From Athens to Beijing
How strong can China be if it is terrified of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu
Xiaobo?
This could have been the year of Greece. The country where Western civilizat
ion was born some 2,500 years ago in a spirit of critical inquiry suddenly o
ffered itself up as a model for where that same civilization may soon end up
. Namely, bankrupt, bailed out and deeply marinated in a culture of entitlem
ent, venality and incompetence.
Then Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday. Now the year belongs
to China.
Freedom or discipline, Athens or Sparta: That's the basic political question
. Nearly anyone who lives under a regime based on an idea of political disci
pline, such as China or Iran or Cuba, wants greater freedom. Without it, lif
e is morally intolerable and often physically so.
Also true, however, is that all free societies are haunted by the fear that
their lack of discipline dooms them in the long run. It's why generations of
Western thinkers—Shaw, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Chomsky—were drawn to
totalitarian regimes. It's why there's such a powerful strain of cultural p
essimism in the conservative movement. It's why so many environmentalists wo
uld gladly suspend democratic norms to combat the notional threat of climate
change.
And it's why so many Westerners make such a fetish of China and its supposed
ly superior ways. They work; we whine. They save for the future; we borrow f
rom it. They build skyscrapers, nuclear plants, airports and cities seemingl
y overnight. We spend years neurotically measuring, then greedily litigating
, asbestos leaks.
Bottom line: They pay an invisible price for their way of civilization in th
e coin of freedom. But we pay a visible price for our way of it in the coin
of efficiency. Reasonable people are entitled to wonder: Are we really getti
ng the better part of that trade-off?
Or at least they were entitled to wonder, until Mr. Liu won his prize. Who i
s he? To ask the question (and the questions that inevitably follow) is like
pulling on a frayed thread in the otherwise seamless fabric that is suppose
d to be modern, confident and ascendant China.
Mr. Liu is a literary critic who became a political dissident around the tim
e of the Tiananmen massacre. What is his crime? He's a repeat offender, but
most recently he became involved in the Charter 08 movement. What's Charter
08? It's a human-rights manifesto, modeled on the Charter 77 movement that b
rought Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel to prominence, which says that the Chin
ese people "see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are univers
al values." To what was Mr. Liu sentenced for putting his name to that line?
Eleven years in prison. On what grounds? "Incitement to subvert state power
."
The thread grows longer. Who else has signed Charter 08? So far, more than 8
,000 Chinese have put their names to it. Are there other political prisoners
in China? The Congressional-Executive Commission on China documents 1,383 p
olitical prisoners known to be detained or imprisoned as of July 2010. Is th
at the total figure? No: the State Department's human rights report on China
estimates that "tens of thousands of political prisoners" (including religi
ous prisoners) remain incarcerated.
Who are some of these people? There's Wang Bingzhang, a longtime democracy a
ctivist serving a life sentence in solitary confinement. There's Shi Tao, a
journalist serving a 10-year sentence for passing along notes of an editoria
l meeting to a U.S.-based website. There's Hu Jia, an activist serving a thr
ee-year sentence for writing essays critical of the Communist Party in the r
unup to the Olympics. There's Gao Zhisheng, a human-rights lawyer who simply
disappeared in 2009.
Where do political prisoners serve their terms? Often in an archipelago of l
abor camps scattered across China called Laogai. How many camps are there? A
t least 909, according to the Laogai Research Foundation. How many prisoners
? The low-end estimate is 250,000; the high-end is five million. How does th
e existence of these camps affect broader Chinese society? The Laogai "is mo
re than a place where rights are violated directly, with beatings, medical n
eglect and forced labor," writes Columbia Prof. Andrew Nathan in "Laogai," a
devastating recent book on the subject. "It is also the anchor end of a con
tinuum of rights-violating methods that the regime uses to enforce its form
of rule."
Two final questions: First, what does all this say about China? Last year, H
illary Clinton insisted that human rights could not interfere with the total
ity of the U.S.-China relationship. That is not possible. Repression isn't j
ust woven into the fabric of Chinese life. It is the warp and woof. The regi
me has gone to extraordinary lengths to disguise that fact, just as it disgu
ises the rest of its weaknesses. But a Nobel for Mr. Liu is the disentanglin
g thread—not on Western terms, but on Chinese ones. How powerful can a stat
e be if it is terrified of a single man?
The second question is about the West. No doubt the travails of Greece expos
e an Achilles heel. But the real test of the West isn't fiscal. It's moral.
Are we willing to pay a small price to keep faith with a lone dissident, one
who is willing to pay a large price to keep faith with us? Last week we did
. Which is why the West may not be a spent force after all, and why the year
belongs to China—the China of Mr. Liu.
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