No doubt you both immediately noticed that this open letter does not address Mr. Hu Jintao as "President of the People's Republic of China." This is because the term "People's Republic of China" contains three falsehoods: "People's" – is it the people's or the people's wishes that are deliberately twisted and soiled? "Republic" – is it a republic or a dictatorial and totalitarian regime that refuses democratic elections? And is it "China" or the Communist Mainland that continues to threaten, with armed aggression, Taiwan that is also part of Chinese culture? The first-named recipient of this letter is not, therefore, the leader of China; rather, he is the head of a cabal that owes vast and countless debts.
The second-named recipient of this letter is the democratically elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The reason for including Mr. Blair as a recipient of this letter is as follows: a Falun Gong practitioner who sat opposite the Chinese embassy in London in silent peaceful protest against the Chinese government's persecution of Falun Gong, was physically attacked by a person who had emerged from the embassy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is extending its thug-style excesses from its own domain to attack the foundations of democracy abroad. This is a public insult to all humanity and conscience, and we implore you, Prime Minister Blair, to devote particular attention to this matter.
Images of the Cold War are still with us. The evil logic of communist ideology is still clear and distinct: with vacuous idealism as the appeal and "economic determinism" and "historical evolution" as the blood-drenched reasons, traditional concepts of property and ownership were shattered by incited violence. People's sense of social commonality was destroyed until finally the wishes of the rulers were attained in the form of monopolies on power and property, stolen in the name of public ownership. The completion of this process culminated in the deliberate distilling and concentrating of the evil in humanity.
The CCP is a product of this twentieth-century anti-human "revolution". However, eastern despotism dressed up in western vocabulary is yet more unscrupulous, more thorough in its tyranny; tens of millions of lives were lost and destroyed en route to the final tragic victim – Chinese culture itself.
Mao Zedong's call to overthrow the landlords and divide the land, rabble-roused China into gangs of bandits; his beloved Cultural Revolution was the "best model" to illegally bludgeon his way to absolute power. The Tiananmen Massacre was Deng Xiaoping ignoring the fact of communism's collapse the world over; a China wracked with violence sped away in the opposite direction to the history of humanity. Power and money colluded in the age of Jiang Zemin to turn all of China into the world's largest National Museum of Communism, exhibiting "the worst of socialism and the worst of capitalism", but even more, China was an example of moral bankruptcy. Jiang Zemin outlawed and started the oppression of Falun Gong, but in doing so he conversely reawakened an interest in traditional Chinese culture – the opposite of his intention.
Practitioners of Falun Gong believe in truthfulness, benevolence and forbearance and are striving for freedom of spiritual belief and practise through peaceful protest. Falun Gong has already become the most powerful and durable component of China's democratic forces, and they are garnering the respect and admiration of people the world over – all the more so for contrasting so sharply with the evil and hideous nature of the CCP.
Mr Hu, there is a great deal of curiosity over how you think this kind of "education in CCP history" should be taught? Several years ago, as you grasped the various reins of power over the CCP, government and military, people were positive; they placed, without doubt, a great deal of hope in your potential. But what is the reality we are witnessing?
II
As we can see, you are increasing the suppression of freedom of expression, and persecuting lawyers who defend the rights of people.
Communist propaganda units under your leadership – like a Ministry of Punishments with premeditation, sanction persecution of any organ of the media which even vaguely attempts to give voice to the people under a despotic totalitarian authority. Harbouring or expressing thoughts at even the slightest variance from the "correct requirements" is targeted for prohibition, with the obvious intention of obliterating independent thought and voices in China:
* Between January 2000 and May 2001, Southern Weekend , which was widely regarded as China's 'first weekly paper', was "rectified". The editor was transferred, the deputy editors were removed from the office, and the journalists were dismissed. The reason? Southern Weekend's reports of a bank raid and the spread of HIV/AIDS were a 'black mark' against the local party branches and government.
* In 2003, the Southern Metropolitan News was closed, the editor was sentenced to six years in prison, the deputy editor was sentenced to eight years and the editor in chief was arbitrarily detained for more than a year. The reason? Southern Metropolitan News trespassed on an officially forbidden area by reporting to China and the rest of the world the outbreak of SARS.
* On 30th April 2005, Shi Tao, a poet and former director of the editorial board at Contemporary Business News in Changsha, Hunan Province, was secretly sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of "illegally providing state secrets to foreign organizations". The reason for this charge was that he sent abroad a memo secretly issued by the government: "severely punish overseas-based democracy activists [attempting to enter China]".
* In May 2005, Ching Cheong, the former deputy editor of Wenwei Bao in Hong Kong was arrested for suspicion of spying and he remains in detention till now.
* On 29th December 2005, Yang Bin, the editor of Xinjing Bao , a WIDELY appreciated newspaper, was dismissed and the paper's staff relocated because they dared to write and run stories exposing and critiquing social problems in mainland China.
* In January 2006, the January edition of a magazine called Ordinary People [bǎi xìng] was pulled, sections carrying criticism were cancelled and its website was closed.
* On 24th January 2006, the weekly Freezing Point – the 'last remaining voice' – was closed and the editor Li Datong was dismissed. At the same time, any reference to Freezing Point on the Internet was removed.
Throughout 2005 and particularly now as we enter 2006, you have vastly expanded and modernised the Chinese Internet police. By using huge profits and captive markets as bait, you have forced western media companies like Google and Yahoo to abandon any principles they ever had to join your game of double standards; they have established a system of checking, forbidding and obliterating information not conducive to totalitarianism. The grubbiest scene so far in the twenty-first century's intellectual history is that of thousands upon thousands of Internet pages of independent thought being shredded by this towering political firewall, built, to their eternal shame, by western companies.
In today's China, "Defending the Rights" is a new term, derived entirely from the CCP's violation of the human rights of over a billion vulnerable people. Even as you face Chinese society, with its problems and contradictions worsening daily, you do not address or attempt to adequately reform the twisted socio-economic structures; rather, you pursue the small minority of brave lawyers who dare to defend the rights of the weak, as though in the enforced silence your lies and lullabies will plaster over the cracks. Just the most recent examples of these incidents are as follows:
* In October 2003, Lawyer Zheng Enchong was sentenced to three years in prison for having defended Shanghai residents who were forcibly evicted from their homes by corrupt government officials and property developers.
* In May 2005, Lawyer Zhu Jiuhu was imprisoned for having attempted to represent a group of people who had invested their money in north Shaanxi oilfields, but lost it to official corruption and mis-management.
* In September 2005, Professor Ai Xiaoming and the lawyers Tang Jingling and Guo Yan, who had attempted to support the villagers' election, represent and help a community in Taishi Village in Guangdong Province to remove a corrupt official from office, were severely beaten by allegedly hired thugs; and a local people's representative, Lu Banglie, was beaten unconscious. In February 2006, a Taishi villager, Wu Yaoqiu who helped these two lawyers to get into the village, was knifed in his right hand and back with two fingers chopped in a knife-attack.
* In October 2005, lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Li Fangping were badly beaten, allegedly by hired thugs, when they travelled to Yinan County, Linyi City, Shandong Province to try and help another human rights' defender, Chen Guangcheng; Chen, blind since birth, had himself been beaten for trying to legally represent women who had suffered forced abortions.
* In December 2005, Lawyer Liu Ruping was sent to "re-education through labour" for 15 months because he wrote a letter to the national government calling for a stop to the brutal suppression of Falun Gong.
* Since the end of 2005, Lawyer Guo Feixiong has constantly been followed by plain-clothed police, detained, and harassed for attempting to represent Taishi villagers; he has been put in prison twice, and he is in constant fear for his life.
* Since the end of 2005, Lawyer Gao Zhisheng has attempted to represent and defend people arrested for their adherence to Falun Gong, and has had his licence to practise law revoked as a result. He has also been the victim of a 'hit and run' incident, which he considers himself lucky to have survived, let alone to have escaped without injury.
* In January 2006, both Gao Zhisheng and Guo Feixiong have established a "People's Investigation and Truth Committee" to look into the events of the "mini-Tiananmen" in Guangdong Province when local military police opened fire and killed un-armed protesters. They have called for all armed security personnel to be 'nationalised' but are now under constant surveillance and have both received death-threats. Their plight has given rise to hunger strikes being staged all over the world to declare support for all human rights' defenders in China and condemn the persecution of the CCP.
III
Mr. Hu Jintao:
You have the world's most sophisticated surveillance system, and you are therefore certainly aware that the above examples represent simply a fraction of the Chinese government's anti-human rights and anti-civilisation deeds.
We are writing this open letter to you not because we have illusions about you. Your journey from a political assistant to highest political power is the grim tale of an individual being brainwashed by communism. But you are not just a beneficiary of this system; you are also – and even more so – a victim of this system. The degree of your victimhood is precisely represented by your terror of a 'colour revolution': at the dawn of the twenty first century, your government is actually ratcheting up controls and repression of independent thought; after 30 years of reforms, the human rights situation in China is ranked 177th in the world.
It should be clearly understood at this point that any changes for the good in China since the Cultural Revolution have not been granted or bestowed upon the people by the government; instead, they have come about because of concessions the government has had to make in the face of demands from the people of China and the international community. And these concessions need to continue until communist ideology is destroyed by your own perverse deeds.
Yet we are still disposed to offer you a friendly reminder: there is a bottom-line to your evil acts. The bottom-line is not using soldiers who do not fire their rifles at people defending their loss of rights; the bottom-line is not threatening the safety and lives of lawyers who defend the protestors' rights; the bottom-line is not suppressing journalists who justly express the outrage of Chinese nation. It is through these agents that the world is judging you, and not the impression you hope you make when you attend the G8 or come to the United Kingdom.
A Chinese sage once said, "To know the things of shame is near to being brave". The requirement to reach the point of knowing a shame may be an extremely high standard, but the degree to which one is 'shameless' is essentially a matter of choice. What is the value of high GDP and enormous foreign exchange reserves when it is compared with a money-grubbing, power-corrupted, justice-perverting clique of gangsters under your command? And what is the point of ever-higher sky-scrapers for your rich and famous lackeys to name in honour of themselves, when the souls of the Chinese people have been so thoroughly polluted.
We beseech you to ponder long and hard upon this question: why are lawyers taking risks to protest; why are journalists braving such extreme personal danger to call for a proper legal system; why have Long Yingtai and so many people in China and elsewhere – known and unknown – been writing reproving letters to you, and even going on hunger strike as a token of their determination? Don't they all want to see that the Chinese people truly, spiritually "stand up;" that an ancient culture can uphold itself with modernity; that we now start to discard the foul and derogatory language that has been grafted onto "China"?
Even though you have no interest in studying the West, the old "idealists" inside the CCP such as Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Jiwei and Li Rui were good enough examples and models for you to follow. They can be so because they were exemplars of honesty to themselves and each other, and they had an exemplary love for their country.
But they are not accommodated by your special interest group; and they put you on the other side of honesty and patriotism. Whether you hold the most power in China or you are just an ordinary person, you too, therefore, need to consider how history will judge you.
And even as you consider yourself, don't forget those "bottom lines"!
The Right Honorable Mr. Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom:
As you can clearly see from the above facts, the human rights situation in China is not improving; indeed, it has been deteriorating. At the beginning of this letter it is mentioned that an incident happened on the evening of 24th January 2006 when a Falun Gong practitioner, who was peacefully protesting outside the Chinese Embassy in London, was kicked by a person who came out of the embassy. The woman who was assaulted, Gao Yudong, attempted to peacefully reason with her attacker until he was detained by a police officer.
We would like to ask how it could be that in a country with established rule of law, a supporter of the CCP can so wantonly break the law? The incident was undoubtedly a result of the CCP's incitement to hatred and violence against Falun Gong, but was it unrelated to western governments' propensity to overlook their own principles? The British government's attitude towards the CCP has already exceeded 'goodwill' and has now reached a stage of 'connivance' because of the government's selfish concern for votes.
A current example: In order to solve the tricky problem of asylum, the UK Home Office has recently tightened its policy and tried to deport Mr. Kun Yang, a Falun Gong practitioner, to China. Doesn't everyone know what would await him if he were deported? Sending him back flies in the face of common sense – it has everything to do with the British government assisting the CCP to heap shame upon itself and upon the conscience of all humanity.
With regard to these two cases, the British government needs to be principled and decisive: first, the actions of the assailant outside the Chinese embassy must be investigated according to law, and a prosecution brought if there is sufficient evidence to support criminal charges. Second, there must be a full assessment and clear understanding of the dangers faced by Yang Kun in light of provisions for political asylum contained in international human rights conventions.
Under the circumstance that the CCP finds ever more ways to pervert human rights standards while lulling the world with promises of riches, we consider those who oppose the CCP's brutality are the ones living the most precarious and dangerous existences in China.
Western governments have their duties to protect these people because you are protecting yourselves.
We must realise the extreme danger of being bewitched by the 'Chinese Economic Miracle'. As western companies troop to China in search of cheap labour and western workers are laid off, people should ask: why is Chinese labour so cheap? It's not just because China's population is so big; more importantly is that in China there are no independent trade unions, no medical insurance, no national minimum wage, nor is there a pension fund. Labour could be cheaper still if a western company moved to North Korea!
Therefore, helping Chinese workers defend their rights today is to help establish a fairer, more competitive global environment, which in turn is to help workers in the west regain their own opportunities for employment.
We should in fact be genuinely grateful to the people who are standing on the front line of opposition to the brutality of the CCP!
Mr. Blair, the West should of course continue to have economic and cultural ties with China, but the premise for these ties are based on the knowledge and understanding of China's reality. What do you wish to achieve by means of these ties? What will change? Or, what is changed in the course of these ties being forged?
If the West is submitting to the lure of the order form and unilaterally abandoning principles of democracy and human rights – to the extent that it is shoring up the CCP's 'stability' to protect huge investments in China – then principles about the value of humanity are being shaken. Surely that is too high and too terrifying a price to pay.
The sages of Western culture would be deeply pained by this; and the ideals and sacrifices of generations of Chinese people are being ridiculed and belittled. Was the whole struggle really for no more than a homogenous, indifferent and sneering world?
This is the bottom-line for you, Mr. Blair. The 'China Question' is not unfolding in some faraway place; it is here beneath the feet of you and your government, and a large part of the reality of Western governance. Hollow appeals for human rights and democracy are nothing compared to standing and facing each challenge with determination and clarity.
The world is patiently watching and waiting to see which choice you both make.
We implore you to think long and hard on this crucial issue.
14 February 2006
Lian Yang is an Award-winning Chinese poet, author of Where the Sea Stands Still and Concentric Circles
Translated by Ben Carrdus
Co-signed by:
* Lady Kina Avebury * Ruth Borthwick * Chu Cai: Writer and Director of Independent Chinese Pen Centre * Kui De Chen: Writer and Director of Independent Chinese Pen Centre * Mai Ping Chen: Writer and Secretary (International) of Independent Chinese Pen Centre * Cllr Brian Coleman AM FRSA: Deputy Chairman of the London Assembly * Antony Dunn: Writer and Poet * Leonardo Felli: Scholar at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) * Carola Frege: Scholar at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) * Dr William N. Herbert: Poet and Senior Lecturer of Newcastle University * Peter Jauhal: Chairman of European Falun Dafa Association and Falun Gong Association (UK) * Professor John Keane: Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, Germany * Jennifer Langer: Director of Exiled Writers Association and Chif-editor of Exiled Ink magazine * Dr Guihua Li: Director of Federation of Saying "Good-bye" to Chinese Communist Party (UK) * Jane Liang: European General Manager, Sound of Hope * Tian Qi Liao: Writer and Director of Independent Chinese Pen Centre * Xiao Bo Liu: Writer and Chairman of Independent Chinese Pen Centre * Dr William Liu: Chief Editor of Epoch Times (UK) * Jian Ma: Writer * Tinch Minter: Writer * Jonathan Mirsky: Journalist and writer * Pascale Petit: Poet, co-founder and Poetry Editor of Poetry London, co-founder of The Poetry School. * Xiang Zhong Qiu: Former Chief Editor of Economic Journal (Hong Kong) * Jiang Shao: Student, One of Student Movement Organizers in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989 * Lord Francis Thurlow KCMG: Former Deputy Under-Secretary of State, UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office * Lingsoong Wong: UK Representative, New Tang Dynasty TV * Ze Xia: Director, Friends of Tiananmen Mothers * Dr Yi Xu: Scholar at University College London * Bei Fang Xu: Workers' Rights Activist * Caroline Brossi Yates: Scientist and Director of Future Science and Culture Centre * You You: Writer * Dr Xiang Zou: Researcher of Cambridge University
