Last year was a tough one for Chinese dissidents. With the Communist Party keen for stability as the leadership transition unfolds, 2012 could well be worse.
Strike hard and take prisoners. That’s the Chinese government’s message on how it will respond to perceived dissent in this Dragon year of 2012.
Just ask the writers Chen Xi, Chen Wei, and Li Tie. Chen Wei received a nine year prison term on December 23 on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” for on-line government criticism. Three days later, a Guiyang court handed down a 10-year sentence on the same charge to Chen Xi, for similar on-line criticism of China’s one-party rule. Then, on January 18 of this year, a Wuhan court sentenced Li Tie to a 10 year prison term for “subversion of state power” for writings that included reference to the official taboo topic of the June 1989 Tiananmen massacre.
Other victims of the Chinese government’s spate of politically motivated court rulings include the disappeared human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng. On December 16, a Beijing court abruptly withdrew Gao’s grant of probation and ordered him to serve the entirety of a three-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power,” handed down on December 22, 2006. The court justified its decision on the basis that Gao had “seriously violated probation rules” despite the fact that he had been the victim of an apparent enforced disappearance – and thus in police custody – since April 2010. The Chinese government also targeted the disabled housing rights activist Ni Yulan and her husband Dong Jiqing. The couple faced trial on December 29 on spurious charges of “creating a disturbance” and “fraud” and currently awaits sentencing. And on January 18, police charged veteran human rights activist Zhu Yufu with “inciting subversion of state power” for writings including a poem that police interpreted as a call for popular unrest against one-party rule.
These cases represent more than the Chinese government’s well-documented contempt for freedom of expression explicitly guaranteed in Article 35 of the Constitution. They are also clear efforts to breed fear and sow silence among China’s beleaguered community of human rights defenders and civil society activists. The aim: to ensure that the 12-month senior Communist Party leadership transition this year proceeds without public challenges to the Party’s 61-year monopoly on power. China’s President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao are preparing to step aside for a new generation of leaders, widely touted to be Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, in a secretive political succession that won’t be complete until in March 2013.
The Chinese government has reason to be nervous about its political legitimacy. It has delivered some impressive economic growth and boosted living standards at the price of an authoritarian one-party state which denies most citizens’ basic rights and freedoms and victimizes those who protest such abuses. It imposes sharp curbs on freedom of expression, association, and religion; openly rejects judicial independence and press freedom; and arbitrarily restricts and suppresses human rights defenders and organizations, often through extra-judicial measures. Despite that repression, Chinese citizens are increasingly aware of their rights and more vocal when they’re denied. By the government’s own numbers, more than 100,000 “mass incidents” or protests are estimated to occur annually in China, and the Chinese government now budgets more funds for “social stability maintenance” to contain outbreaks of popular discontent than for national defense.
But while repression is nothing new in China, the government’s intolerance toward perceived dissent has grown since the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Its victims include imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion” over his role in drafting Charter ’08, an online petition advocating peaceful political change in China. His wife, Liu Xia, who hasn’t been charged with any crime, is believed to be under house arrest to prevent her from campaigning on her husband’s behalf. In February 2011, she said in a brief online exchange that she and her family were like “hostages” and that she felt “miserable.”
Such repression is likely to only worsen in 2012 due to lingering official unease about the “Arab spring” and the vulnerabilities it exposed in previously rock-solid authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. In response, beginning in February 2011, Chinese security agencies rounded up dozens of the country’s most outspoken critics, including the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, and “disappeared” them for weeks outside of any legal protection and judicial procedure. Upon their release, several of those individuals reported being subjected to forced sleep deprivation, interrogations, and threats while in custody.
Photo Credit: Flickr / Mooney47
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John Chan
USA is not a democratic society, and it never intends to be one. USA is a polyarchy.
USA’s Patriotic Act was passed without public and congress debate. Since the pass of Patriotic Act, the right to Freedom of speech, the right to freedom of assembly and the right to freedom of fair trail are no longer protected by the law in the USA; the pass of Patriotic Act, Amendments 4 and 6 to the bill of right are deadened; yet Americans made no protest at all against such tramp on their constitutional rights.
If it is true that “China’s draft criminal procedure law to effectively legalize such disappearances, which remain a serious crime in international law,” then it seems China is following the wrong model, it is implementing USA’s Patriotic Act in China; since there is no outcry against USA’s Patriotic Act a serious crime in international law, it must mislead China to believe that legalize disappearances is an acceptable norm in international community and is not a violation of human rights.
Indeed, the USA, EU and the UK must act what they preach regarding human rights, failure to do so will only prove they are hypocrites, and they don’t say what they meant.
Butter
And Washington and America preached about “superior values”. Maybe “hypocrisy” is one of them. Washington and its brainwashed citizens by Big Business, are not exactly good role models for the world. So don’t preach to another civilization which have other resources to draw from.
GK
Without careful concerns about the benefit of majority, those dissidents are basically reckless. To be honest, I tend to look them as traitors.
If they put more energy on substantial social challenges real facing, I’d like to respect them as heroes. Unfortunately, they are too ignorant, thus majority Chinese won’t support them.