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Battle opens over China's future

By Chris Buckley

Paramilitary policemen march during a flag-raising ceremony in Qingdao, Shandong province in this 1 October 2008 file photo.Reuters/China

The new year is not here yet but already China’s government and dissidents are in battle over how to mark 2009, a year that will be overshadowed by contentious anniversaries and economic woes.

Chinese President Hu Jintao told officials on Thursday that Communist Party rule must not waver. But “Charter 08,” a petition campaign launched last week, wants dramatic democratic changes to end decades of uncontested Party control.

There is no doubting the defiant ambition of the fast-growing campaign, said Wang Yi, a law lecturer and rights campaigner who signed its list of 18 demands.

“This marks a shift from the past,” Wang said by phone from his home in Chengdu, in the country’s southwest. “We’re offering not only criticism but also our own quite comprehensive proposal for China’s future … and this includes a whole sweep of people, from former Party officials to dissidents.”

There is also no doubting the anxiety of China’s leaders, laden with an abrupt economic slowdown, gathering discontent over unemployment, and next year the touchy 20th anniversary of the bloody June 4 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement.

Authorities have already detained Liu Xiaobo , a prominent participant in the 1989 protests who helped organize the Charter. Other organizers have said they were briefly held by police. But some said they are ready for imprisonment.

“This will be a long-term endeavor, like Charter 77,” said Zhang Zuhua, one of the movement organizers, referring to the Czech dissident campaign launched in the 1970s that inspired China’s.

“When I was questioned, I told the police I don’t want to be arrested, but if they do jail me, I will be ready for it, whether it’s a year or a dozen or more,” he said, sipping ice coffee in the backroom of a cafe in west Beijing.

China is thus set for a year of unsettling contention, pitting emboldened dissidents against a one-Party state that prizes unchallenged control — and all this as the economic slowdown fans memories of the woes before the 1989 protests.

“Of course, this document hopes to advance political reform at the time of the 20th anniversary,” said Wang. “We need to escape this bind we’re caught in of a market economy and a top-down high-pressure political system. It’s at a dead-end.”

A “stake in the sand”

China is in thrall to political anniversaries in a way few nations are, and 2009 will bring an abundance of dates that the ruling Communist Party will either celebrate or tip-toe around.

As well as June 4 and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China , there is the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet to exile in India after a failed uprising, and the 90th anniversary of the May Four student protest movement that called for “science and democracy.”

Zhang, the former Communist Youth League official who helped draft Charter 08, said organizers decided to launch it before police stifled activists using detentions and house arrests.

Charter 08 demands rule of law with an independent judiciary, open democratic elections and a federal government that would grant a measure of autonomy to Tibet.

Many measured words in the Charter echo a lot of the Party’s own vows. But taken in full it amounts to a “stake in the sand” that could mark a turning point for Chinese political debate, said Perry Link , a professor at the University of California, Riverside, with long-standing ties to the country’s dissidents.

“It is the first time in PRC history that a group has taken a public stand against one-Party rule,” said Link in an email. His English translation of the Charter can be found on the website of the New York Review of Books (www.nybooks.com).

“This is more than what the Communist Party has always called ‘reform’. It calls for more fundamental change,” said Link.

The movement is also striking for its range of inspirations and support. It consciously echoes the Charter 77 movement, which challenged Communist Party power in Czechoslovakia years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and division of that country.

The original 303 signatories of Charter 08 include lawyers, professors, business people, rural activists and artists.

Thousands more citizens have since signed via the internet or sent messages of support, said Zhang. They included university students, migrant workers and high-school students, he said.

“This time the Internet has played a big role,” he said of the Charter’s fast spread. “There’s a bunch of young people who have been putting it up on message boards all the time, faster than it can be taken down.”

The Communist Party has so far kept mute about this challenge. But the detention of Liu Xiaobo was a clear enough response. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, has repeatedly gone to police to ask for him after officers took him last week. But she has received no information, said Zhang, who stays in touch with her.

“It’s clear that state security wants to build a case against him,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a specialist on China for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

China’s leaders believe they have found the right recipe for their country’s return to strength and prosperity: market-driven growth and one-party control. But the slowed growth of recent months and a rising reservoir of jobless workers and graduates has officials worried.

Charter 08 on its own is most unlikely to stoke such discontent into anything like the 1989 protests, when workers and small business owners joined students in denouncing corruption and top-down rule. The Party used troops to crush that challenge, killing hundreds, some critics say thousands.

Judging the Party’s recent handling of dissidents, officials may attack Charter 08 with selective arrests and trials. But that may not silence core supporters of the Charter, especially if broader ripples of discontent erode Party authority.

“The Party has always relied on a combination of carrots and sticks,” said Bequelin. “If it is unable to distribute as many carrots, the stick loses its efficiency.”

Copyright © 2008 Thomson Reuters

Published in Reuters.com