Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; New York: Columbia University Press [distributor], 2012. xi, 381 pp. (Figures.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-988-8139-07-1.
Edited by three specialists in Chinese studies from Paris and Hong Kong, this volume provides an excellent and wide-ranging analysis of the Charter 08 initiative for the gradual and peaceful democratization of China, and events swirling around the intellectual who became the PRC Party-state’s main scapegoat in its heavy-handed crackdown on this initiative, the professor and activist Liu Xiaobo. The book consists of thirteen chapters, many interspersed Chinese characters, detailed endnotes, an index, notes on contributors, and appendices containing documents such as the entirety of Charter 08 (except for its list of the original 303 PRC signatories). These signatories hail from all walks of life, including farmers and workers, though most of them belong to the intelligentsia.
Because the editors’ jointly authored introduction succinctly summarizes the content of each of the thirteen chapters, this review will focus instead on some of the overarching themes of the book. One such theme is the issue of overseas influences akin to Vaclav Havel’s call to “live in truth” even under one-party authoritarian rule, an infectious idea that Jean-Philippe Béja’s chapter explores in the context of Liu Xiaobo’s life and thought. Charter 08 owes its title and part of its reformist spirit to the Czechoslovakian Charta 77, in which Vaclav Havel and other late-1970s public-spirited Czechs similarly petitioned their single-party Leninist authoritarian regime leaders to correct severe shortcomings in implementing internationally recognized protections of human rights and the rule of law: in the Czech case, the 1975 Helsinki Accords. As Michaela Kotyzova’s chapter points out in comparing Charter 08 with Charta 77, the two authoritarian regimes’ crackdowns were similarly ferocious in striking hard at selected ringleaders, though the PRC chartists have received less support from international media than did their Czech forebears, as well as having had to grapple with a more economically and geopolitically formidable regime. However, the Chinese regime is dogged by internet blogging, as well as burdened with a much higher Gini coefficient of socio-economic inequality than its old Czechoslovakian counterpart. Therefore, an ever-larger share of PRC governmental resources have to be poured into police-state “stability maintenance,” which has even exceeded rapidly rising military outlays in recent years.
Whatever inspiration the Charter 08 signatories gained from overseas sources such as Charta 77 and the UN Declaration of Human Rights, their initiative was mainly a response to growing domestic frustrations resulting from the Party-state’s stalling of political and legal reforms while pushing single-mindedly for rapid economic growth at the expense of the deteriorating environment and worsening political corruption. This has occurred in the context of an appalling lack of accountability to China’s populace stemming from the Communist Party’s monopolistic control or manipulation of the government, military, police, courts, educational system and media. Eva Pils’ chapter discusses how heavy-handed PRC police-state repression of homegrown populist human-rights groups such as the Rights Defending (weiquan) Movement has tended to drive some beleaguered activists of these movements toward responding with violence in kind, quite to the contrary of Liu Xiaobo’s non-violent ideals and Charter 08’s call for peaceful change in the spirit of constitutionalism. The human-rights lawyer and activist Teng Biao’s chapter instead focuses on the Maoist totalitarian legacy of the post-totalitarian 1997 statute against “Inciting Subversion of State Power”; Teng explores the Party-state’s use of this law to silence dissent and intimidate well-meaning reformers such as Liu Xiaobo, noting that much of the theoretical critique of such repressive statutes comes not from the West but from home-grown scholar-activists such as Hu Ping and Ben Xu.
By aggregating data on PRC dissidents convicted of “inciting subversion” and presenting it in the form of graphs, Joshua Rosenzweig’s chapter demonstrates why Liu Xiaobo’s eleven-year jail sentence was unusually shocking, especially to the intelligentsia: it was the lengthiest known sentence for this specific “crime” of incitement for several years running, amounting to over twice the length of the median sentence in this category. Moreover, Liu’s eleven-year sentence seemed to buck the trend of a decreasing number of convictions in Hu Jintao’s reign as compared to the last few years under Jiang Zemin around the turn of the century, thereby signaling a move backward towards increasing intolerance and repression of liberal and democratic thought by the Party-state. Film professor Cui Weiping’s chapter details her bold response to Liu’s shocking eleven-year sentence, which was to solicit short paragraph-length comments on Liu’s sentence from 148 veteran Chinese intellectuals and post them as “tweets” on Twitter, which although banned in the PRC is accessible through a VPN that can leap over the “Great Firewall of China.” Over twenty of these tweets have been appended in full to this chapter, providing a fascinating sample of the Chinese intelligentsia’s reactions to the draconian sentence of 25 December 2009. As for how PRC human-rights lawyers have approached Liu Xiaobo’s trial and similar cases, the chapters by Mo Shaoping et al. and Fu Hualing analyze some key strategies that such defense lawyers have used to criticize prosecutorial abuses of legal procedure and question the soundness of the prosecutor’s argument alleging criminal wrongdoing.
While the concept of human dignity is of Western origin, Man Yee Karen Lee’s chapter on its growing importance in post-Mao China and particularly in Charter 08 reveals how this concept resonates with some ancient Confucian ideals and has become so domesticated within the PRC as to have commonly appeared in former Premier Wen Jiabao’s public statements in favour of political reform. However, the chapter by Pitman B. Potter and Sophia Woodman reminds us that the PRC’s hierarchically “segmented” politics typically attaches more importance to the status of the speaker than to the content of the message. Because of this, similar appeals to the importance of dignity and political reform would be tolerated from the premier and yet punished when uttered by a dissident like Liu Xiaobo.
Though this book would have benefited from more stringent copy-editing in some of the chapters, its careful documentation of source materials and high standard of argumentation throughout make it an invaluable guide to the major political and legal issues swirling around Charter 08 and Liu Xiaobo. One might take issue with a given contributor on this or that issue, but each of the volume’s thirteen chapters makes for a riveting read while interweaving and amplifying ideas addressed in proximate chapters.
Philip F. Williams
Montana State University, Bozeman, USA
pp. 129-131