Leading Chinese dissident claims freedom of speech worse than before Olympics The
Chinese government is allowing its people less freedom of speech than
two years ago, dashing hopes that last year’s Olympic Games would lead
to greater liberalisation, a leading Chinese dissident has claimed. By Peter Foster in Shihezi [The Telegraph, 27 April 2009]

He Weifang, 49, professor of law at Shihezi University was ‘exiled’ after signing the Charter 08 petition calling for democratic reform in China in December 2008  Photo: PETER FOSTER

He
Weifang, a celebrated law professor and lead signatory to last year’s
Charter 08 petition calling for democratic reforms in China, said the
ruling Communist Party was currently engaged in a fresh wave of
repressive internet and media censorship. Even allowing for
the Communist party’s highly conservative approach to any kind of
reform – embodied in Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase “Crossing the river
by feeling for stones” – he said China was moving backwards on basic
freedoms. “The situation at the moment is that the river has
deepened and the Party has got scared, so it has pulled back, fearing
that the waters will rise up and drown them. In the last two years this
pulling back from the water has got worse,” he said in an interview
with The Daily Telegraph. Professor He, once a leading light
at the Beijing University Law School, was speaking from the one-bedroom
flat in the tiny provincial city of Shihezi in China’s arid northwest
where he was ‘exiled’ last month in punishment, he believes, for
signing Charter 08. He cited last year’s anti-government riots
in Tibet, protests over the Olympic torch relay, fears of a rising tide
of nationalism and the forthcoming 20th anniversary of the 1989
Tiananmen Square killings on June 4 as the main reasons behind the
crackdown. “The signs of repression are very clear. Liu Xiaobo
[the lead architect of Charter 08] is still under house arrest and my
own internet discussion forum has also been shut down,” he added. As
a well-known proponent of legal reform, Prof He has published articles
for almost 20 years calling for an independent judiciary in China, but
his writings, tolerated until recently, are now seen as “problematic”. “I
think I was tolerated as an individual, but Charter 08 was a
co-ordinated, collective action and it was that element of organisation
that provoked such a hostile reaction from the Party. Newspapers that
used to publish strong articles arguing for reform no longer dare,” he
said. Prof He, 49, is among a group of 303 Chinese academics
and influential commentators who signed Charter 08 in a self-conscious
effort to revive the democratic, reformist ideals espoused by students
in demonstrations across China 20 years ago. The Charter,
which contains a blistering indictment of the failings of Communist
rule in China, has left intellectuals divided, with many arguing that
its criticisms were too direct and ultimately counter-productive. However
Prof He disagrees. “I favour direct criticism. Charter 08 is a list of
the mistakes the Party has made and the crimes it has committed. It is
important for people to learn about the truth, because the truth is the
only basis for creating change.” Prof He paid a personal price
for refusing to withdraw his signature from the petition when his
appointment to a post in Zhejiang University in southern China was
blocked last year by what he describes as “an invisible hand”. Instead
he was “offered” a position at the little-known Shihezi University in
Xinjiang where he teaches just six hours a week, living far away from
his wife in Beijing and passing long hours listening to Strauss waltzes
and reading books on Silk Road archaeology. He is sanguine
about his two years in exile in Xinjiang which he treats with grim
humour, knowing that he follows in the footsteps of several renowned
Chinese intellectuals such as the writer Wang Meng and poet Ai Qing,
who were exiled to Xinjiang during the Mao era. “When the head
of Beijing University suggested Xinjiang, I said ‘ah yes, what a good
idea. I don’t suppose I shall miss any dramatic legal or political
reforms in the next two years,” he recalls with a roar of laughter. The
modern breed of Chinese students Prof He now teaches have a far more
conservative outlook than in the days when he was a young faculty
member out demonstrating on the streets of Beijing in 1989. “We
students of 20 years ago were more idealistic, we talked about politics
and we worried about the future of the country. That’s how ‘6/4’ [the
Tiananmen Square protests] could happen,” he said. “Students these days
are under all kinds of different pressures. They worry about finding a
job and purchasing an apartment. They do not like to speak out about
politics now.” However despite their far-from-revolutionary
attitude to life, Prof He sees little sign that China’s rulers are
prepared to trust ordinary people with a real say into how their
country is run. There has been progress in some areas, he
admits, citing a growing responsiveness from the government to
individual concerns – such as last year’s contaminated milk scandal and
a recent scandal over prison brutality – but believes it is skin-deep. “There
has been change to some extent, but the response to last year’s Tibetan
protests shows that the changes are cosmetic, not fundamental. The
Party moves only when it is pushed,” he said. “What happened
20 years ago [in Tiananmen Square] caused unimaginable trauma in the
Communist Party. It is a moment from which they have never recovered.” Prof
He believes that that “trauma” and the fact that the bloody repression
of the demonstrators was endorsed by Deng Xiaoping, the hugely popular
father-figure of China’s “opening up”, has made it impossible for the
Party to embrace meaningful reform. “The Party needs to admit
its crimes, but it cannot. It fears that to admit it was wrong would
undermine its entire claim to legitimacy. But if they do not adapt,
then that process of transformation will not occur peacefully, and if
the extreme violence comes, then there will be no Communist Party. It
is a case of adapt or die.”