[These days, major Western governments struggle to get responses from China about prisoners and conditions in Tibet and Xinjiang. Many Western politicians have also become less willing to dwell on human rights problems when other issues — North Korea, trade and investment, terrorism, climate change, cybersecurity — fill their meetings with Chinese officials, said rights advocates and experts.]
By Chris Buckley
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Liu
Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer while i
n
state custody, was mourned in Hong Kong on Thursday.
Credit
Kin Cheung/Associated Press
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BEIJING
— Liu Xiaobo, China’s only
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, catapulted to fame in 1989, when the Communist
Party’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square created an
international uproar.
Now, nearly three decades later, Mr. Liu has
died of cancer while in state custody, a bedridden and silenced example of
Western governments’ inability, or reluctance, to push back against China’s
resurgent authoritarians.
Mr. Liu’s fate reflects how human rights
issues have receded in Western diplomacy with China. And it shows how Chinese
Communist Party leaders, running a strong state bristling with security powers,
can disdain foreign pleas, even for a man near death.
“It’s certainly become more difficult,” said
John Kamm, an American businessman and founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, who
for decades has quietly lobbied China to free or improve the treatment of
political prisoners. He said his attempts to win approval for Mr. Liu to leave
China for treatment, as Mr. Liu and his wife requested, got nowhere.
“I tried my best. I did everything I could,”
he said before Mr. Liu died. “Things are pretty difficult right now. It’s hard
for me to get the kinds of responses I need.”
These days, major Western governments
struggle to get responses from China about prisoners and conditions in Tibet
and Xinjiang. Many Western politicians have also become less willing to dwell
on human rights problems when other issues — North Korea, trade and investment,
terrorism, climate change, cybersecurity — fill their meetings with Chinese
officials, said rights advocates and experts.
The United States, Germany and other Western
governments did politely prod China to release Mr. Liu from prison and let him
go abroad for treatment of his liver cancer, accompanied by his wife, Liu Xia.
A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela
Merkel, issued a statement that “she would like a signal of humanity for Liu
Xiaobo and his family,” while President Trump said nothing publicly about his
case, leaving any comment to lower-ranking officials.
Ms. Merkel’s statement was a reflection of
how the world order has shifted, with the United States under Mr. Trump
departing from its traditional role as the most vocal advocate of human rights.
Still, Mr. Kamm and others said the shift
came many years before Mr. Trump entered the White House in January.
“I do not think that the world prior to Jan.
20, 2017, was one rife with robust, consistent diplomatic intervention on
behalf of peaceful, independent civil society in China,” said Sophie
Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. “Taken together,
particularly over the 2000s and into the 2010s, you have got progressively less
interest on foreign governments in really fighting as hard as they ought to
have for systemic change in China.”
In Mr. Liu’s case, Chinese officials have
dismissed calls by Western governments as meddling.
Beijing issued video and still images of Mr.
Liu in a hospital in northeast China, as if to say: We don’t need lectures
about how to take care of our prisoners. Beijing ignored advice from a German
and an American cancer specialist who visited Mr. Liu, at its invitation, and
who said he was well enough to travel for treatment.
Photo
A torch parade in honor of Mr. Liu in Oslo on
Dec. 10, 2010, the day of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. He was imprisoned by
then, and his absence at the event was signified by an empty chair. Credit Odd
Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“If Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was
able to win some freedom for half a month — or two weeks or four days or half a
day — and could speak out after eight years of silence, that would be
intolerable for the government,” said Wu Yangwei, a writer who uses the pen
name Ye Du and is a friend of Mr. Liu’s. “Ten years ago, it might have been
different, there might have been a little hope. But the political atmosphere
has shifted.”
Lobbying China over its harsh prison
sentences for dissent and its other shackles on citizens’ rights has never been
an amicable conversation; progress has long been spotty. But Mr. Liu’s case
reflects how Western pressure on China’s human rights problems has decreased,
while Chinese leaders have become adept at using economic and diplomatic lures
and threats to thwart it.
The shifting geopolitics around China and the
human rights issue also appeared to be reflected in the disjointed reaction to
Mr. Liu’s death from top officials of the United Nations, where China has moved
to raise its prominence by increasing financial support and furnishing
peacekeeping troops.
The organization’s high commissioner for
human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, implicitly criticized China in a
condolence statement by describing Mr. Liu as a champion who had been “jailed
for standing up for his beliefs.”
But António Guterres, the secretary-general,
was more circumspect. Asked for a comment, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric,
said Mr. Guterres was “deeply saddened,” but he did not address the
circumstances of Mr. Liu’s death or the restrictions on Mr. Liu’s wife. “I
don’t have anything further to say at this point,” Mr. Dujarric told reporters
on Thursday.
In 1989, Mr. Liu was detained for nearly two
years after the Chinese government called him a “black hand” who supported the
student demonstrators who crowded Tiananmen Square before an armed crackdown.
Back then, Communist Party leaders railed against Western-inspired subversion
and imprisoned leading participants in the protests who hadn’t fled.
Yet China was more vulnerable to pressure,
and sometimes made concessions.
It was the world’s ninth-biggest economy in
1989, and needed expertise, investment and technology from advanced countries
to begin growing again. It did not have a wide circle of countries that would
help it thwart Western sanctions and isolation. And the party general secretary
and later president, Jiang Zemin, appeared eager for affirmation and even
friendship from President Bill Clinton and other Western leaders.
But since China joined the World Trade
Organization in 2001 and its economy took off, leaders in Beijing have become
increasingly set against making concessions on human rights cases. That posture
has reflected China’s economic and diplomatic strength. But it has also
reflected leaders’ longstanding fears that, even with robust growth, broad
public support and a powerful police apparatus, they are vulnerable to
political foes.
From 1989 to 2008, when Mr. Liu helped start
Charter 08, a petition for democratic change, he and other dissenters still
hoped that the Communist Party could be coaxed to give citizens greater
freedoms, pushed by civic mobilization in China and encouraged by Western
governments and groups. Even if there were occasional setbacks, many believed
expanding market forces and a growing middle class would shape history in their
direction and would make the government ultimately accept political
liberalization.
“China’s economy is growing quickly, and this
economic development is supportive of a political transformation,” Mr. Liu said
in an interview in 2004. “China’s international environment has seen big
changes, and there’d be very strong international support for its political
reforms.”
But Mr. Liu was arrested in 2008 and
sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009. China’s president since 2012, Xi
Jinping, has overseen an even more comprehensive crackdown on dissent, rights
lawyers and independent civil groups. Mr. Liu’s supporters have not abandoned
their hopes, but they see that the government has gained confidence against
critics.
Mr. Kamm of the Dui Hua Foundation said he
would continue to present lists of political prisoners to Chinese officials.
Now he also plans to point out how the government’s treatment of Mr. Liu hurt
China’s image, he said.
“I think they have taken an incredible hit on
this,” Mr. Kamm said. “There are five prisoners on my list tonight that I will
use this to try to get out of prison into their loved ones’ arms.”
Follow Chris Buckley on Twitter @ChuBailiang.
Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New
York. Adam Wu contributed research.
