Liu Xiaobo’s 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was for the first time in history awarded to a Chinese living inside China, or more precisely, in a jail cell in the northeastern province of Jilin. One year later, the writer and celebrated dissident remains in prison without regular family visits.
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When human rights organizations press international actors to exert greater pressure on the Chinese government, we are often told that quiet diplomacy might be better. After all, the Chinese government has a thin skin, and pushing topics so publicly might result in the opposite of the intended effect.
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After the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts, China is now one of the few remaining countries ruled by dictatorship or, in this case, by a single party that has monopolized power for more than 60 years. Many Chinese people draw inspiration and encouragement from the Arab Spring.
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In China, the most extensive crackdown against pro-democracy and human rights activists in more than a decade continues with no end in sight.
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Since late December, Chinese pro-democracy and human-rights activists have watched, cheered and agonized over the events unfolding in the Arab world. There has been a surge of online traffic, with Chinese activists sharing links to blog posts, photos and YouTube videos in order to show solidarity with protesters in the (read more…)
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On International Women’s Day, Wang Songlian calls for an end to the abuses of reproductive health rights under China’s one-child policy
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Following a call for peaceful protests in China, Beijing is arresting and disappearing activists in perhaps the most exhaustive crackdown in recent memory. Here are their stories.
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Countries that have embassies in Oslo were invited to send representatives to the ceremony, but the Chinese government had aggressively called for a boycott. In the end, forty-five countries attended, but another nineteen—including Russia, Pakistan, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Vietnam—chose to stay away.
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Neither China’s Liu Xiaobo nor his wife or family or friends will be in Oslo to receive his Peace Prize. Who will speak up for him?
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It has been a busy two weeks in China. Last week, my friend, the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Then nearly two dozen Chinese Communist Party elders—some of them highly ranked officials or retired (read more…)
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On July 17, agents of Beijing’s Civil Affairs Bureau raided and closed the office of the Open Constitution Initiative, a local nongovernmental organization. This center had been the primary meeting place for China’s nascent movement of “rights lawyers,” in which I have been an active participant. There are not too (read more…)
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A hundred years after the writing of China’s first constitution, “Charter 08” called for an end to essential features of the country’s political system, including one-party rule, and their replacement with a system based on human rights and democracy.
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