"We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes"– Charter 08, the 2008 dissident manifesto for free speech, open elections and the rule of law in China endorsed by 12,000 online signatures.
Liu Xiaobo’s word crimes, the Charter 08 petition itself and several online essays advocating peaceful reform, were deemed so venal that in December last year he was sentenced, for “inciting subversion of state power”, to 11 years in jail and a further two years’ deprivation of political rights. He is serving it far from home in the northern province of Jinzhou, allowed to see relatives for an hour a month and deprived of access to news. Whether he even knows yet he has won the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace is unclear.
Liu, an academic who has been involved for decades in a non-violent struggle for human rights, was prosecuted for violating rights notionally guaranteed in China’s fundamental law but in reality more observed in the breach. Article 35 of the 1982 constitution proclaims that “citizens . . . enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration”, and a 2004 amendment insists that “the State respects and protects human rights”.
Charter 08, published to mark the 60th anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and like its inspiration, Charter 77, which laid the basis for Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, was precisely a demand that the authorities honour the obligations to which they ostensibly subscribe. Liu, China’s Vaclav Havel, had previously also served three years for suggesting in a similar vein that Communist Party chief Jiang Zemin be indicted for violating the constitution for saying the Chinese army was under the “absolute leadership” of the party instead of the state.
The 2009 charges against him reflected a significant political hardening of attitude by the Communist Party, a trend that began before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and they belie the promise that the party is slowly embracing democratic values. China’s virulent response to the Nobel decision – describing Liu as a criminal and the award an “obscenity” – and its warning to Norway that it would suffer diplomatically are typical of the bullying approach it has also adopted to international recognition of Tibet’s exiled Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama.
True to form, Beijing blocked reception of the BBC and CNN, among others, in a futile attempt to conceal the news from its own people. Ironically, its approach reflects an implicit admission of both its vulnerability and lack of political legitimacy in the face of the country’s tiny human rights movement which will be enormously buoyed by the award.
Liu joins the distinguished band of rights activists honoured by the Nobel committee for their involvement in the struggle for peaceful political reform – Kim Dae-jung, Lech Walesa, the Dalai Lama, Rigoberta Menchú, Martin Luther King, Andrei Sakharov, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi . . . Word criminals all. And like Aung, he should be freed immediately.