DHARAMSHALA: A Chinese court sentenced a prominent legal activist Mr. Xu Zhiyong to four years in prison last Wednesday. Since 2009 he has been under house arrest, detained and finally arrested formally on 22 August 2013 on the pretext of “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.”
In his closing statement at the trial on 22nd January, he said “While on the face of it, this appears to be an issue of the boundary between a citizen’s right to free speech and public order, what this is, in fact, is the issue of whether or not you recognize a citizen’s constitutional rights. On a still deeper level, this is actually an issue of fears you all carry within: fear of a public trial, fear of a citizen’s freedom to observe a trial, fear of my name appearing online, and fear of the free society nearly upon us.”
Xu had been vocal about democratic change, free speech, corruption and rule of law in China. In 2003, he co-founded Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng) that advocates the rule of law and greater constitutional protections. The website of the OCI was shutdown in June 2004 without specifiying any precise reason by the Chinese authority.
In 2009, the organisation published a report criticising the Chinese government’s policies on Tibet. The 22 page report suggested that a new aristocracy has seized control in the Tibetan region and these rulers in Tibet are funded by Beijing in return for absolute loyalty. To cover their shortcomings, and retain their total authority, they had spread propaganda blaming His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
It declared that the failed Chinese government policies in Tibet was the cause of the mass protests in Lhasa and other Tibetan regions in 2008. The Chinese authority had blamed His Holiness the Dalai Lama for instigating the protests.
In 2012, Xu travelled to north-east Tibetan town of Barma to investigate the spiralling number of self-immolators in Tibet. A young Tibetan named Nangdrol had set himself on fire near Zamthang monastery earlier that year. Upon returning, he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled ‘Tibet is Burning’. “I am sorry we Han Chinese have been silent as Nangdrol and his fellow Tibetans are dying for freedom. We are victims ourselves, living in estrangement, infighting, hatred and destruction. We share this land. It’s our shared home, our shared responsibility, our shared dream — and it will be our shared deliverance”, he wrote in the article.
Chinese President Xi has supposedly made fighting corruption as one of his main agendas, but imprisoning people like Xu Zhiyong who has been long fighting against China’s deep rooted culture of corruption and to bring rule of law, on flimsy grounds has discredited his real intention to fight corruption. The sooner this huge gulf between his words and deeds is reduced, the better it would be to restore his credibility.