by the international community of the sentiments of a good
part of Chinese society. As Liu himself said three years before the
Nobel award, political persecution ``has gradually turned into a
vehicle for advancing the moral stature of its victims, garnering them
the honors for being the `civic conscience' or the `heroes of truth,'
while the government's hired thugs have become the instruments that `do
the dirty work' '' Herein lies China's hope. May its leaders begin to
listen to such heroes before it is too late.
_____
______
Prepared Statement of Harry Wu
december 6, 2011
It has been one year since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, and now, just as then, he is still in jail. In 1960 I too was
put in China's laogai prison camps because of my ideas, and I was there
for 19 years. Fifty years later, China's regime has not changed how it
handles dissenting opinions. I hope that today's hearing will draw
renewed attention to Liu's case and remind the world what China does to
those who dare to talk peacefully about democracy.
Many people know that Liu was sentenced on charges of ``inciting
subversion,'' but what crime did he really commit? Over the past few
years, Liu has sent over 260 articles to our Observe China website for
publication, and has also written on countless other overseas websites.
His verdict mentioned several ``subversive'' articles by name,
including three articles published on the Observe China website,
including: ``Can It Be That the Chinese People Deserve Only 'Party-led
Democracy'?,'' ``The Many Aspects of CPC Dictatorship,'' and ``Changing
the Regime by Changing the Society''. Observe China is blocked by the
``Great Firewall'' and is inaccessible to most mainland Chinese
Internet users. How does the CCP
block controversial articles, while at the same time tracking their
writers and readers? We have American technology companies to thank for
this, and ultimately, for the arrest of great thinkers like Liu Xiaobo.
Last year I was in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony.
Although many Chinese tried to attend the ceremony in support of Liu,
they were blocked from leaving China by the government. Not even his
wife, Liu Xia, was there to fill his empty chair. Even so, I was very
happy that a Chinese dissident was finally awarded the prize. It is a
sign that the world will not sit quietly while the CCP cracks down on
freedom of speech.
Many different people came to Oslo to honor Liu Xiaobo. When I
opened up the program for the ceremony, I was surprised to see a
message from John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc. He noted that
Cisco has been a sponsor of the Nobel Peace Prize Concert since 1999
and that, ``Cisco is working to help individuals, companies, and
countries to use the Internet to collaborate, educate, empower, and
further the ideals and innovations inspired by Alfred Nobel and his
legacy.'' I was shocked that Cisco could say this, when around the same
time that the company began supporting the Nobel Peace Prize, it also
began supporting China's authoritarian regime through its massive
``Golden Shield Project''. I realized that Cisco shows a different face
to the international community than it does to its clients. Through its
decade-long partnership with the Chinese government, Cisco technology
and training has ensured that Chinese activists like Liu Xiaobo are
excluded from participating in this vision of what the Internet can and
should be.
Cisco claims to be a company dedicated to encouraging free speech
and upholding a commitment to human rights. Yet in reality, Cisco is a
company that will do business with any partner, so long as it turns a
profit--even at the expense of other people's rights and freedoms. One
day when Liu Xiaobo is released, I am confident that he too will demand
to know just how the Public Security officials were able to track him
down and how the government is able to exert such control over both
internet content and internet users.
Unfortunately, Liu Xiaobo's situation has not changed much since
last year. Several months after the awards, his wife Liu Xia--who had
previously been under house arrest--became unreachable. Prior to this,
the Laogai Research Foundation had been able to maintain some contact
with her in order to provide the couple with regular financial support
from the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund. We have also sold nearly 2,000
copies of Liu Xiaobo's Chinese publications: Civil Awakening--The Dawn
of a Free China and Strive for Freedom--Selected Writings of Liu
Xiaobo. Since February 2011, we have not been able to get either of
these payments to them. Soon we will publish the English translation of
Civil Awakening, so that Liu Xiaobo's message of optimism, democracy,
and peaceful dissent can reach the international community, even while
he serves out his 11-year prison sentence.
When I was in the laogai, political dissidents were treated just
like all the other criminals, if not worse. We worked long hours and
were often beaten or mistreated by prison guards. At night we had to
attend political reeducation sessions and criticize each other for
holding counterrevolutionary ideas. Over the last few decades,
conditions inside the laogai are no longer as severe, but the
fundamental principals that drive the prison system remain the same:
prisoners are forced to labor and are forced undergo to political
thought reform.
By the 1990's China realized that if it wanted to export its prison
labor products internationally, it would have to conceal the origins of
the products. Since 1994, China has stopped using the word ``laogai,''
and now refers to the camps as mere ``prisons''. Yet today, Liu Xiaobo
remains locked up in Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning province, also known as
Jinzhou Jinkai Electrical Group or Jinzhou Xinsheng Switch Co.
According to reports, it is the largest prison in Liaoning province,
with the majority of prisoners having sentences of 10 years or more.
The inmates produce a wide variety of electrical equipment including
household products, circuits, machine components, transformers, and so
on. As of 2008, two of its prison enterprises were listed in Dun &
Bradstreet, and today, Jinzhou Xinsheng Switch Co. continues to be
listed on a number of English business directory websites.
Despite the continued use of forced labor, China has grown
increasingly concerned about its soft power and international image.
Thus, the CCP has afforded more prominent political prisoners like Liu
Xiaobo better treatment. This fall, he was even allowed to return home
to mourn the death of his father, and was permitted a rare visit by
close family. The CCP has learned to treat high-profile dissidents
differently, fearing that any word of abuse would enrage the
international community. Liu may not be forced to do hard labor, but
what about those who are not in the media spotlight, those who are not
lucky enough to escape forced labor? Must a man win the Nobel Prize to
be treated with dignity and have his most basic rights respected?
Today we still do not know what kind of persecution Liu and his
wife are enduring, but one thing is for certain--it is undeserved. Liu
said himself that, ``it is time we move beyond a society where words
are viewed as crimes.'' But the Chinese Communist Party has a long
history of abusing prisoners of conscience in order to minimize
dissent and maximize what it views as ``stability''. In 2009, around
the time of his most recent arrest, authorities had tried to convince
Liu to leave China instead of stirring up trouble at home, but he
refused. It is clear that Liu Xiaobo will not abandon his democratic
ideals, nor will he give up voicing his opinions. Therefore, there is
no telling if the Chinese government will reduce his sentence. So until
that day comes, it is critical that the U.S. government and
international human rights advocates speak out on his behalf, telling
the Chinese Communist Party that he is not forgotten and that his
vision of a better future will not quietly fade away. We should not
talk about ``political reform'' in China, because to the CCP,
``political reform'' means finding a way to keep itself in power even
as its people demand more freedoms. True change in can only happen in
China if and when the CCP falls. The Chinese people will not tolerate
the Communist Party's repression forever.
______
Prepared Statement of Reggie Littlejohn
december 6, 2011
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Commission:
Thank you for holding this timely hearing about conditions of
political prisoners in China. It is a truly humbling opportunity to
testify about one of the most courageous individuals, not only in
China, but also in the world: blind, self-taught lawyer, Chen
Guangcheng. I begin by commending the Chairman, Congressman Chris
Smith, for his recent attempt to go to China to visit Chen. Mr.
Chairman, your tireless efforts to raise the visibility of Chen's case
are having an impact.
Chen Guangcheng was arrested in 2006 for helping to expose the
Chinese government's use of forced abortion and involuntary
sterilization to enforce its ``One Child Policy.'' He amassed evidence
that forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations were used
extensively on women in Linyi City, Shandong Province in 2005. Time
Magazine named him one of ``2006's Top 100 People Who Shape Our World''
and he was given the 2007 Magsaysay award, known as Asia's Nobel Prize.
Simultaneous with this testimony, I am submitting a report from
Chen Guangcheng's 2005 investigation into coercive family planning in
Linyi County, Shandong Province. A member of Chen's team, human rights
attorney Teng Biao, drafted the report. This report contains extensive
witness statements from cases Chen and his team were investigating
before Chen was jailed. In this report are detailed accounts regarding:
A woman forcibly aborted and sterilized at seven
months;
Villagers sleeping in fields to evade Family Planning
Officials;
Family Planning Officials who broke three brooms over
the head of an elderly man;
Family Planning Officials who forced a grandmother and
her brother to beat each other; and
The use of quota systems and the practice of
``implication'' - the detention, fining and torture of the
extended family of One Child Policy ``violators.''
The Chen Guangcheng report makes clear: the spirit of the Cultural
Revolution lives on in China's Family Planning death machine. WRWF has
chosen to release the names of the perpetrators of these crimes against
humanity, so that they can be held accountable before the world.
Things may not have improved in Linyi since 2005. Earlier this
year, Family Planning Officials stabbed a man to death.\1\ A woman, six
months pregnant, recently died during a forced abortion in Lijing
County, also in Shandong Province.\2\
For exposing and opposing coercive family planning in China, Chen
spent four years, three months in prison. His defense lawyers were
detained on the eve of trial. Since his September 2010 release, he has
continued to serve a sentence of home detention. Both in prison and
under house arrest, Chen has experienced mistreatment and beatings. He
suffers from a chronic, debilitating intestinal illness for which he
has not been allowed treatment.
According to a February, 2011 video, which Chen and his supporters
managed to smuggle out of China, sixty-six security police surround his
home constantly. He and his wife are not allowed sufficient food and
are isolated from all outside contact. No one can enter or leave their
home, except officials, who can enter at any time, without notice.
We received evidence that blind activist Chen Guangcheng's health
was in serious jeopardy because of repeated beatings and the
malnutrition he suffers in house detention. According to a June 15,
2011 letter written by Chen's wife, and smuggled out of China, Chen has
faced constant physical and psychological abuse, does not get
sufficient food or nourishment, and is denied proper medical treatment.
Foreign journalists have been forcibly denied access to him, and
lawyers who tried to help Chen were beaten and detained in February
2011, including Jiang Tianyong and Teng Biao, who were detained for two
months or more.\3\
In September and October 2011, human rights campaigners and
visitors seeking to see Chen were beaten and detained.\4\ Also in
September, police detained Chen's brother, who was meeting with
activists.\5\
Women's Rights Without Frontiers and the China Aid Association are
spearheading an international effort to free Chen Guangcheng. Thus far,
we have collected 6463 signatures from 28 countries.\6\
WRWF congratulates Rep. Chris Smith on his successful sponsorship
last July of an amendment to the State Department Appropriation Bill,
in support of Chen Guangcheng and his family. This amendment, which
passed unanimously, urges the Chinese government to stop harassing the
Chen family, to release them from house arrest, and to arrange for
immediate medical treatment. It further urges the Obama administration
to arrange diplomatic visits to the Chen family. Beyond this, it
highlights the tragedy of forced abortion and coercive family planning
in China.\7\
In early October, we received an unconfirmed report through Voice
of America that villagers had said that Chen had died. All efforts to
confirm that report failed, as it was impossible to gain access to
Dongshigu Village in Linyi to verify it.
Relativity Media, however, was able to gain access to Linyi, in
order to film the feature-length comedy, ``21 and Over.'' When
challenged on its choice of Linyi out of the thousands of possible
locations in China, and urged to apologize for its lack of sensitivity
to Chen Guangcheng and human rights, Relativity Media issued a
statement defending its action. Women's Rights Without Frontiers has
called for a international boycott of ``21 and Over.''
November 12, 2011 was Chen's 40th birthday. Although no one knew
for sure whether Chen was dead or alive, brave citizens from many areas
of China attempted to visit Chen's village to wish him a happy
birthday. All of them were turned back from the village, some
violently, by thugs and plain-clothes police.
Finally, just this weekend, Women's Rights Without Frontiers
received a credible report that Chen is indeed alive. In fact,
according to a key activist in China, the conditions of Chen's
detention have improved slightly.
According to this source, who requested anonymity, ``Now his mother
is allowed to go outside to buy food although escorted by three guards,
and his health also is getting better.''
The source attributed the improved treatment of Chen to the fact
that ``Chen's situation was exposed and got huge public attention.''
One campaign that brought considerable visibility to Chen's plight was
the flow of concerned citizens attempting to visit him, leading up to
his 40th birthday on November 12.
In addition, the Chen Sunglasses Campaigns inside and outside of
China have raised the visibility of his case. These campaigns post
photos of people wearing sunglasses in support of Chen. The source
stated, ``I think it's very helpful for people all over the world to
show they care about Chen through the Sunglasses Campaigns. I think
it's very important to show support inside and outside the country - we
can work together.'' \8\
Women's Rights Without Frontiers is collaborating with the Dark
Glasses Portrait Campaign headed by a courageous Chinese political
satirist and cartoonist, whose pen name is Crazy Crab.
The source continued, ``Chen's situation has indeed improved. I
have just sent him some medicine and covered the expenses for his
family in the market . . . Some relatives can visit his mother and
deliver some items under surveillance.''
The source cautioned, however, that the slightly improved condition
of Chen's house arrest is not a reason to relax the campaign to free
him. Most relatives of Chen and his wife are not allowed to visit,
including their son and his wife's parents. We do not know what his
medical condition is. Moreover, the source indicated, the fact that
Chen is now allowed food and medicine ``is still far away from our
basic request, that is, Chen should be freed right away, according to
China's own law.''
According to the source, the persecution of Chen supporters
continues. An activist who announced that she would wear sunglasses in
Linyi's central square this past weekend was detained on December 1.
That same day, another activist from Yantai and a writer from Beijing,
were arrested in Shandong attempting to distribute plastic bags and
balloons bearing Chen's image, in honor of International Day of Persons
with Disabilities, celebrated December 3.
Women's Rights Without Frontiers is thrilled and relieved to
receive a credible report that Chen is alive and his health is
improving. This improved treatment demonstrates the power of the
collaborative effort inside and outside China to raise the visibility
of his case. We greatly admire the brave citizens inside China, who are
risking their safety to stand up for Chen.
We commend the courageous and persistent efforts of Rep. Chris
Smith to visit Chen and urge the Chinese government to grant him a
visa. We also urge U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, to visit Chen
directly. We demand the immediate, unqualified release of Chen
Guangcheng and his family. Chen's ongoing house arrest is illegal and
his medical condition remains weak.
The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to silence Chen, but they
cannot silence the voices of millions in China crying for his freedom.
The report that Chen is alive and in improved condition should not be a
reason to relax efforts on his behalf. To the contrary, these efforts
are having an impact and should intensify until Chen is free.
recommendations
The international community should make official
interventions on behalf of Chen with the Chinese government and
raise Chen's case in bilateral discussion and multilateral
institutions in which China is a member.
Diplomats from the U.S., E.U., Norway, Canada,
Australia, Switzerland and other countries with human rights
dialogues with China - including U.S. Ambassador to China Gary
Locke--should seek access to Chen and his wife Yuan Wejing and
press the Chinese government to stop its mistreatment of Chen,
allow for proper medical attention and arrange for his
immediate and unconditional release.
Organizations and individuals concerned with human
rights, women's rights, and religious freedom should call and
write Chinese embassies and consulates around the world and
sign the petition to Free Chen Guangcheng at:
www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/
index.php?nav=chenguangcheng#petition
___________
\1\ 1Ahttp://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/?p=147
\2\ 1Ahttp://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/?p=429
\3\ 1AA copy of the original letter in Mandarin can be obtained by
emailing ChinaAid at [email protected] or by calling 267.205.5210. An
English translation can be found here: http://
www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=yuan-weijing
Here is a three minute video calling for urgent action: Free Chen
Guangcheng! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpVJidDqVJo
\4\ 1A``Chen Supporters Attacked,'' 9/19/11 http://www.rfa.org/
english/news/china/attacked-09192011123000.html; HRIC Testimony at CECC
Hearing on Chen Guangcheng, 11/1/11 http://www.hrichina.org/content/
5611
\5\ 1A``Police Detain Nanjing Activists,'' 9/8/11 http://
www.rfa.org/english/news/china/activists-
09082011152203.html?searchterm=None
\6\ 1AThe petition to free Chen Guangcheng can be found here:
http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=sign--our--
petition
\7\ 1A``Amendment for Blind Activist Chen Guangcheng Passes
Today,'' 7/22/11 http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/
?p=316
\8\ 1AThese campaigns, spearheaded by Women's Rights Without
Frontiers and Dark Glasses Portrait, can be found at http://
www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=chen-guangcheng and
http://ichenguangcheng.blogspot.com/.
______
Prepared Statement of Bob Fu
december 6, 2011
Esteemed members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on
China, government officials and guests,
The fact that human rights, the rule of law and religious freedom
in China have all seriously deteriorated in 2011 is already well known
to all. Therefore, this hearing on the anniversary of the awarding of
the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo is highly significant.
Based on incomplete statistics, we know that about 100 lawyers,
rights activists and dissidents have been ``disappeared,'' tortured,
imprisoned and even sentenced to prison terms in the first 11 months of
this year. From February to July, more than 1,000 rights activists and
dissidents across the country were ``invited to drink tea and chat''
with or were threatened by police or Domestic Security Protection
agents. They included: eight lawyers appearing in a court in
Heilongjiang province who were beaten up by police--one was a woman
lawyer who was so badly beaten that she miscarried; human rights
lawyers Gao Zhisheng, Fan Yafeng, Cheng Guangcheng, Teng Biao, Jiang
Tianyong, Tang Jitian, Ms. Li Tiantian, Li Fangping, Li Xiongbing, Li
Subin and Tang Jingling; and other activists, artists and writers, such
as Ai Weiwei, Yu Jie, Ran Yunfei, Ding Mao, Wang Lihong, Zhu Yufu,
Zhang Yongpan, Zhang Dajun, Ye Du and others .
Although most of the freedom of religion measures that ``Charter
08'' calls for are guaranteed in Article 36 of China's own
Constitution, in practice and in reality, implementation falls far
short. Broad discrimination against and persecution of independent
religious groups and people of faith have been increasing in the past
12 months. Just last week, we received reports that at least 11 Uyghur
Muslims were detained and four were placed under criminal detention.
What crime did they commit? They were accused of ``engaging in illegal
religious activities'' because they were reading the Koran in their own
homes. Since April 10 this year, members of Beijing Shouwang Church
have experienced weekly detention, harassment and abuse for 35 weeks in
a row. The entire church leadership has been under house arrest,
without freedom of movement, the entire time. Many believers have lost
their jobs and been evicted from their rented apartments. Why? Again,
it is because they have been accused of ``engaging in illegal religious
activities'' - in their case, by worshipping in a public space. Never
mind that they were forced to worship in an outdoor public area because
the government forced the church out of its rented worship place and
made it impossible for it to move into its own purchased facility.
Ever since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe, the Chinese Communist Party has acted as though mafia
groups can be tolerated but not independent religious believers. The
treatment of house church Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur
Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists has been far worse than other so-called
``unstable social elements.'' Torture and brainwashing with drugs have
been used to achieve what the authorities call ``transferring the
mindset'' of these believers.
As we all know, Liu Xiaobo's ``Charter 08'' calls for many
freedoms, of which freedom of religion is only one. However, we at
ChinaAid firmly believe that freedom of religion is the first freedom,
and that it cannot be separated from the other freedoms that Charter 08
calls for:
``9. Freedom to Form Groups. The right of citizens to form groups
must be guaranteed. The current system for registering nongovernmental
groups, which requires a group to be ``approved,'' should be replaced
by a system in which a group simply registers itself. The formation of
political parties should be governed by the constitution and the laws,
which means that we must abolish the special privilege of one party to
monopolize power and must guarantee principles of free and fair
competition among political parties.
10. Freedom to Assemble. The constitution provides that peaceful
assembly, demonstration, protest, and freedom of expression are
fundamental rights of a citizen. The ruling party and the government
must not be permitted to subject these to illegal interference or
unconstitutional obstruction.
11. Freedom of Expression. We should make freedom of speech,
freedom of the press, and academic freedom universal, thereby
guaranteeing that citizens can be informed and can exercise their right
of political supervision. These freedoms should be upheld by a Press
Law that abolishes political restrictions on the press. The provision
in the current Criminal Law that refers to ``the crime of incitement to
subvert state power'' must be abolished. We should end the practice of
viewing words as crimes.
12. Freedom of Religion. We must guarantee freedom of religion and
belief, and institute a separation of religion and state. There must be
no governmental interference in peaceful religious activities. We
should abolish any laws, regulations, or local rules that limit or
suppress the religious freedom.
The persecution that ChinaAid has documented in the first 11 months
of 2011 occurred in 11 provinces, one municipality under direct central
government jurisdiction and three autonomous regions - that is, in
nearly half of China's regions and cities. Nearly 30 house churches
were persecuted, affecting more than 1,500 believers. The number of
Christians arrested or detained exceeds 300. If we take into account
the number of people from Shouwang Church who were detained by police
in the 35 times the congregation has met for outdoor Sunday worship
services, the number would be as high as 1,000. Dr. Fan Yafeng, the
prominent Christian constitutional law scholar and pioneer in China's
legal rights defense movement has been under house arrest December
2010, with all forms of communication with him severed; Shouwang Church
pastor Jin Tianming and other church leaders have been held under house
arrest for eight months; the Chinese House Church Alliance is under
attack, with its vice president, Pastor Shi Enhao, being sentenced in
July to two years of re-education-through labor; in Xinjiang, in
China's far west, Uyghur house church leader Alimujiang is serving a
15-year sentence; while in Beijing, the chief representative of a video
and film company, Ms. Jiang Yaxi, was criminally detained on November
11 for distributing a government-approved Christian documentary. These
are but a few of the cases ChinaAid has documented.
What we have seen in 2011 has been the continuation and escalation
of the Chinese government's comprehensive suppression of independent
religious groups and dissident groups since the September 2010 Lausanne
Congress on World Evangelization and the awarding in October of the
Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. The Hu Jintao government has since the
2008 Olympic Games reinstated some of the Communist Party's most
extreme political ideologies, resulting in a serious and overall
deterioration in human rights, the rule of law and religious freedom in
China.
The October 29 adoption of an amendment to the Resident Identity
Card Law provides additional legal basis for this deterioration. The
Resident Identity Card Law was amended to say, ``When citizens apply
for, change or register their ID cards, they should be fingerprinted.''
This measure broadens the scope of the police's ability to investigate
and expose citizens' private affairs. Furthermore, the amendments to
Articles 38 and 39 of the Criminal Procedure Law say that, in the case
of ``crimes that endanger national security and terror crimes,''
subpoenas can be indefinitely extended and notification of family and
relatives of an arrest or house arrest can be indefinitely delayed.
This provides sufficient legal grounds for secret detentions and
imprisonments.
The examples mentioned heretofore are just the tip of the iceberg.
The persecution and suffering that the Chinese people have endured is
impossible to measure in mere numbers. This year, even the families of
those who work for ChinaAid have been harassed and threatened in China
by the police on many occasions.
On the one-year anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Peace
Prize to Liu Xiaobo, Liu is still serving time in prison for the very
act for which he was awarded the Prize. Meanwhile, his wife, Liu Xia,
is still under house arrest. This embarrassing fact not only is China's
sorrow, it is also evidence of the failure of the power of world
justice. The failure of international efforts to bring about justice is
not necessarily because Communist China today is stronger and more
powerful than Germany and Japan were during World War II or the Soviet
Union was during the Cold War. Rather, it is because the international
community -in particular the Western world--is no longer staunchly
guarding and holding fast to the concepts of freedom, justice and human
rights that it once did. The result is fear when noble sacrifice is
necessary and retreat when a price must be paid. Added to which is the
lure of money and personal interests. All of these factors corrupt the
spirit and dissipate courage, spreading ever wider just like the
current economic crisis.
In America, this great and free country, we have before us the
shining examples of many great heroes: General George Washington, and,
sitting on the other end of the Mall as though watching us, is
President Lincoln; and there's also black civil rights leader Martin
Luther King as well as President Reagan, who faced up to the Soviet
empire and never gave an inch nor ever considered doing so. The
indomitable spirit and the commitment to freedom and human rights that
they and many others who went before us held firm are like a bright
torch shining throughout America's history.
Happily, in the generally disturbing circumstances of 2011, the
sudden release in Sichuan province of Mr. Ding Mao was an encouraging
development and the news spread quickly, giving hope to those of us who
have become a bit weary in our fight for freedom and human rights in
China. Many of you sitting here today perhaps remember seeing Mr.
Ding's petite but strong wife, who came to the United States, a country
she'd never been to before, to plea in Congress and in the Executive
Building and to the media for the release of her innocent husband. This
brave Chinese woman represents the thousands and tens of thousands of
wives in China who refuse to bend to the power of an evil government,
who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their husbands, defending their
families without hesitation---ever willing to make huge sacrifices for
the sake of a future China where there is equality, freedom and human
rights.
So, let us bravely stand with them, just as you and the consular
officers in Sichuan stood with Ms. Feng Xia, and in so doing won the
quick release of her husband.
The Lord is with us! May we draw encouragement from the words of
Hebrews 10: 35-36:
``So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly
rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the
will of God, you will receive what he has promised.''
______
Prepared Statement of Hon. Christopher H. Smith, a U.S. Representative
from New Jersey, Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China
tuesday, december 6, 2011
Excerpts from Hearing Statement
One year after the independent Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, who is a Chinese intellectual and democracy
advocate, Liu remains isolated in a prison thousands of miles away from
his wife, whom authorities are holding under house arrest in Beijing.
In February 2010, I led a bi-partisan group of lawmakers in
nominating Liu for the prize - at the same time nominating two other
persecuted human rights advocates, Chen Guangcheng and Gao Zhisheng, to
be joint recipients - as part of an international tide of support for
the awarding of the prize to Liu Xiaobo.
The Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu
Xiaobo ``for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human
rights in China.'' H.Res. 1717, which I authored, congratulating Liu on
the awarding of the prize passed the House with a vote of 402-1--
exactly one year ago this week.
Chinese authorities, on the other hand, tried Liu and sentenced him
to 11 years in prison for ``inciting subversion of state power,'' the
longest known sentence for that crime, simply for exercising his
internationally-recognized right to free expression. According to
Chinese authorities, Liu's conviction was based on Charter 08 and six
essays he wrote.
Liu Xiaobo signed Charter 08, which is a treatise urging political
and legal reforms in China based on constitutional principles. Charter
08 states that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values
of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the
fundamental framework for protecting these values.''
Characteristic of the Chinese government, officials blocked access
to Charter 08. They have questioned, summoned, or otherwise harassed a
large number of Chinese citizens for contributing to or signing that
document.
chinese officials angry over awarding of prize to liu
Chinese officials apparently remain livid over the awarding of the
prize to Liu, and they continue in their campaign to malign Liu and the
Nobel Committee. In addition, they have nearly suspended political
relations with the Norwegian government, claiming the awarding of the
Peace Prize to Liu had done ``great damage'' to the relations between
China and Norway. They blame the Norwegian government because it
``supported this wrong decision.''
liu's legal case
The apparent violations of Chinese legal protections for defendants
that have marred Mr. Liu's case from the outset are numerous and well-
documented. In addition, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary
Detention determined that the Chinese government's detention of Liu and
the house arrest of his wife are indeed arbitrary.
Mr. Liu's trial and sentence demonstrates once again the Chinese
government's failure to uphold its international human rights
obligations and also its failure to abide by procedural norms and
safeguards that meet international standards.
While authorities did allow Liu to attend his father's funeral
memorial service in October, they continue to limit visits from his
wife. Over the past year, authorities have allowed her to visit her
husband only on a few occasions.
Beijing authorities are holding Liu's wife in a de facto form of
house arrest. They have cut off telephone and internet, and have made
her house off-limits to visitors.
liu xiaobo is not alone: chen guangcheng
As we all know, sadly, Liu Xiaobo is not alone. As of September 1,
2011, the CECC's political prisoner database, perhaps the greatest
database in the world, contained information on 1,451 cases of known
political or religious prisoners currently detained.
Chen Guangcheng is one of these prisoners. Chen is a blind, self-
taught legal advocate, who advocated on behalf of farmers, the
disabled, and women forced to undergo abortions. Authorities have held
him under a form of house arrest in Linyi county, Shandong province
since his release from prison in September 2011. In effect, Chen's
prison sentence has not ended.
Chen served over four years in prison on charges of ``intentional
destruction of property'' and ``organizing a group of people to disturb
traffic.'' His real crime, however, was publicizing the abuses of local
one child policy officials and trying to use the Chinese legal system
to seek justice for the victims of those abuses.
For months, officials have confined Chen and his wife in their
home, beaten them, and subjected them to 24hour surveillance. Officials
have set up checkpoints around the village where Chen lives to prevent
journalists and ordinary citizens from visiting him and his family.
According to one report, 37 people who tried to enter the village in
October were attacked by 100 thugs.
Under great pressure, authorities recently allowed Chen's elderly
mother to go out and buy groceries and other supplies, have allowed his
six-year-old daughter to go to school flanked by security, and have
allowed Chen some medicine sent by supporters, although they have not
allowed him to see a doctor about his egregious health problems.
These small concessions mean little in the larger picture. Publicly
available laws do not seem to provide any the legal basis for holding
Chen and his family as prisoners in their own home. I would note
parenthetically that as Chairman of this Commission, I and members and
staff of this Commission tried to meet with Chen on his 40th birthday.
We were denied a visa. We will try in an ongoing attempt to obtain a
visa to visit China on a number of human rights issues, including Chen
Guangcheng.
gao zhisheng
And now there is the case of Gao Zhisheng. Authorities' treatment
of the once acclaimed lawyer, Gao Zhisheng is even more shocking and
illustrates the brutality of some officials. Officials revoked Mr.
Gao's law license in 2005 in response to his brave efforts to represent
fellow Christians accused of ``illegally'' distributing Bibles, and to
defend workers and Falun Gong practitioners. In 2006, officials
sentenced Gao to three years in prison on the charge of ``inciting
subversion,'' but suspended the charge for five years.
The five-year suspended sentence is set to expire later this month.
Today, however, there is no word about Mr. Gao's whereabouts.
After Mr. Gao wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress in 2007
criticizing China's human rights record, officials brutally tortured
him for 50 days, beating him electric prods, abused him with toothpicks
and threatened to kill him if he told anyone of his treatment.
Mr. Gao disappeared into official custody in February 2009. When he
resurfaced briefly in March 2010, he told friends that he would
``disappear again'' if his statements about his treatment by his
captors since 2009 were made public. After authorities disappeared him
again, the press went public about his torture, which included a
beating with guns in holsters for a period of over two days, which
reportedly made him feel close to death.
human rights and political reform
It does not seem appropriate to talk about political reforms in
China when there has been so little progress in improving civil and
political rights and when authorities continue to mistreat people like
Liu, Chen, and Gao. The political prisoners for whom we have names are
just the tip of the iceberg. No one knows how many other citizens in
China are persecuted for their religious or political beliefs.
In mid-February 2011, Chinese authorities launched a broad
crackdown against rights defenders, reform advocates, lawyers,
petitioners, writers, artists, and Internet bloggers. International
observers have described the crackdown as one of the harshest
crackdowns on human rights advocates in years, if not decades. While
authorities have released many of those people they first detained in
February, the rapidity and severity of the crackdown indicates Chinese
authorities remain intolerant of freedom of speech and religion and a
whole of other fundamental freedoms and rights.
Perhaps the drafters of Charter 08 have it right. The Charter notes
that China's policy of ``reform and opening'' has increased living
standards and economic freedoms in China but states that the ``ruling
elite . . . fights off any move toward political change.''
Submission for the Record