by MARCEL SANROMÀ
2017-07-20
Dissident. Abandoned and unattended in prison, with untreated cancer, and accompanied by the secret police until his last breath. His departure reminds us that China's economic opening has not been accompanied by an abandonment of its brutal repressive methods.
An empty chair and many people watching it. A small sign with his name and his portrait projected on a screen. This is how he received 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Chinese activist and dissident Liu Xiaobo. He had already been in prison for months., accused of subversion for having signed “Letter 08”, a manifesto signed by 303 Chinese intellectuals demanding that the regime open itself to a more democratic system.
The world showed its admiration and support for the letter, but Beijing persecuted its signatories, and ended up imprisoning Liu. His sentence was 11 years of prison (It was supposed to come out in December 2020), but liver cancer killed him last week. Sick, Liu remained locked up in prison, and they only transferred him to a hospital when he was already in a terminal phase. He had been notified of his cancer in May. The question remains whether the Chinese government neglected him to the point of not realizing the disease until then., or if they hid it from him and the world.
They denied him leaving the country in the same way that they denied him the right to demonstrate. His last image, weak, bedridden, and surrounded by staff, without knowing who were doctors and who were government agents. Even at his funeral, there was secret police. The brutality of the Chinese regime made Liu the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in prison since Carl von Ossietzky, awarded in 1935, who died three years later, imprisoned by the Nazi German regime, who convicted him of treason.
His case is a clear example that, despite the fact that mao collars have disappeared from official photographs and skyscrapers have populated the country's large cities, The government of the Asian giant continues to be an authoritarian regime that does not allow dissent.
AT TIANAN. Without any doubt, The best-known episode in the repressive history of the Chinese government was the Tiananmen massacre., occurred on 4 June 1989. It all started on 15 April of that year, with the death of Hu Yaobang, up to two years before, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Hu had gained popular support for his reformist vision, managing to rehabilitate those persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. in 1987 the party forced him to resign because it considered him soft on student protests, which helped generate an image of Hu as a benevolent reformer. The regime tried to minimize his death, which generated the first protests.
After a month of protests, that increasingly led to the demand for deeper and more democratizing reforms, The government declared martial law on 20 of May. The early morning of 3 June, the tanks reached the epicenter of the protest, Tiananmen Square. The US CIA estimated the deaths at between 400 and 800, but the Chinese Red Cross raises the figure to 2 mil 600. Before the majestic gates of the Forbidden City, The protests died with the bloodshed of fellow citizens, and the best thing that those days left to the world was the iconic image of a man, carrying a bag, planted in front of the tanks. Since then, official silence.
TIBET. But China's repressive record begins almost at the same time as Mao's victory., in may 1950. Just half a year later, Chinese People's Army troops invaded Tibet, and shortly after the agreement was signed 17 points that integrated the territory within Chinese sovereignty.
Barely six years after the invasion, the first Tibetan rebellion broke out, which ended with brutal repression, who massacred thousands of civilians in 1959. The brutality of the regime was repeated during Mao's Cultural Revolution, when the state murdered several Buddhist monks and destroyed thousands of temples and monasteries.
So, Tibet continues to be one of the great international causes, often sponsored by the United States and with media exposure contributed by the active militancy of the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.
In fact, The last major episode of repression occurred in 2012, when, after two years of occurring sporadically in Chinese provinces with Tibetan populations, like Sichuan, Tibetan citizens began burning themselves in Tibet, in protest against Beijing. The campaign was followed with a wave of arrests, what, according to Radio Free Asia, a broadcaster linked to the EU, the government arrested 600 personas. Their crimes included recording the immolations with their cell phones..
NO FIGURES. Quantifying Chinese repression is practically impossible. The government rarely provides figures; He didn't do it with Tibet five years ago, nor with Tiananmen, does 28. Every year Amnesty International prepares a report on the evolution of the death penalty (how many people were executed, how many sentences were signed, in which countries, etc.), and the listing always includes an asterisk: “China does not provide data”, but it is taken for granted that it surpasses all the others.
¿CORRUPTION? But Chinese repression has not focused solely on whipping the population, but the tentacles of the government have also been baited with political rivals. The current president, Xi Jinping, has stood out for insisting on the fight against corruption; has made a flag of it, and it has done so at the same time that the fracture between currents of the CCP increases.
There are many who think that the anti-corruption fight is actually more than anything a way to get rivals out of the way, before the party conclave that this fall must define the future of the regime (Xi must leave the presidency in 2023).
The latest example of a possible covert purge is that of Sun Zhengcai, who this past Saturday was suddenly dismissed as head of the Party in the megalopolis of Chongqing (36 Millions of inhabitants). He was expected to be a key player in said conclave, and many believed that he would be the next number two in the government, replacing the current prime minister, Li Keqiang.
Sun has committed “serious discipline violations”, which is how the party usually defines corruption cases. Sun is part of an alternative current to that of Xi, and his relief in Chongqing, Cher Min'er, He is part of the group close to the president. Tension increases on the way to the 19th CCP Congress.
