Quartz: Liu Xia, widow of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo, might be free at last—thanks to Germany

If the reports that she’s been released to Germany are true, it would mark an end to nearly a decade of unofficial detention for Liu Xia—who has been kept under strict state surveillance since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2010. The award came a year into Liu Xiaobo’s 11-year prison sentence for “subversion of state power” for co-authoring a manifesto in 2008 that called for fundamental changes in China’s governance. Few are allowed to visit her and plainclothes police patrol around her Beijing apartment. Those close to her say she suffers from heart ailments and depression, and has many times asked to leave China.

It’s also a big win for Germany, one of the few countries allowed to send a doctor to China last year to examine Liu Xiaobo. The country has been raising human rights issues and the situation of Liu Xia on multiple occasions with China, a major trade partner and investor. While in Beijing in May, German chancellor Angela Merkel met with the wife of a detained human rights lawyer. On the same visit, at a joint press conference with Merkel, Chinese premier Li Keqiang said China was prepared to discuss “relevant individual cases” with Germany. [...]

On Chinese social media, some are expressing their happiness for her—obliquely, of course, so as to avoid censorship. On the microblog Weibo, one user based in Germany wrote (link in Chinese), “Willkommen in Deutschland! Willkommen in die freie Welt!! Welcome to Germany, to the free world!”

read the article

The Atlantic: Trump Is Preparing for a New Cold War

There are problems with this. President Trump’s national security documents make “competition” sound like an inevitability rather than a choice. Thus, they skip over a critical question: When can America best achieve its interests not by competing with China and Russia but by trying to cooperate with them? It’s no coincidence that the same National Security Strategy that downplays the importance of great cooperation also omits the words “climate change.” [...]

It’s the latest evidence that, in the words of Freedom House, “China’s authoritarian regime has become increasingly repressive in recent years. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tightening its control over the media, online speech, religious groups, and civil society associations while undermining already modest rule-of-law reforms.” Last summer, Beijing became the first regime since Nazi Germany to have a Nobel Prize winner, the heroic intellectual Liu Xiaobo, die as a prisoner of the state. [...]

Not many people around the world likely saw the Axios report. But many have noted that the United States, under Trump, exhibits less respect for the liberal and democratic norms they admire. Over the past few years, Pew has asked people around the world, “Do you think the government of the U.S. respects the personal freedoms of its people?” Between 2013 and 2017, the percentage answering “yes” dropped 12 points in the Philippines, 13 points in Indonesia, 16 points in Japan and 25 points in Australia. By vast margins, non-Americans also disapprove of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership and his threats to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal, ban Muslims from entering the United States, and build a wall along America’s southern border. In Trump, they see a leader who respects neither human dignity nor the rule of law at home or abroad. Which is perhaps why, between Obama’s last year in office and Trump’s first, the percentage of non-Americans who expressed confidence that America’s president will “do the right thing regarding world affairs” dropped a massive 42 points.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: Beijing’s Bold New Censorship

Authoritarians, in China and elsewhere, normally have preferred to dress their authoritarianism up in pretty clothes. Lenin called the version of dictatorship he invented in 1921 “democratic centralism,” but it became clear, especially after Stalin and Mao inherited the system, that centralism, not democracy, was the point. More recent examples of prettifying include “The Republic of Zimbabwe,” “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” and several others. What would be wrong with plainer labels? The Authoritarian State of Zimbabwe? The Shining Dictatorship of Korea? That dictators avoid candidly describing their regimes shows that, at least in their use of words, they acknowledge the superiority of freedom and democracy. [...]

The art of controlling speech while avoiding the appearance of doing so has lasted through the ensuing decades. In the 2000s, explicit instructions went out to provincial officials that they avoid putting any censorship or blacklisting into writing. To kill an article, officials should get on the telephone and instruct editors orally.

Similarly, serious speech-crime offenders—people being sent to prison for years—were charged under face-saving euphemisms: tax evasion, fraud, even “blocking traffic,” or simply “picking quarrels.” The most fearful charge, “inciting subversion of the state,” which is reserved for extreme cases, is the only one that comes close to saying what is actually happening. [...]

In 2013, his government’s “Document Nine” warned Party members about the dangers of “universal values,” “Western-style journalism,” “civil society,” and other such ideas. Document Nine was technically classified, but it was distributed within the Party to millions of people and eventually was leaked outside the Party. In July 2015, a nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers was similarly bald. Face-saving references to the lawyers as “thugs” or “swindlers” hardly mattered; the real message, which everyone understood, was: Here comes the Party’s power. 

The New York Review of Books: Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who Stayed

When the Tiananmen protests erupted, Liu was abroad but chose to return. After the protesters were bloodily suppressed, many of the Tiananmen leaders who could left the country; Liu, too, after a brief stint in prison, had opportunities to leave. But like Tan Sitong, he chose to stay in China, where he mattered most. Even after a second, harsher stint in jail, Liu was determined to remain and keep pushing for basic political rights. He was risking not the immediate arrival of soldiers, but the inevitable and life-threatening imprisonment that befalls all people who challenge state power in China today. [...]

This didn’t mean shunning protests or direct action, but prioritizing the more realistic and—even though Liu often provocatively said he was in favor of complete westernization—very Confucian idea of promoting social change through one’s own life and actions. He said Chinese should study “the non-democratic way we live,” and “consciously attempt to put democratic ideals into practice in our own personal relationships (between teachers and students, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and between friends).”

Liu’s moderation culminated in Charter 08, a petition for political change that relied heavily on rights already enshrined in China’s constitution and in internationally recognized UN treaties. He helped draft Charter 08’s careful language, and he did much to persuade others to sign it. As a result, in 2009 he was sentenced to eleven years for “subversion of state power.” [...]

In a way, this is in fact the crux of the issue: what is China’s historic arc? China’s authoritarian leaders justified their reign through mysticism: that the forces of history had chosen the Communist Party. Then, after thirty years of political upheaval and famines ended in the late 1970s, the Party adopted the role of a development dictatorship: it developed, therefore it ruled.

read the article