Chinese Dissident Liu Xiaobo (1955-2017) Dies at 61

Here is a writeup and an overview. China needs more like him. I'll leave you with the indelible image of his empty chair at the 2010 Nobel ceremony that China's leadership did not permit him to attend, for it had imprisoned him the year before. Oh, and do take a look at his lecture.

Interview with a Chinese Dissident

The New York Review of Books sits down with filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. (Her films are banned in China, by the way.) The whole thing is fascinating, but here is a piece of it:

Q; I’m curious about how you became politically active. During the 1989 protests you were not involved with the student movement. 

A: People like me who went through the Cultural Revolution, we are often skeptical of politics. I was a teacher and I watched the students but didn’t participate directly. I went to Tiananmen Square twice but mainly watched this from a distance. 

Q: What changed? 

A: In 1999 I spent a year abroad at the University of the South in Tennessee. It had a huge impact on me. I saw how people discussed social problems. I remember participating in commemorations for Martin Luther King, Jr. on his holiday. I thought: this is how a university ought to be; I want to bring this back to China.

Meet Joshua Wong of the Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Protests

Wong is 17.

If You Can't Stand The Dissent, Get Out Of The Kitchen

Dinner wasn't the only thing cooking in Soviet kitchens.

The Closing of the Chinese Mind

Aka "groupthink makes you stupid."  The CCP is busying itself with "thought reform."  Note too a related academic angle:

... the customarily mild-mannered American Association of University Professors called on universities to cut ties with Confucius Institutes unless academic freedom prevails there. That’s not the case at present. Notes the AAUP, “Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.” Agreements establishing them make “unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China. Specifically, North American universities permit Confucius Institutes to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.” These cuddly-seeming institutions, in other words, are CCP propaganda mills on American campuses.

Forgetting Tiananmen Square

It's been 25 years, and three new books consider how it has been suppressed.  If you're in a hurry, you can jot down the titles of the books and take a look later:

• The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim, OUP USA
• Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, by Rowena Xiaoqing He, Palgrave Macmillan
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos, Bodley Head

Well, here we're not forgetting!  Please take a look at:

• NatGeo's story of two photographers (twin brothers!) who were there
• (still imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner) Liu Xiaobo's poem from his collection June 4 Elegies
• Another poem inspired by those events
• How a gangster became a savior: the story of the Triad who helped smuggle 100+ dissidents to safety after the massacre
• Footage of Tiananmen survivors telling their stories at the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee; one is Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, an organization combatting gendercide in China.
• The world's first Tiananmen museum that has opened in Hong Kong
• Demonstrations in Hong Kong and Taiwan

25 years ago I was only a child watching the news on TV, and from that year I remember two overwhelming feelings that were so intense that they probably shaped my adult take on foreign relations more than I realize: 1989 was defined by the joy of the fall of the Berlin Wall with all its jubilant crowds ... and the absolute, stomach-churning horror of Tiananmen Square.  God, what kind of monstrous, despicable, (what the hell, let's use the word and call a spade a spade) evil government sends its tanks and troops to mow down unarmed students?  And you wonder why I practically have an allergic reaction to people saying that Taiwan should be part of China. 

UPDATE: The Onion nails it again.

Dance Dance Revolution

In Turkey.

Iran: Fresh Protests

What's this?  I've been so busy watching Turkey that I missed this from the BBC: "Iran dissident's funeral turns into anti-government protest."  More here and here.  Nobody's forgotten the 2009 protests either.

Another Year, Another Tiananmen Censorship Drive

But we do not forget.

Reading Hayek in Beijing

Mao, Hayek, and journalist Yang Jisheng.  Do read.

Religious Freedom Around the World: the 2013 Report

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s annual report is out (in PDF).   I'm just going to quote part of its assessment of China:

The Chinese government continues to perpetrate particularly severe violations of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. Religious groups and individuals considered to threaten national security or social harmony, or whose practices are deemed beyond the vague legal definition of “normal religious activities,” are illegal and face severe restrictions, harassment, detention, imprisonment, and other abuses. Religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain particularly acute, as the government broadened its efforts to discredit and imprison religious leaders, control the selection of clergy, ban certain religious gatherings, and control the distribution of religious literature by members of these groups. The government also detained over a thousand unregistered Protestants in the past year, closed “illegal” meeting points, and prohibited public worship activities. Unregistered Catholic clergy remain in detention or disappeared.

Escaping From Oppression

Here is a collection of 6 TED talks, beginning with Hyenseo Lee's escape from North Korea.

Exposing North Korea's Secret Prison Camps

Pyongyang can issue all the denials it wants, but Google Earth satellite imagery tells its own damning story.  You may remember this harrowing account and this.  Arguably the entire country is one vast prison camp.

Quote of the Day: Thoughts on Gun Control by a Chinese Dissident

Some food for thought as the gun control debate rolls on: 

"Do you know that the Chinese Constitution guarantees almost all the nice things we have here? It is written that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of speech and religion, they have human and property rights, and that such rights cannot be taken away without due process of the law. And do you know what? Chinese people do not have the right to keep and bear arms. I assure you all those nice guarantees are not worth the paper they are printed on, because when the government has all the guns, they have all the rights. I was not born a citizen of the United States. I was naturalized in 2007. In 2008, I became a proud gun owner. To me, a rifle is not for sporting or hunting; it is an instrument of freedom. It guarantees that I cannot be coerced, that I have free will, and that I am a free man."

Here's the source:

Censorship Protests in China

Well, looky here:

Protests by journalists over alleged heavy-handed censorship at one of China's most daring newspapers have garnered high-profile support in the media and blogosphere, with prominent academics, bloggers and even movie stars joining in. 

... On Monday, several hundred protesters gathered outside the headquarters of the Southern Weekly newspaper in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, to vent their anger at the reworking of a New Year's editorial that originally called for greater legal rights but ended up as a celebration of the government's achievements.

Here also are quotations from two people at the protest:

"Readers should decide whether content is good or bad. It isn't for officials to judge," said Ah Qiang, a writer and public-rights activist who attended Monday's protest. "Everyone knows about media censorship, and for the most part everyone has learned to deal with it. But this time they crossed a line and that caused people to unleash a lot of pent-up frustration." 

"I was deeply moved," said Ye Du, a dissident writer who spent 2½ hours at the protest before being forcibly taken home by state security agents. "This wasn't just about Southern Weekly. It was about Chinese people's desire for more political freedom."

Meet Shin Dong-hyuk, North Korean Refugee

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in a North Korean prison camp and escaped at age 23.

 

His story, Escape From Camp 14, is here.

China: The Plutocrats vs. the People

Hmmmmm:

The time of autocratic rule has passed for China's Communist Party. At one time it was understood that the people would obey, and everyone would get rich in return. But economic success will no longer suffice. Now the Chinese are demanding freedom and security too.

I remind you that China spends more on internal security than on external.  

"Free China: The Courage to Believe": The Documentary China Tried to Quash

Here's something fitting for a Sunday, my darlings.  Read this and spare a thought for the prisoners of conscience in China, both Falun Gong and not.  I remind you that China is ruled by, in the words of a friend of mine, "a criminal regime." 

This isn't, by the way, me endorsing Falun Gong as a belief system, but you don't have to adhere to it in order to understand that the Chinese government's persecution of its practitioners is a gross human rights abuse.

"Free China" is the winner of four international film festivals.  Take a look here:

Photo of the Day: Chen Guangcheng and Christian Bale

You all know about Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese human rights activist who managed to escape and is now in the States.  You may not know, though, that while he was still under house arrest in China, Christian Bale attempted to visit him.  The two finally met when Chen was honored with a human rights award earlier this week.  Here's a charming photo of the actor and his hero.  (Oh, and there's video in which Bale mentions Chen detailing the Chinese government's gross human rights abuses, especially against women.)

For Your Reading List: "Escape from North Korea"

The book is brand new and getting a bit of attention.  Check out this blurb by none other than former ambassador to the UN John Bolton:

Escape from North Korea should be assigned reading for anyone—policymaker, academic, or journalist alike—who think they know anything about the Kim family dictatorship. Melanie Kirkpatrick shows how “the new Underground Railroad” is not only providing an escape route from the prison camp that is North Korea, but something even more important as well. She shows how that escape route, aided and expanded, can bring down North Korea’s despotic regime and free its entire people. Kirkpatrick combines exhaustive reporting with insightful analysis in a powerful and compelling tale of repression and freedom.

Here it is on Amazon.