Charter
History of Chinese Communities in
International PEN
By Chen Maiping and Zhang Yu
The first Chinese affiliate of International P.E.N was chartered in 1927 under the name of Zhonghua Minguo Bihui (Republic of China PEN Centre, or RCPC). Thefounding president was Mr Cai Yuanpei (T’sai Yuan-pei, 1867-1940), the President of Universities Academy and the first Education Minister of the republic founded in 1912. After the death of Mr. Cai, Dr. Hu Shi (Hu Shih, 1891-1962), philosopher and leading liberal intellectual in modern China, had served as the president, and was also elected one of the co-presidents of International P.E.N during the period of 1941-1947. In 1949, the RCPC moved to Taipei, along with Dr. Hu and its other leading figures. In 1962, Dr. Lin Yutang (Lin Yu-tang, 1895-1976) succeeded Dr. Hu as the president and became the vice-president of International PEN in 1975. The RCPC continued under this name until 1980.
After the PRC displaced the ROC in the UN, the Beijing government succeeded in forcing the RCPC to change its name to the Chinese Taipei PEN Centre (CTPC). The new PEN center in Beijing was founded in 1980 and named itself the China PEN Centre (CPC), with Mr. Ba Jin (1904-) as its president and Wang Meng and Liu Baiyu as vice presidents. These writers attended International PEN congresses in the 1980s. China evidently thought of International PEN as a literary UN, a kind of world writers union, and thus an arena in which it was important to push Taiwan aside.
International P.E.N in fact allows individual countries, for a geographical or linguistic reason, to have up to 5 centers. For example, in the U.S., there are American PEN and USA PEN West Centre. Switzerland has three centres: Italian, French and German PENs while Australia has five centers: Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney PENs. Hong Kong has both an English and a Chinese PEN Centres. The PRC too has a Shanghai PEN and a Guangzhou PEN, both still listed on the International PEN membership roster as valid PEN Centres.
The PRC chapters have not paid International PEN dues since 1997, and have stopped sending delegates to the annual PEN congresses (with only one exception the 2000 congress held in Moscow). This is mostly because they found out that International PEN is actually a kind of human-rights organization defending freedom of expression, and at almost every congress there have been resolutions condemning abuses by the Chinese government. Since CPC regards itself as representing the government, it decided not continue to attend.
In the 1970s, a group of Chinese writers, mostly from Taiwan, also ounded a Chinese PEN Centre tah named as Chinese Writers in Exile, with New York City as its base. The first presidents included C.T. Hsia. It renamed to the Chinese Writer Abroad in 1990s.
The Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPC) was founded in 2001 by a group of writers in exile along with some in China. ICPC was chartered that year at International PEN’s London Congress, in October 2001. The first slate of officers included the president Liu Binyan, vice-president Zheng Yi, and executive director Bei Ling. Two years later, in October 2003, in accordance with the organization’s by-laws, the ICPC membership elected a new board. Dr. Liu Xiaobo (China) was elected as president and Cai Chu (USA) and Wan Zhi (Chen Maiping, Sweden) as vice-presidents. Other board members include Yu Jie and Liao Yiwu in China, along with Meng Lang and Ma Jian abroad. Wan Zhi was appointed by the board as Secretary General.
Roger Noether
Guest Editor’s Introduction
Source note: This book is dedicated to my wife, Tao Li, although I know that this book cannot in any way compensate her for all she has done for me.
Liu Xiaobo, one of Chinas best-known intellectual dissidents and author of innumerable articles critical of the Chinese government, was born in 1956. During the cultural revolution in the 1960s, he was too young to play an active role, yet in his Contemporary Chinese Politics and Intellectuals he recalls ganging up with other youngsters to mistreat an old Nationalist soldier. In August 1988 he received his doctorate in literature from Beijing Normal University. While studying there he also lectured on aesthetics. His lectures were so popular that in a lecture hall designed to hold 3,000 people, so many attended that some students who were leaning against the windows broke the glass. In the 1980s Liu Xiaobo was renowned for his iconoclastic essay A Dialog with Li Zehou: Feeling, The Individual, My Choice, in which he takes issue with Li Zehous defense of Chinas cultural past. One of the recurring themes in his writings is the inability of Chinas intellectuals to reflect on the rottenness within Chinas culture, political structures, economy, and the entire Chinese milieu.
In the West, Liu Xiaobo is widely known for his sense of responsibility to his beliefs, expressed in his returning from his guest lecture tour at Columbia University in the spring of 1989. Previously he had been at the University of Hawaiis Asian Pacific Institute, where he completed his work, Contemporary Chinese Politics and Chinese Intellectuals. Upon his return to China, at thirty-three years of age, he participated in the final period of the student movement. On June 2, together with three others, he began a hunger strike in the hope of moving the government and the masses of students to engage in a dialog of equals. On the night of June 3, together with Hou Dejian and Zhou Duo, he successfully negotiated with the troops to gain additional time for the students to leave the square, while persuading the students with the greatest of difficulty to leave the square before they were slaughtered. For these efforts and for the dissident views in his writings, he was detained for twenty-one months.
In May 1995, with the approach of the sixth anniversary of the Tiananmen crack-down and while the Chinese authorities negotiated with the nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists planning the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Liu Xiaobo was again targeted by the regime. Liu Xiaobo had authored an open petition to the government (the May 19 petition) calling for democratic reforms and respect for the rule of law. It was titled Drawing Lessons from Blood and was signed by fifty-six people. It was one of a number of petitions that circulated in March and May. The authorities reacted by detaining Liu Xiaobo at the house of his girlfriend.
The following year, in late September, coinciding with the preparation of the plenary session of the Communist Party and President Jiang Zemin’s efforts to consolidate power, Liu Xiaobo and Wang Xizhe, a veteran activist, issued a statement to the authorities requesting that they honor a 1945 commitment to guarantee freedoms of religion, press, speech, and the right to form political parties and hold demonstrations. The statement demanded that Jiang be impeached for saying that the People’s Liberation Army was under the “absolute leadership” of the Communist Party instead of the state. In a reference to China’s dispute with Japan over the sovereignty of Diao Yu Tai, a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, and China’s threatening Taiwan with missile tests, the statement said: “Force can be used against Taiwan, force can be used against students, but force cannot be used against Japan. What is the reason?” The statement addressed the issue of Tibetan self-determination, saying that China had failed to give Tibet autonomy as promised. Reuters news agency reported that police notified Liu’s wife that he was sentenced to three years of reform through labor.
As of this writing, Liu Xiaobo has not relented in his efforts to petition the Chinese government for redress of wrongs. On October 28, 2003, Du Daobin, a civil servant from Hubei, was arrested for posting articles on the Internet advocating democracy and freedom of expression in China. Du also had campaigned for the release of Liu Di, at the time a twenty-two-year-old college student (known by her screen handle as the “stainless steal mouse”) arrested in November of 2002 for posting messages on the Internet advocating freedom and democracy, as well as expressing sympathy for Huang Qi, an Internet provider who also had been arrested for advocating freedom of expression. To challenge the Chinese disregard for the rights of its citizens, Liu Xiaobo wrote a public letter to the National People’s Congress demanding a fair trial for Liu Di. Early in March 2003, for his effort to deliver this public letter to the Congress, which was in session for its annual meeting, Liu Xiaobo was detained and placed under house arrest. This letter garnered 690 signatures of netcitizens. Also around this time Liu Xiaobo drafted a petition demanding that Du Daobo be released. As of February 2004, Liu Xiaobo had gathered some 102 signatures of well-known academics and intellectuals for this petition.
Liu Xiaobo’s writings have kept pace with his political activities. From 2002 until the present, more than ten articles of his have appeared on the BBC Chinese.com scholarly forum site. He has continued to challenge the regime for its repressiveness, in such pieces as “The Other Face of the Mainland Police,” in which he points out the lack of accountability that besets China’s law force. He highlights the callous disregard of the regime for the well-being of its weaker members in his piece “The Human Rights Disaster Behind Self-Immolation,” in which he details the plight of those whose dwellings have been appropriated for urban development and who have not been adequately compensated. He deals with corruption among official ranks in his “Wither the Sinking Ship,” in which he points out the fact that every year assets worth some US$90 billion are transferred to the West by corrupt officials, many of whom, together with their families, then manage to abscond to the West. These are the same people who would promulgate the idea that some must leave the ship in life boats for the safety and well-being of the ship (the leaky ship theory). The people who leave the ship swim in a sea of mass unemployment as the price that must be paid to repair the ship. Hopefully, once the ship is repaired, they will one day be picked up and even be compensated by the party and the state.
All his trenchant criticism of a brutally repressive totalitarian regime has not kept Liu Xiaobo from acknowledging the fact that the Chinese people have made some strides toward achieving freedom, democracy, and human rights. In his piece “Ruling the Country by Law the Chinese Way,”, he notes that there is a heightened awareness of human rights as evinced by the willingness of people to sign petitions to protect the “Mothers of Tiananmen Square,” for Liu Di, the “stainless steel mouse,” and the outcry raised in the online forums by poets over the death of Xu Tianlong, a Sichuan worker who resorted to self-immolation when he could not collect his back wages. An end to forcing the homeless and the destitute into police custody (see Liu Xiaobo’s “A Victory for Safeguarding the People’s Empowerment Movement”) brought about by the hue and cry raised as a result of the death of Sun Zhigang is another example of positive systemic change. Perhaps the most wide-reaching changes are to be seen in the shift in China’s mass media. No longer dependent on official subsidies, the media have been compelled to furnish their publics with content that has mass appeal. At present, people in China are concerned about the unequal distribution of wealth, the prevalence of official corruption, how changes in party personnel will affect their lives, and what impact foreign relations, particularly the Sino-American relationship, will have on their lives. New publications like the Southern Weekend, led by young intellectuals, are advancing intellectual freedom in China.
In the end, to break with the bleak past, change must be rooted in values that are different from those of the past. The values of democracy, freedom, and human rights, emphasizing the dignity of all people, can only come to fruition in the words of Liu Xiaobo if “more and more young intellectuals attempt to rid themselves of their inner fears and take the ideals of freedom from their studies into the actual practices of their everyday lives.” Liu Xiaobo’s actions, his writings, and his criticisms represent his efforts to contribute to achieving these aspirations and to raising the consciousness of others to participate in this struggle. I believe that a reading of Liu Xiaobo’s Contemporary Chinese Politics and Chinese Intellectuals will elucidate the wellsprings of these ideals, while a review of his life will attest to the fact that he has made sacrifices to live up to this intellectual commitment.
Translation © 2006 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Chinese text. Liu Xiaobo, Dui fouding wenhua da geming de
Translation © 2006 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Chinese text. Liu Xiaobo, Yi
