Wang Ju PAI AN | Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08: I Have No Enemies | Text Version

A couple of days ago, I did a program on Liu Xiaobo and the June Fourth Incident. After the program aired, an audience member left a message saying, “Wang Ju, if you want to talk about Liu Xiaobo, you must talk about ‘Charter 08,’ and not just Liu Xiaobo and June Fourth.” Because in the entire June Fourth movement, Liu Xiaobo was not actually a particularly core figure. At most, he was just a bystander in the early days. It was only during the clearing of Tiananmen Square on the night of June Fourth that he was an important witness and participant. And throughout Liu Xiaobo’s life, his most important highlight was undoubtedly the signing process of ‘Charter 08.’

I completely agree with this view. So when I was making this program on Liu Xiaobo and June Fourth, I had already planned to do an episode on the story of Liu Xiaobo and ‘Charter 08.’ In my opinion, ‘Charter 08’ was the largest-scale non-governmental opposition movement organized by Chinese intellectuals of the June Fourth generation after June Fourth. Why do I say this? You can look at the drafters of ‘Charter 08,’ Liu Xiaobo and Zhang Bolai, as well as some important signatories such as He Weifang, and even older figures like Mao Yushi and Bao Zunxin. Their intellectual maturity all came from the era of the 1980s, when a hundred schools of thought contended and thought was liberated.

That vibrant era cultivated a generation of independent Chinese intellectuals. Relatively speaking, most of these independent intellectuals had experienced the 1989 June Fourth movement. They witnessed the CCP’s massacre of the student movement and also witnessed the setbacks of China’s democratic reform movement. Therefore, most of these intellectuals have very strong feelings about June Fourth. They hope that China’s democratic movement will not be interrupted because of June Fourth. Therefore, after 1989, these intellectuals who remained in China, regardless of whether they were engaged in non-governmental opposition movements, mostly hoped to continue to promote China’s ideological liberation through non-governmental opposition movements and ideological liberation movements, and ultimately achieve institutional change.

Ultimately, all this formed ‘Charter 08.’ Therefore, when writing Chinese history in the future, especially the history of China’s institutional transformation, ‘Charter 08’ will be an unavoidable chapter.

Some people often ask me, so many people participated in June Fourth back then, especially intellectuals like you who were not students, the so-called “black hands” of that time. Now many people have gradually gone on to do other things: doing business, going abroad, or returning to the system after going abroad, teaching in universities, or even entering government departments. There are people from all walks of life. So why do you still persist in this matter after twenty years? You can’t publish any articles in China, can’t accept any interviews, can’t hold any positions in any organization, and only rely on your own writing?

After the June Fourth Incident in 1989, Liu Xiaobo was actually arrested by the Communist Party and imprisoned in Qincheng Prison. At that time, Liu Xiaobo was defined as an elite and a black hand of the turmoil, meaning that he was a very important cultural and ideological figure who led students astray during the June Fourth Incident. Because he made many shocking remarks at the time, such as China needing 300 years of colonialism to achieve democracy and freedom, and so on.

So after the June Fourth Incident, he initially hid in a diplomatic apartment, and was arrested after coming out, and was imprisoned in Qincheng Prison. Liu Xiaobo initially thought he would be sentenced to a long prison term, but later the Communist Party found him and hoped that he could write a confession, and then he could be treated leniently. After a fierce ideological struggle, Liu Xiaobo wrote this confession, and admitted the contents of the confession in court, and also cooperated with the interview of China Central Television, claiming that there were no casualties during the clearing of Tiananmen Square.

Liu Xiaobo’s compromise at the time had a special background. The authorities put pressure on his father, who was a professor at a military academy, and even knelt down to him in prison, asking him to repent and compromise. We can imagine that compromise in such extreme circumstances can be forgiven. So in the second half of 1990, Liu Xiaobo was released from prison, and it should be said that the sentence was relatively light.

But after being released from prison, Liu Xiaobo basically lost his job and went from being a literary theory critic to a dissident. According to Liu Xiaobo’s good friend Xu Youyu’s recollection, Liu Xiaobo’s thinking changed a lot after the June Fourth Incident. A very important change was that this person gradually became very gentle from his past very radical posture. Not only was he gentle in his thinking, but he also became gentle in his dealings with people.

The early Liu Xiaobo was very arrogant, but later, in many gatherings, he gradually became a core figure in the Beijing intellectual circles. In this core, he was very humble and could deal with people from all sides, not only with people outside the system, but also with people inside the system.

Xu Youyu gave an example. Despite this, the sharpness in Liu Xiaobo’s heart was not lost. For example, in a Beijing dinner party, there was a figure named Kuai Dafu, one of the five major leaders during the Cultural Revolution, and the head of the rebel faction at Tsinghua University. Later, he fell out of favor and was arrested. After the reform and opening up, he was also keen to participate in these dinner parties, and eventually became familiar with Liu Xiaobo. At dinner parties, Kuai Dafu would always take out his phone to show everyone his photos with Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing, and he would be very proud of his interactions with those national leaders, and at the same time, he would also express his gratitude to Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing.

At first, everyone thought it was fresh, but gradually, this practice made everyone feel uncomfortable. Most people would not say it out loud, but Liu Xiaobo said to Kuai Dafu very bluntly: “Your practice, the first time everyone thinks it’s fresh, the second time they feel awkward, and the third time they may feel a little ridiculous and sad. You have always lived in the world of the Cultural Revolution and have never come out.”

Xu Youyu believes that although Liu Xiaobo’s sharpness has changed, his outspokenness about unreasonable phenomena still exists. There are two reasons for Liu Xiaobo’s personality change: the first reason is that he was constantly imprisoned. After the June Fourth Incident, he was imprisoned four times. When he was in prison, he could not communicate with others and could only face his thoughts alone. The second reason is reading. During his imprisonment, he repeatedly read books, which played a very important role in his ideological evolution or sublimation.

After Liu Xiaobo was released from prison in 1991, he was still active in Beijing, and later met his wife Liu Xia. He divorced his first wife, Tao Li, during his time in Qincheng Prison. After being released from prison, he mainly engaged in political activities, on the one hand writing political commentary, and on the other hand organizing signature campaigns.

For example, in 1995, he organized a signature campaign, writing an open letter to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, demanding the establishment of a special anti-corruption committee, and promoting judicial independence and the nationalization of the military. At that time, more than a dozen people signed with him, which attracted the attention of the relevant departments, but no action was taken. Soon after, he wrote a call for the sixth anniversary of June Fourth, proposing to establish a press and publication law, an association law, and a constitutional court, etc. This touched the bottom line of the CCP, because at that time, the evaluation of June Fourth was high-pressure, and it was not allowed to mention the rehabilitation of June Fourth, nor was it allowed to mention positive factors.

Liu Xiaobo’s call for the sixth anniversary of June Fourth violated two major taboos: one was that June Fourth could not be mentioned at all, and the other was that the content of press and publication, freedom of association, and the constitutional court directly touched the roots of the Communist Party. So in that year, he was arrested for the second time. This time, he was not sentenced, but was placed under residential surveillance. This residential surveillance lasted for more than a year, from 1995 to 1996.

In 1996, he was arrested again a few days after he came out. This time it was because he and a group of intellectuals organized a Double Ten Agreement, calling on the CCP and the Kuomintang of Taiwan to negotiate, abandon historical grievances, and promote national reunification. The content mentioned in the Double Ten Agreement, such as the people’s democracy and freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the nationalization of the military, was very sensitive in the eyes of the CCP at that time.

The content of the Double Ten Agreement was considered to be “the voice of history,” because the Communist Party had a newspaper called “Xinhua Daily” in the Kuomintang-controlled areas in the early days, which published articles advocating democracy and freedom, the nationalization of the military, and party elections, etc. These articles posed a great threat to the Kuomintang’s rule at the time, making people feel that the Communist Party was a party that advocated democracy.

However, after the Communist Party came to power, these remarks became taboo. Liu Xiaobo’s Double Ten Agreement was considered to be using the Communist Party’s early remarks to slap the current Communist Party in the face, and as a result, he was sentenced to three years of re-education through labor and imprisoned in Dalian, Liaoning.

During 1997 and 1998, US President Clinton visited China, and there was a lot of controversy between China and the US on human rights issues. The US hoped that China would release some dissidents and let them go to the US. The CCP actually compromised and released Wang Dan, Wang Juntao, Wei Jingsheng, and others. Liu Xiaobo was also proposed to be allowed to go to the US for medical parole, but he refused, believing that he had already served half of his three-year re-education through labor term and could get through it. Ultimately, he chose to stay in China and continue his opposition movement.

From his release from prison in 1999 to 2008, Liu Xiaobo was not arrested again, but his life was frequently monitored by the Communist Party. This monitoring started from his release in 1990 and continued until 2008. The level of monitoring of Liu Xiaobo by the Communist Party was indeed very high. There was a guardhouse at his doorstep, and there were also people in the opposite building who were specifically monitoring him. On sensitive dates, he was sometimes not allowed to go out, and once he went out, he would be followed by the police.

Liu Xiaobo himself also mentioned many similar examples in interviews. Once, he and his wife went to the east side to eat with Wang Shuo. They waited for a long time but couldn’t get a taxi, so they had to take a bus. The police car followed all the way, and even used a small motorcycle to arrive at each bus stop in advance. This kind of monitoring made Liu Xiaobo’s life full of drama.

Liu Xiaobo was constantly monitored in his life, but he still engaged in his non-governmental opposition movement. He wrote open letters and appeals to the CCP authorities, and organized signature campaigns. The most important achievement was “Charter 08.” He hoped to show the existence of opposition forces through these actions and continuously promote China’s constitutional reform.

‘Charter 08’ is an important expression of Chinese intellectuals on China’s democratic process. In the future writing of Chinese history, especially in the history of China’s institutional transformation, ‘Charter 08’ will be an important chapter that cannot be avoided. Liu Xiaobo paid a huge personal price for this, but he firmly believed in his beliefs, insisted on criticizing the autocratic system, and sought historical justice for June Fourth and for those who died.

Liu Xiaobo was finally tried in 2009, and his thinking also underwent a transformation in this process. Although he was a radical thinker in his early years, after 20 years of ideological evolution, he gradually moved towards the realm of “I have no enemies.” This concept of non-violent non-cooperation became an important label in his opposition movement.

In a big country like China, future political changes will definitely be endogenous, and this endogenous change process needs political leaders with moral appeal. Liu Xiaobo is undoubtedly the closest figure to this image in China’s political opposition movement. Although he still has a gap compared to Mandela and Gandhi, he is the most influential political opposition movement leader in China in the past 30 years.

Liu Xiaobo died of liver cancer in 2017, and his death marked the beginning of a low tide in China’s political opposition movement. The CCP’s suppression of opposition forces is also becoming more and more experienced, by driving dissidents out of the country, or long-term imprisonment, making them out of touch with society, and the opposition movement is difficult to gain momentum. However, the trend of history is rolling forward, and those who follow it will prosper, and those who go against it will perish. In the future, the ideal of democratic constitutionalism will eventually be realized, and the sacrifices of Liu Xiaobo and others will also be respected and recognized by future generations.