Chinese Citizens Advocate Democracy

Originally signed by 303 prominent Chinese citizens inside and outside of government, Charter 08 was released on December 10, 2008.The name refers to Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 human rights manifesto. The excerpt below was translated by Perry Link, and originally appeared in the New York Review of Books.

The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government. The ruling elite clings to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.

The stultifying results include: endemic official corruption; an undermining of the rule of law; weak human rights; a decay in public ethics; crony capitalism; growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor; pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments; and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.

Xu Zhiyong, the co-founder of Gongmeng, the Open Constitution initiative, is a lawyer who has represented defendants in death penalty cases and parents of babies poisoned by melamine tainted milk. Xu is an elected member of the Beijing People’s Congress. In 2009, Gongmeng challenged the official version of the 2008 crackdown in Tibet. In July 2009, Gongmeng was shut down. Xu and a colleague, Zhuang Lu, were arrested and held for 3 weeks, but were released after an international outcry. Photo: Esquire cover via China Digital Times

As these conflicts and crises grow ever more intense, and as the ruling elite continues with impunity to crush and to strip away the rights of citizens to freedom, to property, and to the pursuit of happiness, we see the powerless in our society — the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas — becoming more militant and raising the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions. The decline of the system has reached the point where change is no longer optional. The democratization of Chinese politics can be put off no longer.

Accordingly, we dare to put civic spirit into practice by announcing Charter 08. We hope that our fellow citizens who feel a similar sense of crisis, responsibility, and mission, whether they are inside the government or not, and regardless of their social status, will set aside small differences to embrace the broad goals of this citizens’ movement. Together we can work for major changes in Chinese society and for the rapid establishment of a free, democratic, and constitutional country. We can bring to reality the goals and ideals that our people have incessantly been seeking for more than a hundred years, and can bring a brilliant new chapter to Chinese civilization.

Update: The Asia Sentinel reported that the Chinese Ministry of Propaganda has banned any mention of the Charter or interviews with any Charter 08 signatory. Many signatories have been interrogated or faced police harassment. Liu Xiaobo, an original Charter 08 signatory, prominent dissident writer, and former President and current Board member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, was detained by police on December 8, 2008. He was charged on June 23, 2009 with “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge which carries a maximum of 15 years in prison.

In an interview in 2006 with PEN, Liu Xiaobo said, “I want to make an appeal again to writers throughout the world, especially writers from free countries, as well as to governments and Non-Governmental Organizations, to continue to pay attention to Chinese writers and to their conditions of writing, and thus help them to obtain their freedom. If the Chinese people have the support of the whole world, we can work together to change China from a totalitarian state, from a state without freedom of writing, into a free nation.”

Charter 08 has been signed by over 8500 Chinese citizens as of August 2009, according to PEN.

A petition to free Lu Xiaobo is available at the PEN Center site.

Editor's Note: For 37 years, Peacework was published by, but did not necessarily represent the views of, the American Friends Service Committee. Peacework's final printed issue (September 2009) focused on human rights violations and nonviolent activism in China. This issue was never posted to Peacework's previous AFSC-sponsored website. Since the print magazine was being closed down as part of budget cuts resulting from the financial meltdown, AFSC decided to spin Peacework off into a fully independent blogging platform, one not sponsored by AFSC. It was agreed that the contents of Peacework's archives, including the final issue, could be posted online by the newly independent Peacework. We are working to create that blog platform, and this article is one of those from that last issue.