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ONE YEAR AFTER THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AWARD 

TO LIU XIAOBO: CONDITIONS FOR POLITICAL 

PRISONERS AND PROSPECTS FOR POLITICAL 

REFORM 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE 

COMMISSION ON CHINA 

ONE HUNDRED TWELFTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

DECEMBER 6, 2011 

Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China 

( 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov 
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

House Senate 

CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey, 

Chairman 

FRANK WOLF, Virginia 

DONALD A. MANZULLO, Illinois 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California 

TIM WALZ, Minnesota 

MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio 

MICHAEL HONDA, California 

SHERROD BROWN, Ohio, Cochairman 

MAX BAUCUS, Montana 

CARL LEVIN, Michigan 

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California 

JEFF MERKLEY, Oregon 

SUSAN COLLINS, Maine 

JAMES RISCH, Idaho 

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS 

SETH D. HARRIS, Department of Labor 

MARIA OTERO, Department of State 

FRANCISCO J. SA ́ NCHEZ, Department of Commerce 

KURT M. CAMPBELL, Department of State 

NISHA DESAI BISWAL, U.S. Agency for International Development 

PAUL B. PROTIC, Staff Director 

LAWRENCE T. LIU, Deputy Staff Director 

(II) 
(III) 

CO N T E N T S 

Page 

Opening statement of Hon Christopher H. Smith, a U.S. Representative from 

New Jersey; Chairman, Congressional-Executive Commission on China ....... 1 

Walz, Hon. Tim, a U.S. Representative from Minnesota; Ranking Member, 

Congressional-Executive Commission on China ................................................ 4 

Link, Perry, Chancellorial Chair for Innovative Teaching, Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, University of California, Riverside; Professor Emeritus, East Asian Studies, Princeton University ............................. 6 

Li, Xiaorong, Independent Scholar ......................................................................... 7 

Botsford Fraser, Marian, Chair, Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International ................................................................................................................. 9 

Gershman, Carl, President, National Endowment for Democracy ...................... 11 

Chai, Ling, Founder, All Girls Allowed ................................................................. 24 

Wu, Harry, Executive Director, The Laogai Research Foundation and Laogai 

Museum ................................................................................................................ 26 

Littlejohn, Reggie, President, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers ...................... 28 

Fu, Bob, Founder and President, ChinaAid Association ...................................... 30 

APPENDIX 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

Link, Perry ............................................................................................................... 42 

Li, Xiaorong .............................................................................................................. 47 

Botsford Fraser, Marian .......................................................................................... 49 

Gershman, Carl ........................................................................................................ 53 

Chai, Ling ................................................................................................................. 55 

Wu, Harry ................................................................................................................ 77 

Littlejohn, Reggie ..................................................................................................... 79 

Fu, Bob ..................................................................................................................... 82

Smith, Hon. Christopher H. .................................................................................... 84 

SUBMISSION FOR THE RECORD

The Chen Guangcheng Report: Coercive Family Planning in Linyi, 2005, 

drafted by Teng Baio, submitted by Reggie Littlejohn ..................................... 87 

(1) 

ONE YEAR AFTER THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE 

AWARD TO LIU XIAOBO: CONDITIONS FOR 

POLITICAL PRISONERS AND PROSPECTS 

FOR POLITICAL REFORM 

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2011 

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE

COMMISSION ON CHINA, 

Washington, DC. 

The hearing was convened, pursuant to notice, at 12:05 p.m., in 

room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher H. 

Smith, Chairman, presiding. 

Also present: Representatives Tim Walz and Frank Wolf. 

Also present: Anna Brettell, Senior Advisor and Paul Protic, Staff 

Director, Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, A 

U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW JERSEY; CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

Representative SMITH. The Commission will come to order, and 

good afternoon, everyone. 

One year after the independent Nobel Committee awarded the 

Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, who as we all know is a Chinese 

intellectual and democracy advocate, Liu remains isolated in prison 

thousands of miles away from his wife, who authorities are holding 

under house arrest in Beijing. 

In February 2010, I led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in nominating Liu Xiaobo for the prize, at the same time nominating two 

other persecuted human rights advocates, Chen Guangcheng and 

Gao Zhisheng, to be joint recipients as part of an international tide 

of support for the awarding of the prize to Liu Xiaobo. 

The Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu 

Xiaobo for his ‘‘long and non-violent struggle for fundamental 

human rights in China.’’ H. Res. 1717, which I authored, congratulating Liu on the awarding of the prize passed the House with a 

vote of 402 to 1 exactly one year ago. 

Chinese authorities, on the other hand, tried Liu and sentenced 

him to 11 years in prison for ‘‘inciting subversion of state power,’’ 

the longest known sentence for that crime, simply for exercising his 

internationally recognized right to free expression. 

According to Chinese authorities, Liu’s conviction was based on 

Charter 08 and six essays that he wrote. Liu Xiaobo signed Charter 

08, as we know, which is a treatise urging political and legal reforms in China based on constitutional principles. Charter 08 
2 

states that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind, and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values. 

Characteristic of the Chinese Government, officials blocked access to Charter 08. They have questioned, summoned, and otherwise harassed a large number of Chinese citizens for contributing 

to, or signing, that document. Chinese officials apparently remained livid over the awarding of the prize to Liu and they continue in their campaign to malign Liu and the Nobel Committee. 

In addition, they have nearly suspended political relations with 

the Norwegian Government, claiming the awarding of the Peace 

Prize to Liu had done ‘‘great damage’’ to the relations between 

China and Norway. They blame the Norwegian Government because it ‘‘supported this wrong decision.’’ 

The apparent violations of Chinese legal protections for defendants that have marred Mr. Liu’s case from the outset are numerous 

and well documented. In addition, the United Nations Working 

Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that the Chinese Government’s detention of Liu and the house arrest of his wife are indeed arbitrary. 

Mr. Liu’s trial and sentence demonstrates once again the Chinese 

Government’s failure to uphold its international human rights obligations and also its failure to abide by procedural norms and safeguards that meet international standards. While authorities did 

allow Liu to attend his father’s funeral memorial service in October, they continue to limit visits from his wife. Over the past year, 

authorities have allowed her to visit her husband only on a very 

few occasions. 

Beijing authorities are holding Liu’s wife in a de facto form of 

house arrest. They have cut off telephone and Internet service, and 

have made her house off-limits to visitors. 

As we all know, sadly, Liu Xiaobo is not alone. As of September 

2011, the CECC’s Political Prisoner Database, perhaps the greatest 

database in the world, contained information on 1,451 cases of 

known political or religious prisoners currently detained. Chen 

Guangcheng is one of those prisoners. Chen is a blind self-taught 

legal advocate who advocated on behalf of farmers, the disabled, 

and women forced to undergo abortions. 

Authorities have held him under a form of house arrest in Linyi 

County, Shandong Province, since his release from prison in September 2011. In effect, Chen’s prison sentence has not ended. Chen 

served over four years in prison on charges of ‘‘international destruction of property’’ and ‘‘organizing a group of people to disturb 

traffic.’’ 

His real crime, however, was publicizing the abuses of local onechild-per-couple policy officials and trying to use the Chinese legal 

system to seek justice for the victims of those abuses. 

For months officials have confined Chen and his wife in their 

home, beaten them, and subjected them to 24-hour surveillance. 

Officials have set up checkpoints around the village where Chen 

lives to prevent journalists and ordinary citizens from visiting him 

and his family. 

According to one report, 37 people who tried to enter the village 

in October were attacked by 100 thugs. Under great pressure, au-
3 

thorities recently allowed Chen’s elderly mother to go out and buy 

groceries and other supplies and have allowed his six-year-old 

daughter to go to school, flanked, of course, by security, and have 

allowed Chen some medicines sent by supporters, although they 

have not allowed him to see a doctor about his egregious health 

problems. 

These small concessions mean little in the big picture. Publicly 

available laws do not seem to provide any legal basis for holding 

Chen and his family as prisoners in their own home. I would note 

parenthetically that as Chairman of this Commission I, and members and staff of this Commission, tried just a few weeks ago to 

meet with Chen on his 40th birthday. We were denied a visa. We 

will attempt to obtain a visa to visit China on a number of human 

rights issues, including visiting Chen Guangcheng. 

Then there’s the case of Gao Zhisheng. Authorities’ treatment of 

the greatly acclaimed lawyer Gao Zhisheng is even more shocking 

and illustrates the brutality of some officials. Officials revoked Mr. 

Gao’s law license in 2005 in response to his brave efforts to represent fellow Christians accused of ‘‘illegally’’ distributing Bibles 

and to defend workers and Falon Gong practitioners. 

In 2006, officials sentenced Gao to three years in prison on the 

charge of inciting subversion, but suspended the charge for five 

years. The five years suspended sentence is set to expire later this 

month. Today, however, there is no word about Mr. Gao’s whereabouts. 

After Mr. Gao wrote an open letter to Congress in 2007 criticizing China’s human rights record, officials brutally tortured him 

for 50 days, beating him with electric prods, abused him with 

toothpicks, and threatened to kill him if he told anyone of the 

treatment. 

Mr. Gao disappeared into official custody in February 2009. 

When he resurfaced briefly in March 2010, he told friends that he 

would ‘‘disappear again’’ if his statements about his treatment by 

his captors since 2009 were made public. 

After authorities disappeared him again, the press went public 

about his torture, which included a beating with guns in holsters, 

for a period of over two days, which repeatedly made him feel close 

to death. 

It does not seem appropriate to talk about political reforms in 

China when there is so little progress in improving civil and political rights and when authorities continue to mistreat, abuse, and 

torture people like Liu, Chen, and Gao. The political prisoners for 

whom we have names are just a tip of the iceberg. No one knows 

how many citizens in China are persecuted for their religious or political beliefs. 

In mid-February 2011, Chinese authorities launched a broad 

crackdown against rights defenders, reform advocates, lawyers, petitioners, writers, artists, and Internet bloggers. International observers have described the crackdown as one of the harshest crackdowns on human rights advocates in years, if not decades. 

While authorities have released many of those people they detained in February, the rapidity and severity of the crackdown indicates Chinese authorities remain intolerant of freedom of speech 
4 

and religion, and a whole host of other fundamental freedoms and 

rights. 

Perhaps the drafters of Charter 08 have it right. The Charter 

notes that China’s policy of reform and opening has increased living standards and economic freedoms in China, but states that the 

ruling elite fights off any move toward political change. 

I’d like to yield to my good friend and colleague, the Ranking 

Member from the House side, Mr. Walz. 

STATEMENT OF HON. TIM WALZ, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE 

FROM MINNESOTA; RANKING MEMBER, CONGRESSIONALEXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA 

Representative WALZ. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank 

you to all of our witnesses who are here. I can’t tell you, as I say 

every time, the Chairman’s passion, his long history of working on 

human rights unwaveringly, and the active nature of this Commission now is something I’m very proud of. 

The Commission staff, we have some of the best and brightest. 

They’re compiling some of the best database, as you heard the 

Chairman say, on the issue of political prisoners of anywhere in the 

world, and for that I’m very proud. 

Probably most importantly, though, for the panelists who come 

before this Commission are some of the most inspiring, some of the 

most humbling people that I have ever been around because of the 

experiences and the expertise that it brings here, focusing on an 

issue that knows absolutely no political differences on this Commission and has continued to move forward on bringing the issue of 

human rights. 

It’s not just about China and that’s our focus and that’s our Commission’s mandate, but it’s about setting the example, especially for 

our own country, that these are the things that are important to 

us. The Chairman’s work has certainly propelled this of importance 

in the Congress as a whole. 

Once again, today we are blessed with several great panels that 

I’m really looking forward to to give us some insight of where we 

go next, because it truly is all about making sure that everyone has 

the right to those basic human rights and freedoms that we all care 

so deeply about. 

So, Mr. Chairman, thank you again for convening another great 

panel, and I yield back. 

Representative SMITH. Mr. Walz, thank you very much. And 

thank you for your passion and for the knowledge you bring, having lived in China, and your comments and your leadership is 

greatly appreciated. 

I’d like to now introduce our first panel. I would just note, the 

picture on the right, which everyone will recognize, the empty 

chair. When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, many 

of us, including many of our panelists, were there in attendance, 

as was I. It was a moving moment beyond words when not only 

was Liu Xiaobo not there, nor was his wife or anyone else allowed 

to stand in his stead to receive that very august prize. 

So, we lift up that picture. A picture is worth a thousand words. 

Let it go out from here, because all of you have been steadfast in 

this fight for human rights in China from day one. Liu Xiaobo and 
5 

the others are not forgotten in the least. If anything, we are 

ratcheting up our efforts to secure his release and his freedom and 

that of people who have courageously borne the scars of human 

rights advocacy in the People’s Republic of China. 

So I’d like to now introduce Perry Link, who is professor emeritus, East Asian Studies, Princeton University. He’s currently 

teaching at the University of California in Riverside. 

Dr. Link recently co-edited a book on Liu Xiaobo’s essays, which 

he just gave me a copy of and I deeply appreciate that, ‘‘No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems,’’ Liu Xiaobo. He also 

did a book entitled, ‘‘Empty Chair: Chronicling the Reform Movement Beijing Fears Most.’’ Previously he co-edited the book entitled, ‘‘The Tiananmen Papers,’’ a collection of documents leaked by 

high-level government officials that helped chronicle events surrounding the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and their suppression. 

Representative SMITH. Then we’ll hear from Li Xiaorong, who is 

an independent scholar and human rights activist who has cofounded and served on the boards of Chinese human rights nongovernmental organizations. She was a research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy of the University of Maryland, where she also taught graduate courses. She has published 

a book on ethics and human rights and many academic articles. 

Her research projects have won support from many well-known 

foundations and organizations. 

Then we will hear from Marian Botsford Fraser, who is chair of 

the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International. We all 

know that Liu Xiaobo was a former president of the Independent 

Chinese PEN Center. She is a Canadian writer, editor, and broadcaster. She is the author of three acclaimed non-fiction books. She 

has been an active member of PEN International since 1991, including serving as president of PEN Canada. She has undertaken 

three freedom of expression missions on behalf of PEN International, including one to China in 2011. 

Then we’ll hear from Carl Gershman, who has long been before 

this Commission and a great leader for human rights and democracy and is president of the National Endowment for Democracy, 

a private congressionally supported grant-making institution with 

the mission to strengthen democratic institutions around the world 

through non-government efforts. 

In addition to presiding over the endowments and grants programs in many countries around the world, he has overseen the 

creation of the Quarterly Journal of Democracy, International 

Forum for Democratic Studies, the Reagan Fasell Democracy Fellows Program, and the Center for International Media Assistance. 

So, welcome all four of our distinguished witnesses on panel one. 

Dr. Link, if you could begin. 
6 

STATEMENT OF PERRY LINK, CHANCELLORIAL CHAIR FOR INNOVATIVE TEACHING, COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND 

FOREIGN LANGUAGES, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE; PROFESSOR EMERITUS, EAST ASIAN STUDIES, 

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 

Mr. LINK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s an honor to be here 

and I salute you and your colleagues on the Commission for your 

wisdom and your passion, obviously, in holding this important 

hearing. 

Liu Xiaobo is one of those unusual people who can look at human 

life from the broadest of perspectives and reason about it from first 

principles. His keen intellect notices things that others only look 

at, but do not see. 

Hardly any topic in Chinese culture, politics, or society evades 

his interest and he can write about upsetting things with analytic 

calm. We might expect this kind of steadiness in a recluse, a hermit poet, a cloistered scholar, but in Liu Xiaobo it comes in an activist. Time and again, he has gone where he thinks he should go 

and done what he thinks he should do as if havoc and the possibility of prison simply were not there. 

Fortunately for us, his readers, he writes utterly free from fear. 

Most Chinese writers today, including the best ones, write with political caution in the backs of their minds and under a shadow that 

looms as their fingers pass over their keyboards: What topics 

should I not touch? What indirection should I use? Liu Xiaobo does 

none of this. What he thinks, we get. 

His starting point almost always is deeply humane. For example, 

in this book he analyzes China’s obsession with Olympic gold medals, those shining badges of state-sponsored chauvinism, from the 

viewpoint of six-year-old divers whose retinas are ruined for life by 

repeated impacts with the water’s surface. He points out that Confucius, for all his fame, in fact, ranked pretty low among ancient 

Chinese thinkers in his sympathy for the poor and the oppressed. 

Liu surveys the political jokes that course through China today and 

notes that ‘‘in a dictatorship, the grins of the people are the nightmares of the dictators.’’ 

At his trial for subversion two years ago, Liu said that the bloody 

massacre on June 4, 1989, in Beijing, was a turning point in his 

own life. Every year since then on that date he’s written a poem 

for the ‘‘lost souls.’’ In one of these he writes that ‘‘at that moment 

the watching world was as a defenseless lamb/slaughtered by a 

blazing sun/Even God was stupefied, speechless.’’ 

Liu is different from most Chinese writers in his attention to 

transcendent values. He praises the great Chinese writer Lu Xun 

for an ability to look beyond mundane matters to problems of isolation and despair in the human condition. He describes how, on a 

visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1988, he 

was suddenly overwhelmed to realize that his preoccupations with 

the specific problems of China seemed petty when measured 

against profound challenges to the human spirit. 

Liu sees the roots of Chinese problems today in its political system, not in people. He insists that no individual person, including 

any who prosecuted or imprisoned him, is his personal enemy. His 

ultimate goal is regime change, but done peacefully. 
7 

On this point China’s rulers, who charge him with subverting 

their power, actually see him correctly. They are also correct to 

perceive that his ideas would be broadly popular inside China if 

they were allowed to circulate freely, and that of course is why they 

are so eager to block them. 

Liu writes that change in China will be slow, but he is optimistic 

that unrelenting pressure from below from farmers, petitioners, 

rights advocates, and perhaps most important, hundreds of millions 

of Internet users, eventually will carry the day. 

Chinese people have always shown special reverence for Nobel 

prizes in any field, and this fact has made Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize 

especially hard for the regime to swallow. When China’s rulers put 

on a mask of imperturbability as they denounced Liu’s prize, they 

are not only trying to deceive the world but at a deeper level are 

lying to themselves. 

When they try to counter Liu’s prize by inventing a Confucius 

Peace Prize and then give it to Vladimir Putin, citing his ‘‘iron fist’’ 

in Chechnya, there is a sense in which we should not blame them 

for their clownish appearances because these spring from an inner 

panic that they themselves cannot control. 

Liu Xiaobo sits in prison, in physical hardship, but in his moral 

core there can be no doubt that he is much more at peace than the 

men who oppress him. 

Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Dr. Link, thank you very much for your 

testimony. 

Now I’d like to ask Li Xiaorong to proceed. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Link appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF LI XIAORONG, INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR 

Ms. LI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to speak 

at this special occasion. One year after winning the Nobel Peace 

Prize, Liu Xiaobo continues to languish in a Chinese prison without 

regular family visits. His wife, Liu Xia, has been under illegal 

house arrest. Liu Xiaobo’s family has been under heavy pressure 

to keep silent, and only recently was able to convey some information about his current situation to the press. 

One of Liu’s brothers reportedly said that Liu Xiaobo was allowed briefly out of prison on September 18 to mourn his father’s 

death, and that his brother and Liu Xia were each recently allowed 

a rare opportunity to visit Liu at the Gingo Prison. 

Back in 2009, on December 25, Liu Xiaobo was convicted of inciting subversion of state power by the Beijing Number One Municipal Court. Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison, with 2 years’ 

deprivation of political rights. It was one of the longest sentences 

handed down for the so-called crime of inciting subversion of state 

power in recent years. 

Officials left no doubt that the legal system, despite any promise 

of reform, was simply the Communist Party’s tool to stamp out its 

critics, and that the crime of inciting subversion of state power is 

so vaguely ill-defined that it can be conveniently used by the CCP 

to serve their political purposes. Liu’s conviction was based entirely 

on his writings, expressions of his political opinions, and his nonviolent activities. 
8 

From the time of the arrival of a policeman at Liu’s apartment 

in Beijing on the evening of December 8, 2008, to his imprisonment 

incommunicado today, the prosecution of Liu Xiaobo has been 

marred at each step by violations of his legal constitutional rights 

and international human rights. 

For instance, from December 8, 2008, to June 23, 2009, Liu was 

held under residential surveillance at an undisclosed location in 

Beijing. Except for two police-escorted visits by his wife, Liu had 

no contact with the outside world. 

Once Liu’s case was turned over to the Beijing municipal prosecutor’s office in early December 2009, his lawyers were given very 

little time to prepare his defense. During the trial of December 23, 

2009, Mr. Liu and his defense lawyers were not allowed to fully 

present their defense in court. The presiding judge interrupted Liu 

Xiaobo and cut him short during his prepared remarks. 

Liu’s two lawyers were given a total of less than 20 minutes to 

present their arguments. Liu’s trial was essentially closed to the 

public. With the exception of two family members, all other spectators in the small courtroom were young males in plainclothes, apparently put there to occupy the seats in order to keep Liu’s other 

family members and supporters and observers from the diplomatic 

community out of the way. 

Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, was denied permission to attend the trial. 

The practice of unlawful secret detention prior to Liu Xiaobo’s sentence has profound ramifications and a chilling effect in the country’s rapidly declining climate for rule of law reform in the last few 

years. 

Since then, the same kind of secret detention and forced disappearances have been applied on multiple occasions, for example, 

to many activists and lawyers during the government crackdown 

and online calls for tradition-style Jasmine revolution protests last 

February and to the artist Ai Weiwei. 

In February, within a few weeks, a total of 52 individuals were 

criminally detained and at least 24 were subjected to forced disappearances, 5 were sent to reeducation through labor camps, 4 

were placed under illegal residential surveillance, and 2 were held 

in psychiatric hospitals. 

As we speak—a draft revision of the Chinese criminal procedure 

law is under consideration in the National People’s Congress, the 

government is trying to legalize such secretive detention or forced 

disappearances. 

If anyone had expected that the government would take some 

positive steps toward honoring the spirit of the Peace Prize and improve the human rights situation in China as a result of the historical decision, one would be very disappointed. Awarding Liu Xiaobo 

the prize was no doubt a game-changer; it drew unprecedented 

scrutiny to the government’s systematic human rights abuses since 

1989. 

After the Peace Prize, together with other precipitous events, the 

once-popular argument that when it comes to China there should 

be somehow double standards and human rights concerns should 

not get in the way of U.S. trade and strategic priorities has somehow seemed to be on the defensive. 
9 

The question remains, however, whether the international community is doing anything effectively or doing enough to support 

those Chinese who risk their own lives and liberty to fight for democracy and human rights, such as Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng, 

Gao Zhisheng, Liu Xianbin, Chen Wei, Wang Lihong, Ni Yulan, 

and the many, many others. 

Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you very much, Ms. Li, for your 

testimony. 

I’d like to now ask Ms. Botsford Fraser to proceed. Let me just 

note that we’re joined by Chairman Frank Wolf, who is not only 

a member of this Commission, but also co-chairs the Lantos 

Human Rights Commission and is the subcommittee Appropriations Chair for the justice and other agencies on the Appropriations 

Committee. So we’re glad to have him here. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Li appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF MARIAN BOTSFORD FRASER, CHAIR, WRITERS 

IN PRISON COMMITTEE OF PEN INTERNATIONAL 

Ms. BOTSFORD FRASER. Thank you, Chairman Smith, members of 

the Commission. I am Marian Botsford Fraser and I chair the 

Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International. I’m very grateful to the Commission for the opportunity to reflect on the situation 

of Liu Xiaobo, who is a PEN colleague and a former president of 

the Independent Chinese PEN Center [ICPC], and also on the prospects for greater freedom of expression in China. 

Since 1921, PEN International has been fighting for freedom of 

literature and freedom of expression. We currently have 144 PEN 

centers in more than 100 countries worldwide. 

In Liu Xiaobo’s case and in all of our advocacy, PEN is guided 

by the human rights norms that countries around the world are required to uphold. The right to freedom of expression is enshrined 

in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights created 63 

years ago and the International Covenant on Civil and Political 

Rights [ICCPR]. Only 19 nations have not signed the ICCPR. The 

People’s Republic of China is among seven states that have signed 

the covenant but haven’t yet ratified it. 

Liu was sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison for 

seven phrases extracted from his essays and from Charter 08, 

which he had helped to draft. In none of those phrases did Liu call 

for the overthrow of the government. He expressed his opinions, he 

offered critiques of current realities, and considered ways to make 

life in China more democratic and more just. 

I was honored to be part of a PEN delegation at the Nobel Peace 

Prize ceremony in Oslo last year. We were gratified by the international recognition of Liu’s efforts to promote peaceful change in 

China, but we were saddened by the Chinese authorities’ response 

and the subsequent crackdown, which included the arrest of Liu 

Xia. 

That crackdown was followed early this year by another even 

more severe wave of repression, this one targeting dissent thought 

to have been inspired by uprisings in the Middle East. 

This summer I was part of a PEN delegation that went to Beijing 

to gauge the level of repression and current climate for freedom of 
10 

expression and to deliver a message of solidarity to our colleagues. 

What we found was a mixture of absurd restrictions and repression 

on the one hand, and positive signs and hope on the other. 

In Beijing, 11 of 14 writers invited to the U.S. Embassy for a discussion about freedom of expression were prevented from attending, many after visits and warnings from the guobao, the security 

police. We could only assume that their telephone and Internet 

communications were monitored and that the Embassy’s may have 

been as well. 

Other private meetings with individuals we arranged were also 

canceled after visits from the guobao. We had also hoped to meet 

with Liu Xia, but with her Beijing compound guarded and her communication lines cut, we were cautioned not to attempt a visit, nor 

could we visit with Teng Biao and Ye Du, two other members of 

ICPC who were rounded up earlier this year, also being held incommunicado in their homes. This was discouraging. 

We were appalled by the intrusiveness and sheer size of the surveillance state and the severity of restrictions imposed on our PEN 

colleagues. The Chinese Government still doesn’t allow the ICPC to 

function fully inside the country and Liu Xiaobo is only 1 of 40 

writers in prison in China whose cases PEN is following today. 

At the same time we were surprised by the widespread dissatisfaction with the state of freedom of expression in China. Many 

of the writers we met with, even those not considered dissidents, 

decried the level of censorship and self-censorship and the oneparty system behind this repression, censorship that extends its 

tentacles deep into the literary life of China, into bookshops where 

bookshop owners are beaten and prevented from holding literary 

events. 

The frank expressions of those we met in Beijing seem to mirror 

the aspirations of China’s citizens. At the end of our trip, a highspeed train collided with another outside the city of Wenzhou, killing 40 people and injuring almost 200. The government’s attempts 

to cover up this tragedy, which included literally trying to bury the 

train at the scene, sparked outrage around the country. In five 

days, Chinese citizens posted 25 million messages critical of the 

government’s handling of the accident on China’s microblogs, or 

weibos. 

That campaign, unprecedented in its breadth and tenacity, has 

since been emulated in several other scandals and tragedies. Similarly, Chinese citizens who want to comment on the kinds of politically sensitive topics that dominate Liu Xiaobo’s essays are finding 

new ways to elude the censors, using word-play, humor, satire, 

posting photographs of themselves silently supporting political prisoners, as in the dark glasses campaign for the blind lawyer Chen 

Guangcheng. 

Citizens are beginning to ask why this lawyer was being confined 

inside his home after his release from prison. Murong Xuecun, a 

well-known and popular writer, recently documented his own attempt to visit Chen and the beating he got when he did. In a 

harrowing account published in The Guardian he said, ‘‘We just 

wanted to verify what it takes in this country, at this time, to visit 

an imprisoned free man.’’ 
11 

This surge of activism, citizens simply asking the question ‘‘why,’’ 

lends hope that China is changing. People are coming to realize, as 

Murong said of Chen Guangcheng, that ‘‘at the moment his freedom was arbitrarily being taken away, your freedom came under 

threat.’’ 

When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year 

the Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjorn Jagland, noted that the 

severe punishment imposed on Liu made him more than a central 

spokesman for human rights. Practically overnight he became the 

very symbol, both in China and internationally, of the struggle for 

such rights in China. 

So on the anniversary of that date, PEN would like to thank, 

again, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, this Commission, and all 

governments, organizations, and individuals around the world that 

have stood with Liu Xiaobo. We ask everyone to redouble their efforts so that by this time next year he and his wife Lui Xia are 

free. 

Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Ms. Botsford Fraser, thank you very much 

for your testimony and for your leadership. 

I would just note that if anyone has to leave, our witnesses or 

anyone who is so interested, we hope to have everyone who would 

like to sign that picture and when Liu Xiaobo gets to accept his 

Nobel Peace Prize someday—God willing someday soon—in person, 

when he makes his way to Washington we would like to present 

him with that. 

Carl Gershman? 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Botsford Fraser appears in the 

appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF CARL GERSHMAN, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL 

ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY 

Mr. GERSHMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It’s wonderful to see 

you again. 

I’ve been asked to address, briefly, three issues: The impact of 

China on global democratic trends, including the significance of the 

so-called China model of authoritarianism; the prospects for democratic reform in China, including the necessary pre-conditions for 

democratic institutions; and, finally, the influence of the Nobel 

Peace Prize on Chinese society and official policy. 

Regarding China’s impact on global democratic trends, it’s now 

common knowledge that China exerts an anti-democratic influence 

in world politics. Liu Xiaobo has said that China serves as a ‘‘blood 

transfusion machine’’ for smaller dictatorships in North Korea, 

Cuba, and elsewhere. 

In addition to providing economic and political support to such 

regimes, it shares tactics bilaterally with autocrats such as 

Lukashenko in Belarus, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Chavez in Venezuela; and it cooperates multilaterally with Russia and the Central Asian countries through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. 

China also projects its system of authoritarian capitalism as an 

alternative model to the system of democracy with a mixed economy that exists in the United States, Europe, and many other 
12 

countries around the world. There are some people in this country 

who are persuaded of this model’s effectiveness. Just last Thursday 

the SEIU’s [Service Employees International Union] former president, Andy Stern, published an article in the Wall Street Journal 

entitled, ‘‘China’s Superior Economic Model,’’ that praised its system of central planning. 

But this model is flawed for three fundamental reasons. First, as 

Liu Xiaobo pointed out in his 2006 essay ‘‘Changing the Regime by 

Changing Society,’’ two decades of reform have eroded, to one degree or another, each of the four pillars of China’s totalitarian system. Comprehensive nationalization is giving way to a system 

where independent economic activity ‘‘has given individuals the 

material base for autonomous choices.’’ 

The system of ‘‘all-pervasive organization’’ that eliminated all 

independent activity ‘‘is gone and never to return,’’ according to 

Liu, and society is now ‘‘moving toward freedom of movement, mobility, and career choice.’’ 

The ‘‘mental tyranny’’ of an imposed ideology has succumbed to 

the information revolution that has awakened individual consciousness and awareness of one’s rights. While the fourth pillar of political centralization and repression remains, according to Liu people 

have lost their fear of repression and the victims of persecution, far 

from being socially isolated and humiliated, now ‘‘inspire reference’’ 

in the society and are able to put their accusers ‘‘into the moral position of being defendants.’’ 

The second reason the model is flawed, according to Yu 

Jiangrong, the well-known Chinese scholar and sociologist, is that 

it is characterized by ‘‘rigid stability’’ and ‘‘dichotomized black-andwhite thinking’’ in which the ‘‘expression of people’s legitimate interests’’—land issues for peasants, wages for workers, homeowner 

rights for urban residents, minority rights for Tibetans, Uyghurs, 

and Mongolians—becomes a threat to the social order and is adamantly opposed. 

A rigid system, according to Professor Yu, is by definition brittle 

and can break under stress. It lacks the resilience of democracy 

where government is accountable and conflicts can be resolved lawfully. Professor Yu indeed fears that without such resilience, China 

will not be able to escape what he calls ‘‘the tragic fate of two millennia of the cycle of alternating chaos and order.’’ 

The third flaw is that the Chinese regime lacks political legitimacy. It has achieved a degree of performance-based legitimacy by 

using market reform to generate material wealth. But such legitimacy is inherently unstable since it is not immune to the business 

cycle, which is why Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking after 

the National People’s Congress in 2007, described the economy as 

‘‘unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.’’ 

No wonder the recent spike in worker protests in Guangdong has 

caused such alarm in Beijing. Without the authority that derives 

from receiving popular consent, Andrew Nathan has written, the 

Chinese regime lives ‘‘under the shadow of the future, vulnerable 

to existential challenges that mature democracies do not face.’’ 

Regarding the preconditions and possibility for China’s democratic transition, the picture is mixed. The brightest area is media 

liberalization, with social media and the Internet as a whole driv-
13 

ing traditional media over the past five years. As Liu Xiaobo noted, 

this has spread democratic values, including rights, awareness, and 

the desire to hold the government accountable. 

Even though those most active with social media only account for 

40 percent of the Chinese Internet users and 14.2 percent of all 

Chinese, they are having an impact throughout the society, and 

even workers using cell phones and social networking platforms 

use it to organize informally, despite official restrictions. 

Less encouraging is the fact that civil-society organizations continue to be highly restricted. The immense Chinese countryside remains woefully underserved by civil-society organizations. Most 

democrats now look to the rights defense movement as a critical 

way to advance the possibility of a transition. With increasingly 

broad participation and a convergence between middle class and 

working class, this movement strives to bring the struggle of workers and farmers into the mainstream. It is pushing for concrete 

gains in the rule of law and more distributive justice. But with the 

government showing no interest in giving this movement space, the 

conditions for a gradual and peaceful transition are limited. 

The concern of many Chinese activists is that increasing repression will delay a regime transition for so long that, when it does 

happen, which they think is inevitable, it will be accompanied by 

bloodshed and social turbulence. Thus, the probability of the regime surviving in its current form dwindles, along with the possibility for a peaceful transition and democratic consolidation. 

Finally, regarding the influence of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think 

it deepened the Chinese Government’s legitimacy crisis. For one 

thing, as The Economist noted at the time, Beijing’s disastrous response to the prize portrayed for the whole world to see ‘‘the government’s insecurity at home.’’ And it didn’t help when the audience of thousands rose in repeated standing ovations as Liv 

Ullmann read ‘‘I Have No Enemies,’’ Liu’s final statement at his 

trial, with his empty chair of honor constituting a powerful indictment of the regime. 

With all its stirring symbolism, the Nobel ceremony represented 

the confirmation by the international community of the sentiments 

of a good part of the Chinese society. As Liu himself said three 

years before the Nobel award, political persecution ‘‘has gradually 

turned into a vehicle for advancing the moral stature of its victims, 

garnering them honors for being the ‘civic conscience’ or the ‘heroes 

of truth,’ while the government’s hired thugs have become the instruments that ‘do the dirty work.’ ’’ Herein lies China’s hope. May 

its leaders begin to listen to such heroes before it is too late. 

Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Mr. Gershman, thank you very much for 

your testimony. 

I’d like to yield to Chairman Wolf, if he has any comments to 

make. 

Representative WOLF. Thank you, Mr. Smith. I believe you were 

there in Oslo. Yes, I do have a question. Is that what this is for? 

Representative SMITH. Or comments. 

Representative WOLF. I’ll wait for questions. Go ahead. 

Representative SMITH. Okay. Thank you. 
14 

Let me just ask a few opening questions, if I could. First of all, 

thank you all for your very eloquent statements on behalf of Liu 

Xiaobo and all of those who are languishing in either the laogai or 

some detention center, being tortured, mistreated because they 

espouse a human rights policy that unfortunately the Chinese Government finds objectionable. 

Paradoxically, Liu saw gradual and incremental change en route 

to full and unfettered democratization, yet the highly visible and 

unjust incarceration and detention ongoing, dissing the entire free 

world that rallied around him and the others, but certainly in 

Oslo—I mean, the sentiment, which continues unabated, was extraordinarily strong. 

But it seems to me that denying Liu the award, denying him the 

release from prison underscores Beijing’s insecurity and weakness. 

I like what you said, Dr. Link, when you quoted him, ‘‘utterly free 

from fear.’’ The fear is in the government, it’s not in the Gulag. 

It seems to me that this pushes China toward a tipping point 

faster and I think the end of this dictatorship and the matriculation of democracy is likely to happen sooner rather than later because of this highly insecure government and the way it has reacted. So I would like to ask you, at best the Chinese Government 

has mismanaged this. 

I mean, in broad daylight, with all eyes wide open, they not only 

have kept him in prison, and others, but the way—and those of us 

who were in Oslo were shocked, and maybe not shocked, about how 

the Chinese Government went into overdrive, propaganda-wise, to 

hurl insults and accusations against him, against the Norwegian 

Government, and all the others. 

So they have mismanaged it certainly from a public relations 

point of view, as well as from a governmental point of view. Is it 

that their arrogance is so high, are they so insecure, or is it that 

they think there is no sustainable penalties that might be meted 

out to them, particularly as they go around the world with some 

nouveau cash in their pocket to seemingly help some of the struggling countries in Europe and elsewhere. 

Why are they so brazen? Anybody like to take that? Carl? 

Mr. LINK. I think you’re right about the insecurity, yes. On the 

question of whether they feel there are no penalties around the 

world out of a kind of an arrogance that money can do anything 

for them, I think that’s part of the answer, too. I think ‘‘both’’ is 

the answer to your question. It’s an inner insecurity as well as a 

new-found confidence, if that’s the word, that money can do anything. 

Liu Xiaobo has written about this as well, that the new way to 

control everything in Chinese society now is money. In the Mao era 

it was power and thoughtwork and so on, but money is playing 

that role now. But still, it’s a seal atop a twisting ball, is the metaphor I like. I think they’re constantly having to adjust and feel insecure, so I think you’re quite right about that. 

Mr. GERSHMAN. I don’t think it’s unique. I think around the 

world you have dictatorships that hold onto power and behave in 

a very brazen way. China’s brazenness is increased by its size. It’s 

a big country and has growing power in the world, and it’s throw-
15 

ing its weight around. But what I find remarkable is the degree of 

its insecurity. 

It derives from the fact that its economic performance is creating 

divisions in the society, the feeling on the part of the masses that 

they’re not benefiting from the growing wealth. And so you’re seeing great disturbances as workers get laid off. They don’t have any 

means for representation. 

The regime has also lost moral legitimacy, which we know from 

past experiences is ultimately the most important thing. I remember once Elena Bonner saying that back in the 1970s they were 

just 11 dissidents with a typewriter, and look what happened to 

the Soviet Union. This frightens regimes today. 

Representative SMITH. Yes. 

Ms. BOTSFORD FRASER. I think the level of desperation is demonstrated also in the way in which the surveillance state is functioning within the country and the degree to which it hampers people at the most ordinary levels of life. For example, one of the people that we met with in Beijing who was allowed to come to the 

U.S. Embassy meeting, hasn’t actually done anything bad since 

1998. He has not been detained and he has never been accused of 

anything, and yet he’s under constant surveillance all the time. 

So I think that this indicates a level of a sort of almost haphazard and kind of frantic, desperate sort of surveillance, sort of 

just scattershot, really. 

Ms. LI. I would just add to that, insecurity, arrogance, mismanagement, and panic. It was a profound sense of unpreparedness and shock that this small country, Norway, a few people on 

the Nobel Peace Committee, would dare to do this to China. So I 

think this has provoked a certain soul-searching and it is an indication that the regime, as Carl said, is degenerating into a sort of 

profound lack of moral legitimacy, both in society and within the 

government. 

Representative SMITH. I appreciate that. 

Mr. Gershman, you mentioned Elena Bonner. Twice, she testified 

here, right where you sit, and made very similar comments about 

the importance of a few people having a profound impact when 

they stand firm. But they do need the support of other countries 

like the United States, like our European friends, like friends in 

Africa, Latin America, and everywhere else in the world who cherish and believe in fundamental human rights. 

I am wondering if, one year later, we have done enough to ensure 

that Liu Xiaobo is, (A) not forgotten in any way, shape, or form; 

and (B) that his cause and the cause of the others is kept front and 

center. I would note parenthetically that we had a press conference 

and hearing to express great disappointment that when Hu Jintao 

was here, many people in this room raised the case of Liu Xiaobo 

and Gao and Chen, and many others, very strongly and with great 

detail, including the Commission, including the Human Rights 

Subcommittee, which I chair, and it was never even mentioned, 

publicly at least—maybe privately. 

But the Associated Press asked a great question, and all of a 

sudden there is a problem with communications at the joint press 

conference with President Obama and Hu Jintao and he couldn’t 

answer it for some reason. The President said something that I 
16 

hope he retracts, President Obama, that they—they, being the Chinese—have a different culture and they have a different political 

system. 

That rubbed even the Washington Post profoundly the wrong 

way, which did a huge editorial, ‘‘Obama Defends Hu Jintao on 

Rights Issues.’’ A different culture? Harry Wu spent 20 years in the 

laogai being tortured. Bob Fu spent time there as well, who will 

testify later. They understand perfectly human rights and democracy. The culture is profoundly in favor of these rights, so I do hope 

our own administration does more and in a much more visible way. 

Your comments on that? I mean, this is a bipartisan Commission. We speak out. Right before the Olympics when President 

Bush was being not as strong as he could be—as a matter of fact, 

weak, to some extent—on human rights in China, Mr. Wolf and I 

went to China right before the Olympics, brought the Commission’s 

list of prisoners, and were very unhappy with our own ambassador, 

and even Condoleeza Rice, who was talking about what venue they 

wanted to attend, was it swimming, was it track and field, rather 

than going to prisons and trying to promote the reform agenda. So 

there’s no partisanship here. I would hope the administration 

would do more. Any comments you might want to have on that? 

Mr. GERSHMAN. I recall, Mr. Chairman, that at the NDI [National Democratic Institute] dinner at the beginning of November, 

Secretary Clinton, talking about the Arab Spring, said that we can 

walk and chew gum at the same time. In other words, we can support democracy even as we work on the very practical issues that 

the Administration must address with the governments in the Gulf, 

or in this case, China. 

I think striking that balance is key. We recognize that the 

United States has great interests with China—economic interests, 

political interests, and so forth. But that in no way should prohibit 

us from also expressing the strongest support for democracy and 

human rights. There’s no contradiction there. The Administration 

has said it themselves. I think they’re increasingly following it in 

their policies, and I hope they’ll continue to do that. 

Representative SMITH. Well, I would just take one disagreement 

with the ‘‘continue.’’ I hope they will do it. I mean, Mrs. Clinton 

did say that she was not going to allow human rights to ‘‘interfere’’ 

with climate change and peddling U.S. Treasury debt. And I say 

that with respect to the Secretary of State. This man, and all of 

these men and women, are suffering irreparable harm to their bodies and minds in these horrific Gulags and we need to be much 

more visible and louder. 

Mr. Walz? 

Representative WALZ. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll probably piggy-back a bit on that. I absolutely refuse to believe that we 

need to capitulate our stances on human rights with this false 

choice of upholding human rights versus economic growth. I think 

that’s a trap. I don’t believe it. I think you can certainly do both 

and we can demand that of our trading partners. 

I think what we’re trying to understand, and I said when I came 

to this hearing that I think, unfortunately, maybe the Chairman is 

right, this is one of the small outposts of this being spoken of. 

Sometimes this type of discussion is not accepted in polite company 
17 

in Washington because we may offend someone over our trade policies. I think we need to reset that. We need to reset that approach 

to it. It certainly doesn’t mean that we live in our own glass house 

and understand that we need to do things ourselves, but it’s this 

quest to try and get human rights to the forefront. 

My question to all of you is one that I always try and understand 

on these panels. This discussion here can be for domestic consumption, but what I’m most proud of is that door is open and we’re 

quite aware that this ends up getting back. We hope it gets back 

to folks in China who maybe somewhere down along that bureaucratic line, listen a little bit. 

What are our best approaches to this? What are the best ways 

to ensure—what I’m always trying to understand, and I tell this 

story, I did spend some time living in China in the 1980s and I 

traveled back—I always say 34 times, but because it’s China, every 

time I went I learned a little bit less and I’m one trip from knowing 

nothing about China, because I’m always trying to understand the 

people, and this dichotomy I have with a regime that doesn’t seem 

to honor those ideas, but a people who do on an individual and a 

community basis. I’m trying to figure out, what can we do? 

What is the best way? What are the things the Chairman is talking about, of asking the administrations, regardless of politics? 

How do we best help people like Liu Xiaobo and how do we help 

the average person who is not a Nobel Prize recipient, but is sitting 

there in their home thinking things could be different? Can any of 

you help me try and—from your experience and understanding? 

Mr. LINK. I’m madly flipping through the book here because Liu 

Xiaobo himself addresses this question. If I can find the quote in 

a few minutes, I’ll read it to you. 

Representative WALZ. Okay. 

Mr. LINK. But he, in receiving a prize in San Francisco in 2002, 

where he was barred from going but he sent a statement, said— 

and this isn’t verbatim, but his idea was—it’s profoundly uplifting 

for us to hear the goodwill expressions of human beings in other 

parts of the world in support of our work. 

I would argue that it’s not only to the dissidents that it means 

a lot, but precisely because of the Elena Bonner phenomenon. You 

have a few people at typewriters who are called ‘‘dissidents.’’ In 

fact, they are spokespeople for much larger groups of people who 

don’t dare to speak out. After all, what is it that makes a dissident? It’s the willingness to put your head on the line. 

Everybody else is watching, and when the principle can be articulated people who otherwise are silent feel enthusiasm from 

within. So I think the short answer to your question is that human 

beings everywhere, including us and our government, ought to 

make clear moral statements about what’s going on. 

Representative WALZ. I couldn’t agree more. 

Mr. LINK. And have it be out there, and it’ll be heard by people 

who don’t dare to speak. Lots of people who don’t dare to speak. 

Representative WALZ. Thank you. 

Do you dispel this myth that the sociological factor that the Chinese quest for stability in some cases outweighs that quest for individual personal justice? This idea of, don’t rock the boat, because 

when the boat’s been rocked in the past we’ve had decades of un-
18 

rest. Do you reject that as a reason that the Chinese—we hear this 

sometimes, that the Chinese public is not themselves as concerned 

with pushing this as are the diaspora, for lack of—— 

Mr. LINK. Yes. I think that’s a technique of the ruling elite. If 

you look at the history of the Communist experience in China and 

ask the question, where has chaos originated—— 

Representative WALZ. Yes. 

Mr. LINK. From the top. Mao Zedong created more of it than anybody else. The Tiananmen massacre was from the top. The wealth 

gap between rich and poor that Carl refers to as creating so much 

stability is because the power elite hangs on power and wealth. 

Representative WALZ. Yes. 

Mr. LINK. The causes of chaos and instability are from the top, 

not ordinary people. So I think that’s an utterly false argument. 

It’s very smart for the regime to use it in their ruling techniques. 

I mean, they could have read Machiavelli on ‘‘The Prince’’ on how 

to do this. But should we take it seriously? No, not at all. 

Representative WALZ. If I could ask Ms. Botsford Fraser, what’s 

being passed around amongst Chinese people that they’re reading, 

if you know, of things that are inspiring them? I watched this, having worked in being with my friends for some time, and it would 

be after work drinking a beer and then they would tell the jokes. 

I found it—I tried to listen to the Chinese political jokes. One of 

the problems was, they many times relied on a play on words of 

the Chinese language, and my Chinese was so weak that I laughed 

out of courtesy, not because I got it. But I found that those jokes, 

when I did understand them, were very telling, how people were 

seeing it. I am wondering from a writer’s perspective or how you 

see it, what are they saying? 

Ms. BOTSFORD FRASER. Certainly when we were there we had 

the impression of a very deep and very rich and very lively literary 

culture and a very sophisticated literary culture, and it’s one where 

individual writers understand the need to speak both to the citizens of China and also the outside world, and they’re quite strategic in how they decide to manage that, to manage their own careers in terms of the kinds of books that they publish. 

So I would say that it’s a very rich culture. I am not a Chinese 

speaker and I don’t know the literature, but I certainly had that 

sense of a very dynamic culture. But I think the other aspect of 

this is the changes in technology and the way that social media 

and the way that figures like Ai Weiwei, for example, have dramatically changed the way that Chinese citizens are speaking to 

one another and the kinds of—you mentioned the political jokes, 

the imagery, the satire, the ways that all of these things are sort 

of spreading across social media and become the sort of—the language of how people understand their situation. 

And I think for a lot of people one of the turning points is not 

only the issues such as freedom of expression, which has now become an issue that affects everybody because everybody wants to 

have a cell phone and be able to use it, and suddenly freedom of 

expression isn’t an abstract thing, it’s about me being able to use 

my cell phone and me being able to read the Internet in countries 

all around the world. 
19 

But it is also about the identification that people like Ai Weiwei 

have introduced into the broader culture, the younger culture, 

where people get it. They get those kinds of visual images. 

Representative WALZ. Yes, that’s the thing. And Mr. Chairman, 

thank you for indulging me. I’ll leave you with this. I was thinking 

right prior to June 4, I remember it just stood out for me. I thought 

it was a very funny short joke and I thought it really exemplified 

what was happening prior to the spring revolution. This must have 

been in 1988. 

Someone told me it was President Reagan—it dates you on this— 

but President Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping all got the opportunity 

to meet God. And President Reagan said, when will America be 

truly free and democratic and open? And God said, oh, 25 years, 

and President Reagan cried. President Gorbachev says, when will 

the Soviet Union, Russia, become truly free and open? He said, it’ll 

be 50 years, and President Gorbachev cried. And then Deng 

Xiaoping said, when will China be truly open and free? And God 

cried. 

The issue at the time was, and you could tell, there was something happening in the society. I just say this as a small thing, and 

it’s a writer’s piece of it, in honoring someone like Liu, that there’s 

a profound understanding of the culture that we need to understand and what we can do to facilitate that. So, thank you for indulging me, Mr. Chairman, and thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you. 

Chairman Wolf? 

Representative WOLF. Thank you, Mr. Smith. I’ll thank both of 

the members for their comments and questions. I have been encouraged by listening to your comments. They express the feelings 

that I have, but I think you all have forgotten more about China 

than I will ever know, so you validate some of the things that I 

think are going to happen or are happening. 

To ask you a couple of questions, does Liu’s wife—can she have 

visitors? If someone were to fly there and just say, we’re going to 

take a cab over, can you visit? Can you knock on the door? Can you 

go inside? 

Ms. BOTSFORD FRASER. When we were there we were told no, 

that we absolutely would not be able to. I will say that the diplomatic community in Beijing tries very hard to visit Liu Xia. They 

make a point of going to her compound and asking permission to 

visit her and they are denied permission to visit her. This happens 

over and over again, and it is done by almost all—not all, but a 

large number of the embassies in Beijing make this effort. 

Representative WOLF. Has the American Embassy ever made the 

effort? 

Ms. BOTSFORD FRASER. Yes, they have. All of the embassies do 

this on a regular basis. They see this as part of their mandate 

there. 

Representative WOLF. Second, where do you think we are in the 

timeline if we had to compare China with the Soviet Union? And 

we know how it collapsed. I think you could do this in an appropriate way. If you recall, Ronald Reagan said—in 1983, he said, 

‘‘Tear down this wall,’’ and then he goes to the Danilov Monastery 
20 

and gives a very powerful speech, and yet Gorbachev comes to his 

funeral. 

So you don’t have to be just—you can raise human rights and religious freedom concerns in an appropriate way. But where do you 

think we are in China compared to the Soviet Union today? Are we 

in 1979? Are we 1983? Are we 1986? Where do you think we are? 

Not hope we are, think we are. 

Mr. GERSHMAN. Mr. Chairman, no one can really precisely answer that question. Most people didn’t anticipate the fall of the Soviet Union, and there are significant differences with China, one 

being China’s economic success today. That’s a significant difference. The second is the nationalities issue. The Soviets had a 

much larger nationalities problem than the Chinese have. 

However, I come back to this issue of stability. They’re worried 

about it. I quoted Yu Jianrong earlier, that they don’t have real 

stability, the stability that comes with resilience. China has a very 

brittle system. If they go through an economic crisis, if this growth 

doesn’t continue, it could break and we do not know when that’s 

going to happen. 

The other major difference between the two periods is the Internet. During the Soviet time, as I said, it was 11 dissidents with a 

typewriter; you remember, smuggling around carbon copies of 

manuscripts and what have you. Now some 400 or 500 million people are on the Internet, and the struggle over the Internet is going 

to be very critical. 

We can practically help not only by helping to get information in, 

but by helping people inside break through the restrictions that the 

government is putting on the Internet. It’s terribly important to 

keep the Internet as open as possible for the people in China. 

That’s a very powerful factor, and I think it contributes to the instability of the situation. 

Ms. LI. I would add by saying that China is in a place where the 

Soviet Union has never been. This brings not much certainty about 

when something would happen, but it also challenges us to think 

more creatively. I also want to add that nobody predicted what 

would happen in the Arab Spring: in Tunisia and Egypt. 

I want to get back to the question of, what the U.S. Government 

or this administration could do in the short term. I think the administration or the U.S. Government should be consistent, at least, 

when it comes to human rights, whether violations took place in 

Libya or Syria, Iran or Burma, or China. There shouldn’t be double 

standards because of China’s economic power status. 

The upcoming visit by the Vice President of China to the United 

States would be one advocacy opportunity to press for the release 

of Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng, and Gao Zhisheng, and all 

other political prisoners, because the Vice President, as we know, 

is the heir apparent to the throne of the CCP [Chinese Communist 

Party]. It’s important to put him on the spot. 

President Obama himself, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, certainly 

should do more to obtain the immediate and unconditional release 

of his fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo. The Burmese 

opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest for almost 20 years. We hope with all our efforts and the admirable efforts by this Commission, we would see Liu Xiaobo free sooner. 
21 

Mr. LINK. I want to answer Congressman Wolf’s question about 

‘‘where is China now? ’’ by reinforcing what Mr. Gershman said 

about the Internet. Five years ago, my view of the rising Chinese 

Internet was that it was an open question whether or not this 

could be the first medium in the history of Communist China that 

breaks free. 

Now, I really think that the Internet is going to win. I don’t 

think they can keep the lid on. The consequences of that are something that the regime clearly fears, and I think it’s an open question, but it makes me, today, much more optimistic about change 

in China than I was three or four years ago. 

There are two of Liu Xiaobo’s essays that say that the Internet, 

in his view, is ‘‘God’s gift to China.’’ It’s partly tongue-in-cheek, but 

very serious at another level. 

I found the sentence that I was looking for and I’d like to read 

it because I think it’s a good coda for this whole effort that you people are making. 

He writes, ‘‘I should emphasize that for people like me who live 

inside a cowardly dictatorship, which is a prison of its own kind, 

every little bit of good-hearted encouragement that springs from 

the human nature of people who live in other places, even if the 

encouragement is small, causes us to feel gratitude and awe.’’ 

Representative WOLF. Well, you know, Sharansky used to say, 

when he knew that people in the West—Congressmen, Senators, or 

people who were just advocating for him—he was inspired by that, 

and even in the Gulag knew that it was taking place. I’m going to 

ask you for one thing, but before that I have one last question that 

I want to ask on this. Does Liu know of this interest? Are there 

ways that he knows that this hearing—will he find out that this 

hearing took place? Do you believe that he and his wife know of 

the interest in the West? Just yes or no. 

Ms. LI. In some ways, the general efforts to seek the release of 

Liu Xiaobo or support prisoners of conscience like him by the international community is known among Chinese activists. Whether 

this particular hearing, when the information will reach them, I 

cannot answer that question. 

Representative WOLF. Okay. 

Ms. LI. My understanding is the house arrest of his wife, Liu 

Xia, has been done in such a way that if she would not go out of 

her way to try to talk about her situation, she would be given a 

certain chance, for example, for a prison visit. We cannot confirm 

any prison visits by her had actually taken place, but there have 

been some reports to that effect. 

Representative WOLF. So would it be helpful if Members of Congress, when they went to Beijing, tried to visit Liu’s wife who is 

under house arrest? 

Ms. LI. As Marian just said, I also heard the same, that diplomats have been trying to visit her at her compound. The first 

barrier they face are the security guards at the compound. 

Representative WOLF. I understand that. But would it be helpful 

if, when Members were there—if we wrote Members of Congress 

who are always going to China and said, when you’re in Beijing, 

go and try to visit Liu’s wife. You know, try. 

Ms. LI. Yes. Yes. 
22 

Representative WOLF. You may not get there, but try. Ask. 

Ms. LI. Yes. 

Representative WOLF. Don’t listen to the American Embassy telling you not to do it. But try. Would it be helpful if they tried? 

Ms. LI. Yes. 

Representative WOLF. Okay. That’s—— 

Ms. LI. The more such attempts to visit as we know in the case 

of Chen Guangcheng under house arrest in his village, the more attention that such attempts can draw to the individuals, the better. 

Representative WOLF. So we’ll do a letter to every Member of 

Congress saying, when you go to Beijing, try—try—and if Member 

after Member tries and tries, you know, someone will get through. 

The last question is, if you could give Mr. Smith a letter with 

some recommendations that we can get to Ambassador Locke. 

When he was nominated—I opposed his nomination. He came up 

to me after testifying before my subcommittee and said, ‘‘You know, 

when I go to China’’—and I think Ambassador Locke is a good 

man. Let the record show he said, ‘‘I’m not going to let you down.’’ 

So if I can say to Ambassador Locke, we had four distinguished 

witnesses before this Commission and they recommended that you, 

Mr. Ambassador, do X, Y, and Z, that would be helpful. So if you 

all could just draft something to Mr. Smith and then we will get 

it to the Ambassador to say we had the four of you here, and they 

thought that if you do this, because he’s getting very good coverage—good coverage and bad coverage, showing him with his 

backpack and buying ice cream, and they’re sort of confused by 

him. If we give him this opportunity and we set a standard, then 

I think we can give these to the Ambassador to say these four distinguished witnesses before this Commission recommended this, 

and I respectfully request that you do these things. Thank you very 

much. 

Mr. Smith, thank you for the hearing. It’s a great hearing. 

Representative SMITH. Li Xiaorong, you mentioned a double 

standard. Would the other three witnesses agree that there has 

been a double standard of the United States toward China, especially as it relates to places like Libya, as you pointed out, Iran? 

Mr. GERSHMAN. You know, I think it’s more than a double standard. The Arab Spring has so fixated American consciousness on the 

Middle East that people are just not looking anywhere else right 

now, at least not sufficiently. That’s why I think this hearing is so 

really incredibly important. 

Congressman Wolf, you know, when you asked, ‘‘Does Liu know, 

will he know? ’’ My answer is, ‘‘They knew in the Gulag in the old 

days.’’ If they could know in the Gulag, at a time when half the 

population is connected to the Internet in China, it’s inconceivable 

to me that Liu doesn’t know. I would only say, in terms of what 

can be done, Saturday is the anniversary of the Prize. 

Representative SMITH. That’s why we’re having the hearing. 

Mr. GERSHMAN. It would be wonderful, even if Ambassador Locke 

just issued a statement in China, just a simple statement, congratulating Liu Xiaobo on the anniversary of the award and expressing concern about his freedom. I think that would be extraordinary, if that could be done on Saturday. 
23 

Ms. LI. Such gestures do make rounds in China among friends 

and the general population. I would mention the former Ambassador, John Huntsman, who appeared in Wangfujing on the day of 

the ‘‘Jasmine Revolution’’ protest in Beijing, and all such gestures 

do get noticed. 

Representative SMITH. Dr. Link? 

Mr. LINK. I agree that there has been a double standard. I like 

Mr. Gershman’s suggestion immensely of, on the anniversary, our 

Ambassador making a statement. In general, again, if I wasn’t 

clear before, I am in favor of public statements. It’s a mistake to 

say behind closed doors we’re going to say this privately and expect 

that it’s going to do anything. 

Representative SMITH. So why not President Obama in addition 

to our Ambassador? 

Mr. LINK. Of course. Of course. That would be even better. 

Mr. GERSHMAN. Yes, especially because of the Nobel connection. 

Mr. LINK. Yes. 

Ms. BOTSFORD FRASER. I think all Western democracies have suffered from the curse of the double standard in terms of China and 

also in terms of other emerging democracies as well. I think it’s our 

job to make sure that they’re called to account for that double 

standard. It’s not fair, and I think the standard that should be applied is, what are the needs and wishes of the people of China, not 

the government of China, and that should be the standard by 

which we measure our actions and our statements. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you. 

Let me thank our witnesses. Anything you want to add before we 

go to the second panel? 

[No response]. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you so much for your leadership. 

Please be sure to sign the picture, because we will give it to him 

when he is free. 

I’d like to now move to panel number two, beginning with Chai 

Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed. She is the founder of that organization, an NGO focused on raising awareness of human rights 

issues in China, especially as it relates to coercive population control, forced abortion, forced sterilization, gendercide, and the missing girls who have simply been eliminated, exterminated, because 

they happen to be female. 

Chai was a student leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement. She was on the government’s 21 Most Wanted Students list. 

She escaped from China in 1990 and became a successful businesswoman. She has been previously nominated on two occasions for 

the Nobel Peace Prize and she just completed and published her 

memoir, ‘‘A Heart for Freedom,’’ just a few months ago. 

We’ll then hear from Harry Wu, executive director of the Laogai 

Research Foundation. It’s a foundation established in 1992 to gather information on, and raise public awareness of, the Chinese 

laogai system. Harry Wu spent almost 20 years in the infamous 

Gulag system known as the laogai in China, and years ago—almost 

20 years ago I held the first hearing ever on survivors of the laogai. 

We had six individuals: Catherine Ho, Paul Dingiatsu, of course 

the great Harry Wu, and they told us what actually went on in 

those concentration camps. 
24 

One of those who testified, Paul Dingiatsu, a Buddhist monk, 

brought some of the implements of torture routinely employed 

against people in the laogai and the security downstairs wouldn’t 

even let him in the building. We had to go and escort him. When 

he held up the cattle prod and said this is what the Chinese Secret 

Police use against people in the laogai, you would have heard a pin 

drop in this hearing room. So Harry, thank you for your tremendous work. 

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers. Reggie is a lawyer and president of the Women’s Rights 

Without Frontiers, a nonpartisan international coalition opposed to 

coercive population control and sex slavery in China, as well as an 

expert on China’s one-child-per-couple policy, and she has been arguing very passionately for Chen Guangcheng’s release and will 

speak to that, and other issues during her testimony. 

And then fourth, Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid Association. He was a leader in the 1989 student democracy movement, again, in Tiananmen Square, along with Chai Ling. He later 

became a house church pastor and founder, along with his wife. 

After being persecuted for their work, after being incarcerated for 

their work, they escaped to the United States and in 2002 founded 

ChinaAid and monitors and reports on religious freedom in the 

People’s Republic of China. 

I know she has to leave, but Sophie Richardson from Human 

Rights Watch, I want to thank her for her leadership. She will be 

submitting testimony for today and was in Oslo, as so many of us, 

during that very uplifting but heartbreaking ceremony when we all 

witnessed the empty chair. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Richardson appears in the appendix.] 

Representative SMITH. Ms. Chai? 

STATEMENT OF CHAI LING, FOUNDER, ALL GIRLS ALLOWED 

Ms. CHAI. Well, Chairman Smith and Ranking Members of the 

Commission, thank you for hosting this important hearing to give 

honor, respect, and much-needed attention to Mr. Liu Xiaobo. His 

bravery and perseverance continue to set an example for all of us 

when we consider our Nation’s relationship with China. 

My experience with Liu Xiaobo began at Tiananmen Square in 

1989. From the beginning, we approached the movement with different strategies and ideas toward a common goal to request dialogue with the Chinese Government to urge peaceful reforms. However, on the night of the massacre we reached very powerful unity. 

After that, I went through 10 months in hiding until I was able to 

reach America. Unfortunately, Liu Xiaobo was sent to prison in 

China, where he still is today. 

Charter 08 and China’s three reforms are necessary for China’s 

democracy and freedom. During the 1989 movement, the leader Hu 

Yaobong—who led the movement—died. He had advocated for 

three reforms, economic, political, and spiritual reform. 

Zhao Ziyang, the premier, who was eventually sentenced to 

house imprisonment for his disagreement with Deng Xiaoping, advocated for two reforms, political and economic. But Deng Xiaoping 

only wanted one, economic reform, and that’s what China has 
25 

today. So Charter 08 is the effort of advocating for political reform 

in China. 

Today, of the 303 initial signers who signed the first round of 

Charter 08, 156 of them have suffered severe persecution, such as 

prison sentences, arrest, house arrest, and forced disappearances 

on sensitive dates such as the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. 

It is really important and necessary to also remember them as 

well. 

Charter 08 advocated for many rights, including freedom of 

speech, freedom of religion, and property rights for average Chinese people. Today, China has used its corruption and power and 

authority and has taken many average, helpless people’s properties, millions of those. 

We recently were informed of a case of this lady, her name is Nie 

Lina. I wanted to point out her situation because it’s urgent, and 

she was detained in April due to her petition for a loss of housing. 

The government punished her by sentencing her to a forced abortion, and here we see the picture of her being strapped down, going 

through detainment. So we sent out an urgent prayer request, and 

48 hours later that prayer was answered and she was set free. So 

five months later she was able to give birth to her baby. 

Unfortunately, this saga continues. This brave woman, a new 

mother, returned to petition again, and she was imprisoned again. 

Yesterday morning our staff and partner, Zhang Jing, got an urgent call from her. She and her three-month-old infant and her 70- 

year-old mother are being detained in a black jail somewhere in 

Beijing. 

For more than 10 days, she was given very little nutrition, so she 

didn’t have enough milk to feed her baby. So we do want to use 

this opportunity to advocate for her immediate release, her, her 

baby, and her mother. 

So this is just one of many cases. We cannot fight in every single 

case, but we can advocate for freedom and justice by a much more 

broad approach, looking at U.S.-China policy. When we talked last 

year, when five Nobel Peace Prize committee members were able 

to take a stand, through their enormous courage to take on the 

whole of China, it inspired the rest of the world. 

It was awesome to see, Chairman Smith, you and Nancy Pelosi, 

then-House Speaker, Mr. Gershman, Professor Perry Link, all 

there. It was a beautiful reunion. However, the lack of the presence 

of President Obama was heartbreaking for many of us, and this 

symbolizes a consistent problem between U.S.-China policy. It’s a 

lack of leadership, lack of conviction, lack of moral authority. 

Particularly, a statement like that, such that we cannot let 

human rights interfere with our economic crisis and security issues 

in dealing with China, that has become the root cause for the deterioration of China’s human rights conditions and the decline of 

America. 

Two years ago, I was invited to know Jesus Christ, so today I can 

no longer talk about China’s situation without mentioning God. So 

that is also the reality in China, that a third of the Chinese 

Tiananmen generation has come to know Jesus, and has been 

given renewed courage and determination to fight for freedom and 

democracy for China. 
26 

I do want to come to Scripture to see what should be the basis 

of the U.S.-China relationship. The God who founded America 

through the forefathers is clearly a God who loves justice, hates 

robbery, and iniquity. He’s a God who gave the following decree: 

Curse the man who withholds justice from the aliens, the fatherless, and the widow. 

So when we uphold justice to do what God requires us to do, to 

act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord our God, 

there are severe consequences, as the Bible clearly lists. You will 

be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. 

As we know today, America is paying 42 cents of interest on 

every dollar we spent as a government. The following picture 

serves as a chilling reminder to start doing right. It is said, ‘‘A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor 

produce. You will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. 

The sights you see will drive you mad.’’ It continues, ‘‘He shall lend 

to you, but you shall not lend to him. He shall be the head and 

you shall be the tail.’’ In many ways this reminds us of the current 

economic and debt situation we have in China. 

I know my time is running out. I would like to be able to finish 

the rest of the story later in the question and answer time. I would 

like to request that all the information we provide, including the 

many names of the Chinese people who are in detention, our report 

on the one-child policy, and our urge to have H.R. 2121 to be 

passed, all that information to be included in this hearing record. 

Representative SMITH. Without objection, so ordered. And you 

also have the names of the people with Ms. Nie Lina? 

Ms. CHAI. Nie Lina. Yes. I forgot to mention that. Yes. Appendix 

1 is the names of the officials who are responsible for Nie Lina’s 

detention. 

Representative SMITH. I appreciate that. It’s amazing that you 

have that list. 

Ms. CHAI. Yes. We’d like to include them in the record and ask 

Ambassador Locke to bar them and their family members from entering this country. That would send a very strong message. 

Representative SMITH. I appreciate that. Thank you. 

Ms. CHAI. Yes. Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you, Chai Ling. 

Harry Wu? 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Chai appears in the appendix.] 

STATEMENT OF HARRY WU, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE 

LAOGAI RESEARCH FOUNDATION AND LAOGAI MUSEUM 

Mr. WU. I wish my testimony could become part of the record of 

this hearing. 

Additionally, I want to make four points. The first point is, it has 

been one year since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace 

Prize, and now he’s still in the jail. In 1960, I, too, was put into 

the Chinese laogai camps because of my ideas. I was there 19 

years. But 50 years later, the Chinese regime has not changed how 

it handles dissidents’ opinions. 

Liu Xiaobo has sent over 260 articles to our Web site, Observe 

China. We published it. But Liu Xiaobo’s articles did not get published inside China. But the Chinese Government picked three of 
27 

these articles in the verdict—the three articles are: No. 1, ‘‘Can It 

Be That the Chinese People Deserve Only Party-led Democracy? ’’; 

No. 2, ‘‘The Many Aspects of CPC’s Dictatorship’’; and No. 3, 

‘‘Changing the Regime by Changing the Society.’’ This is the socalled crime, ‘‘intent to subvert the government.’’ Unfortunately, inside, the people cannot read these articles, but they try to. 

Point number two: last year I was in Oslo. I was surprised to see 

a message from John Chambers, the CEO of the Cisco Systems. He 

noted that Cisco has been a sponsor of the Nobel Peace Prize Concert since 1999, and that ‘‘Cisco is working to help individuals, 

companies, and countries to use the Internet to collaborate, educate, empower, and further the ideas and innovation inspired by 

Alfred Nobel and his legacy.’’ 

But we do know, in the last decade, Cisco cooperated with Chinese security systems very well. They signed a number of contracts 

with the security systems to upgrade their military, upgrade their 

Internet systems. So today, the Chinese Internet system very well 

protects their market. It’s called the Golden Shield Project. 

Number three: We published two Chinese-language Liu Xiaobo 

books. Unfortunately, today there’s only two Chinese versions, but 

we will soon publish an English version and it’s only written by Liu 

Xiaobo. We sold about 2,000 copies of these Chinese versions. We 

collected more than US$16,000. But we cannot send the money 

back to Liu Xiaobo. Even from 2006 until today, every month we 

financially supported Liu Xiaobo. But in February 2011, we had to 

stop because Liu Xia, his wife, also disappeared. 

But I have a photo here. This is the so-called Jinzhou Prison. 

But, so far as I know, Liu Xiaobo was not in this prison. Just as 

you know, in 1995 when the Chinese Government arrested me, 

they put me in a retirement center. When the American consulate 

came to visit me, interview me, they removed me to the Wuhan No. 

1 Detention Center. Supposedly, Liu Xiaobo is in the Jinzhou Prison, this is not the truth. He is in a secret location. 

The last issue, I want to remind you, we should not talk about 

‘‘political reform’’ because this is telling the Chinese Communist 

Party that he is not forgotten, that his vision of a better future will 

not be quietly fading away. Is there any Communist Party today— 

since 1917 until today, is there any of them that can be reformed? 

No. Not any Communist Party can be reformed. 

You remember the Polish leaders, the East German leaders talking about reform. But since Deng Xiaoping talked about political 

reform, what’s going on? I was there in the prison camp 50 years 

ago, and Liu Xiaobo is there again. I want to remind the people 

here, today at this hearing, some people said the Internet will be 

open as soon as possible. And some people say the Internet is going 

to win. 

Let me remind you of a story. Thirty years earlier in 1980, I was 

in China. I heard an American entrepreneur. He said, we want to 

help China—only help the Chinese produce the color TV for each 

family to have a color TV. I thought this was wonderful because 

at the time only a few families had black-and-white, small TVs— 

televisions. If everybody had a color TV, that means the communication, the media will be free. But today you know the Chinese, 
28 

almost every family has a color TV, but the media is entirely controlled by the Communists. 

Today China has more than 300 million Internet users, but Liu 

Xiaobo’s articles only can be published outside. If the inside people 

want to see it, you have to cross over the firewall. Don’t expect that 

the Internet can be free while the Chinese Communists are still 

over there. Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you very much, Mr. Wu. 

I would just note at this point that tomorrow I will be introducing the Global Online Freedom Act and its new, enhanced, 

beefed-up version of a bill that I had introduced a couple of years 

ago. It will require disclosure to the Securities and Exchange Commission of all U.S.-listed corporations, and that would include Chinese corporations like Baidu and others. 

Light is a great disinfectant. Hopefully that will shine a bright 

light on what they are doing, or not doing. Second, it also has a 

regimen of export controls, a modest attempt to try to open up the 

Internet and similar technologies in China. 

Thank you, Mr. Wu. 

Ms. Littlejohn? 

STATEMENT OF REGGIE LITTLEJOHN, PRESIDENT, WOMEN’S 

RIGHTS WITHOUT FRONTIERS 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the 

Commission. It is a humbling opportunity to testify on behalf of 

one of the most courageous individuals not only in China, but in 

the entire world, the blind self-taught lawyer, Chen Guangcheng. 

I begin by commending the Chairman, Congressman Christopher 

Smith, for your recent attempt to visit Chen Guangcheng and your 

tireless efforts to raise the visibility of his case and other cases. 

Your efforts are having an impact. 

Chen Guangcheng had helped farmers and the disabled, but he 

was arrested in 2006 for helping to expose the Chinese Communist 

Government’s massive and systematic use of forced abortion and 

involuntary sterilization to enforce its one-child policy in Linyi 

City, as opposed to Linyi county, in 2005. 

Time Magazine named him one of 2006’s Top 100 People Who 

Shape Our World, and he was given the 2007 Magsaysay Award 

known as Asia’s Nobel Prize. 

Simultaneous with this testimony I’m submitting a report from 

Chen Guangcheng’s 2005 investigation team. This team was investigating coercive family planning in Linyi in 2005, and this report, 

which contains extensive witness statements from various people 

who have experienced untold atrocities, was drafted by, himself a 

celebrated lawyer, Teng Biao. 

So this report basically contains like a slice of life, a snapshot of 

Chen’s investigative team and the kinds of atrocities they were 

finding right prior to his imprisonment. In this report are detailed 

accounts of the following: A woman forcibly aborted and sterilized 

at seven months following the detention of 22 of her relatives; villagers sleeping in fields to evade family planning officials; a family 

planning official who broke three brooms over the head of an elderly man because his daughter was not home when they came to 

grab her for forced sterilization; family planning officials who 
29 

forced a grandmother and her brother to beat each other; the use 

of quota systems and the practice of implication; the detention, 

fining, and torture of the extended family of so-called one-child-policy violators; the institution of something that he called the Family 

Planning Learning Class in which extended family members are 

detained and tortured, and then charged a fee, which they called 

tuition; the account of a farmer who committed suicide because his 

family and his neighbors were detained and tortured because his 

son had had an extra child; and then there is a report here of the 

harassment of Chen Guangcheng and his team as they were trying 

to document these cases. 

The Chen Guangcheng report makes this clear, that the spirit of 

the Cultural Revolution lives on in China’s family planning death 

machine. Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has chosen to release 

the names of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity so 

they may be held accountable before the world under H.R. 2121. 

This report was drafted in 2005, however, conditions have not 

improved in Linyi since 2005. Earlier this year, family planning officials stabbed a man to death, and a woman six months pregnant 

recently died during a forced abortion in Lijin county, also in 

Shandong Province. 

As the Chairman has indicated, for exposing these horrendous 

crimes against humanity, Chen Guangcheng was jailed, tortured, 

denied medical treatment. For more than four years he’s now languishing under house arrest. Foreign journalists have been forcibly 

denied access to him and lawyers who try to help Chen 

Guangcheng have been beaten and detained. 

I speak specifically of Jiang Tianyong, who I testified with in 

2009, and Teng Biao. In February they were both detained for 

more than 60 days. This fall, leading up to Chen Guangcheng’s 

40th birthday, people from all over China streamed in to try to see 

him and try to visit him, and they were, without exception, repelled 

by thugs at the crossroads of his village. 

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and the ChinaAid Association 

are spearheading an international effort to free Chen Guangcheng. 

Thus far, we have collected more than 6,400 signatures from 28 

countries on our petition. 

In early October, we received an unconfirmed report that villagers had said that Chen Guangcheng had died. This was after we 

had received a video that was released through ChinaAid about the 

horrific conditions of Chen Guangcheng’s house arrest, and also a 

letter from his wife, Yuan Weijing, saying that she was concerned 

that he might not survive because of his medical condition. 

However, even though the many visitors to Chen Guangcheng’s 

village have been repelled, Relativity Media was able to gain access 

to Linyi in order to film the feature film comedy ‘‘21 and Over.’’ 

When challenged on its choice of Linyi out of the thousands of possible locations in China and urged to apologize for its lack of sensitivity to Chen Guangcheng and human rights, Relatively Media 

issued a statement defending its action. Women’s Rights Without 

Frontiers has called for an international boycott of the film ‘‘21 and 

Over.’’ 

Just this weekend, a source inside China contacted me and gave 

me a credible report that Chen Guangcheng is alive, and in fact 
30 

that his condition has improved slightly. She attributes this, the 

fact that he’s alive and that his condition has improved, to the fact 

that Chen’s situation has ‘‘gotten exposed and gotten huge public 

attention,’’ in her words. 

So part of that public attention was the stream of visitors. Part 

of it also was an international campaign called the Sunglasses 

Campaign, which was a collaboration between Women’s Rights 

Without Frontiers in the West and the Dark Glasses Campaign in 

the East. Other members of this panel have talked about how effective political cartoonists are and the person in China that is spearheading this campaign is the political cartoonist, Crazy Crab. 

You can see the image that he came up with there, which is the 

image of Chen Guangcheng made up of the images of supporters 

who have taken their sunglasses portraits and sent them in to our 

Web sites from China and the United States, representing visually 

the collaboration between China and the United States that has 

been effective in helping Chen Guangcheng. 

We would also like to say that it would be very effective for Ambassador Locke to attempt to visit Chen Guangcheng. The Chinese 

Communist Party has attempted to silence Chen, but they cannot 

silence the voices of millions in China crying for his freedom. The 

report that Chen Guangcheng is alive and in slightly improved condition should not be a reason to relax efforts on his behalf. To the 

contrary, these efforts are having an impact and should be intensified. Chen, we will not stop until you are free. 

Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you very much, Ms. Littlejohn, for 

your very eloquent and very strong statement and for your advocacy that has made a huge difference. Thank you so much. 

Pastor Fu? 

STATEMENT OF PASTOR BOB FU, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, 

CHINAAID ASSOCIATION 

Mr. FU. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Just one year ago, you and I were sitting at the Oslo City Hall, 

witnessing that historic but sad moment of the empty chair. One 

year later, the empty chair is still there. The fact that human 

rights and the rule of law and religious freedom in China have all 

seriously deteriorated in 2011 is already well-known to all. So on 

the one-year anniversary of the awarding of Nobel Peace Prize to 

Liu Xiaobo, it’s very highly significant. 

Based on our own incomplete statistics we know that about 100 

lawyers, rights activists, and dissidents have been disappeared, tortured, imprisoned, and even sentenced to prison terms in the first 

11 months of this year. From February to July alone, more than 

1,000 rights activists and dissidents across the country, invited to 

‘‘drink tea,’’ were being threatened. 

Although most of the freedom of religion measures that Charter 

08 calls for are guaranteed in Article 36 of China’s own Constitution, but in practice and in reality the implementation falls far 

short. 

Broad discrimination against and persecution of independent religious groups and people of faith has been increasing in the past 

12 months. Just last week we received reports that at least 11 
31 

Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region were detained, and 4 were placed under criminal detention. What crime 

did they commit? They were accused of so-called engaging in illegal 

religious activities because they were reading the Koran in their 

own homes without permission. 

Since April 10 of this year, numerous members of Beijing’s 

Shouwang Church, with over 1,000 members, an independent 

house church, have experienced weekly detention, harassment, and 

abuses for 35 weeks in a row. The entire church leadership has 

been under house arrest without freedom of movement the entire 

time. 

Many believers have lost their jobs and have been evicted from 

their rented apartments. Why? Again, it is because they have been 

accused of engaging in illegal religious activities, in their case by 

worshiping in a public space. Never mind that they were forced to 

worship in an outdoor public arena because the government forced 

the church out of its rental worship place and made it impossible 

for it to move into its own purchase of the facility. 

In 1989, I was also participating with the students’ movement 

with the ideal that we want to reform the Communist Party by 

urging the system to change and reform. Of course, it ended with 

a massacre. I was very disappointed later on during the interrogation time. Even some of my fellow comrades betrayed me by telling 

lies in order to show their loyalty to the Communist Party. 

So I went from disappointment to disillusioned, and I was thinking in despair to commit a suicide bomb campaign. I wanted to kill 

my enemies and end my own life. But it was at that time that I 

found my faith in Jesus Christ, and later on became a member of 

the house church and engaged in the religious freedom defense 

movement. 

Of course, ever since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet 

Union and Eastern Europe, the Chinese Communist Party has 

acted as though mafia groups could be tolerated, but not independent religious believers. The treatment of house church Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, and Tibetan 

Buddhists has been far worse than other so-called unstable social 

elements. Torture and brainwashing with drugs has been used to 

achieve what the authorities called transforming the mind-set of 

these believers. 

In terms of recommendations, I want to—— 

Representative SMITH. Mr. Fu, if you could just suspend for one 

second. 

Mr. FU. Yes. 

Representative SMITH. I would ask you to complete your statement. I would ask if our distinguished witnesses would mind waiting for about 15 minutes or less. There’s three votes on the floor 

and there’s about a minute and a half left on the first. 

Mr. FU. Yes. Yes. 

Representative SMITH. Then we’ll reconvene. But we’ll take a 

brief respite and then come back. 

Mr. FU. Thank you. 

Representative SMITH. So if you could just hold that, then we’ll 

come back to it. 

Mr. FU. Sure. 
32 

[Whereupon, at 3:54 p.m. the hearing was recessed.] 

AFTER RECESS [4:28 P.M.]

Representative SMITH. The Commission will resume its sitting. 

I’d like to return to Pastor Bob Fu to complete his statement. 

Mr. FU. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

In terms of recommendations, I want to point to two things. 

First, I think the U.S. Government should make a very consistent, 

coherent human rights policy and all the—you know, from the top 

down, and every delegation, from trade to intellectual property, to 

other delegations to China to have a human rights agenda. 

Second, I think Congress, like, Mr. Chairman, you have campaigned for the Vietnamese, you know, the Human Rights Law Act, 

to have the State Department and the administration to report to 

Congress about the improvement or the procedures the administration has taken on the human rights record in Vietnam. I think the 

same standards should apply to China, too. 

By doing so, I think with a consistent and coherent foreign policy 

on human rights, I think it will produce results. Remember, just 

a few weeks ago on November 3, Feng Xia, the wife of one of China’s most prominent Internet freedom democracists, Mr. Ding Mao, 

was sitting right behind me. She quit her job and came here just 

to explain her husband’s innocence and tried to explain to the 

international community and asked for help. 

It was this Committee, including, Mr. Chairman, yourself, that 

has taken action immediately. The chairwoman took a photo with 

her and Congressman Wolf and Congressman Pitts immediately 

wrote letters and made phone calls on that Friday to the State Department, and it resulted, of course, on the Sunday when Ms. Feng 

Xia arrived in her hometown airport in Chengdu the U.S. Embassy 

sent an official and met with her and they had tea together, and 

the next day, on Monday, she was driven to the U.S. Consulate 

compound for a one-hour meeting. Happily, of course, as you already know, last Friday her husband was released after nearly 10 

months in illegal detention. 

Of course, he already served over eight years previously. That’s 

a very unusual release of Mr. Ding Mao that is a bright spot, I 

think, that can be used as a good example, that persistent diplomacy still works, even in the face of the largest stronghold, the last 

stronghold of the Communist country, China. 

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Fu appears in the appendix.] 

Representative SMITH. Thank you very much, Mr. Fu. Thank you 

for that update, encouraging in what is otherwise a very discouraging set of events that are occurring in China. 

Let me just ask a couple of questions. First, starting with the 

issue that I raised with the previous panel about double standard, 

just so that the record is clear from this panel whether or not you 

think the United States, our European allies, other democracies 

around the world have, for reasons that might be economic or otherwise engaged in a double standard when it comes to China. 

It seems to me that in countries like Burma, where there are not 

huge economic interests, it’s always that much easier for the 
33 

United States to be very aggressively promoting the human rights 

agenda. Is there a double standard? 

Harry Wu? 

Mr. WU. Well, I was complained to by Cuban dissidents because 

the Cubans—even their country’s president Fidel Castro—cannot 

obtain an American visa. But with the Chinese president, it’s not 

only the visa, but he can become the White House’s honored guest. 

So this is a double standard. China’s the only country, with the socalled publish and control, to only allow one child for each family. 

It doesn’t happen in Cuba, it didn’t happen in Vietnam. But did 

we really condemn this national policy? No. Okay. Roman Catholicism, until today, is illegal inside China—but it is a kind of freedom in Cuba. But what did we do? We did nothing, okay? And 

China executed many people, and organ transplants—this is very 

unique. It only happens in China. But I suppose because China is 

a very large country, so we just forget about it. Let’s talk about the 

market, talk about economy, the labor force. It’s not really talking 

about human rights at all. 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. If I might respond, Mr. Chairman. I think that 

the double standard that is applied between China and the United 

States was very evidence in Vice President Biden’s statement that 

he made when he was in China, that he fully understands, but 

does not second guess, China’s one-child policy. 

So in other words, he fully understands that China’s one-child 

policy is enforced through forced abortion, forced sterilization, and 

infanticide. He fully understands that girls are selectively aborted. 

He fully understands that this gendercide has caused a situation 

where there are 37 million more men than women in China today. 

He fully understands that this gender disparity is driving human 

trafficking in sexual slavery in China. He fully understands that 

the oppression of women, because of the one-child policy, is a factor 

in the fact that China has the highest female suicide rate of any 

country in the world, and yet he’s not second-guessing it. 

What does that mean? If it’s not okay in the United States it’s 

not okay in China either, and I just think that, again, that statement really undermined the moral credibility of the United States 

on the world international scene. 

Mr. FU. Yes, Mr. Chairman. There’s definitely a double standard 

over there. As a former prisoner born and educated in China, I 

wish, when President Obama made his speeches during the Jasmine Revolution time, during the crisis with Libya, these names of 

Libya and Tunisia could be replaced with China and look at the 

standards. 

I mean, the horrifying—you know, from gendercide to the torturing and the forced disappearance of prisoners. I think it all 

makes sense, I mean, that there is a double standard and that’s 

why we advocate for a coherent, consistent, and persistent foreign 

policy on human rights. 

Ms. CHAI. Yes, I do want to agree with all the three witnesses, 

that the U.S.-China relationship definitely has a double standard, 

double moral standards. I would like to focus to help the American 

Government establish its singular standard by seeking justice as a 

foundation of its foreign policy. Recently we visited Rome, and in 

preparation to visit Rome we studied Pope Benedict XVI’s letter on 
34 

September 22, 2011, to Germany’s Lower House of Parliament and 

I found that message really enlightening and would like to share 

if that’s okay. 

He said, ‘‘Allow me to begin my reflections on the foundation for 

law with a brief story from the sacred Scripture. In the first book 

of the Kings it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne to make a request. What 

would a young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success? 

Wealth? Long life? Destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of 

these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may 

govern God’s people and discern between good and evil.’’ This is 1 

Kings 3:9. 

‘‘Through this story the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician.’’ I would really like President 

Obama to listen to this and the future presidents or the leaders in 

the U.S. Congress as well. 

‘‘His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a 

politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain’’— 

which is 100 percent opposite from what our Nation has been doing 

in the past 22 years. 

‘‘Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally, a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity 

for effective political action at all. Yet, success is subordinated to 

the criteria of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the 

understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and 

thus can open up the path towards falsification of what is right towards the destruction of justice.’’ 

‘‘ ‘Without justice, what else is the state but a great band of robbers? ’ as St. Augustine once said.’’ Our America is very much like 

a band of robbers in U.S.-China policy. We should check the record, 

we should check the history and we should figure out what is the 

right thing to do and move forward. 

I want to go back to the Pope’s words again: ‘‘We Germans know 

from our own experience that these words are no empty specter. 

We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power 

opposed right and crushed it, so that the state became an instrument for destroying right—a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of 

the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the dominion of 

wrong is, and remains, the fundamental task for the politician. At 

a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes particular urgency.’’ 

‘‘Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, 

so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern 

between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may 

appear right? Even now Solomon’s request remains the decisive 

issue facing politicians and politics today.’’ 

As the Pope pointed out correctly, the foundation of a listening 

heart is to seek justice, not success. Today we need to have a listening heart to confront injustice in China. As Martin Luther King, 

Jr. said, ‘‘Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.’’ So that’s my 

recommendation. 
35 

Representative SMITH. I appreciate that. Very profound words 

and sentiments. 

Let me ask, with regard to the whole sense of accountability, 

when Liu Xiaobo—when the announcement was made that he had 

won the Nobel Peace Prize we all rejoiced. It was like, maybe this 

is a tipping point moment. Maybe the Chinese Government will finally, at long last, realize at least some of the errors and some of 

the egregious behavior that they’re engaged in. 

Yet, they went precisely in the opposite direction, calling the 

Nobel Peace Prize award obscene, attacking the Norwegian Government and all other governments that were in accord with this 

very fine selection, and I am very worried, frankly, that there has 

been, at least in some quarters, silence over the last year with regard to Liu Xiaobo. 

I mentioned earlier President Obama’s silence, at least public silence, when his jailer, Liu Xiaobo’s jailer, was right here in town 

and we failed to raise the question of a Nobel Peace Prize winner 

being incarcerated and his wife, de facto, being under house arrest. 

It was an opportunity lost. 

Now, if the lesson learned from the countries, including the 

United States, is to go silent, we will only be, perhaps unwittingly, 

but certainly enabling the dictatorship to be even more grievous in 

its mistreatment of people. I’m wondering what you would recommend that we do to be very clear, transparent, strong. Wei 

Jingsheng once said, and I know Harry Wu agrees with this, that 

when we’re quiet they beat people more in the prison, in the laogai. 

It seems to me that there has been some silence in some quarters. 

Saturday certainly is a day that everyone, every government 

leader including the President and Ambassador Locke, as was recommended previously by Carl Gershman, put out a very clear 

statement. We need those statements everywhere so the Chinese 

Government does not take the wrong sense of what is either fear 

or indifference or looking the other way. 

We need to ratchet up, redouble our efforts, as Ms. Li said in her 

testimony earlier. Your views on that? It seems to me we have to 

do much more, because over the last year, other than present company excluded, we seem to have done little or nothing. 

Ms. Littlejohn? 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. Well, Mr. Chairman, I would completely agree 

with your statement. I believe that one of the reasons, perhaps the 

primary reason that Chen Guangcheng is alive and that they have 

even improved slightly his condition, is because so much attention 

has been focused on his case, both inside of China and outside of 

China. 

The brave people inside of China who have been visiting him, 

even though they know they’re going to be beaten and detained, 

and then the people outside of China, the Sunglasses Campaign, 

your own efforts to go and visit him, have all contributed to the 

fact that he is alive and not dead, and also that his situation has 

improved. 

Now, as I’m sure you know, there was a piece that was written 

in the New York Times recently saying that perhaps we should 

mute ourselves, because if the international community puts too 
36 

much pressure on China then China will not accede because they 

don’t want to be seen to be bending to international pressure. 

I completely disagree with that, and I think that the people on 

this panel would disagree with that approach, that consistently, 

when pressure is applied, conditions improve. When people are 

quiet, when we try to kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party, 

then they just use that as a license to descend farther and farther 

and farther into atrocities. 

Chen Guangcheng himself urged people to take a stand. In the 

video that was released he said what we need to do is to overcome 

terror and to expose their egregious acts that lack any sense of conscience. He, himself, has urged people within China and the international community to take a stand against the atrocities in China, 

and I can think of no better approach than the one that is espoused 

by Chen Guangcheng. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you. 

Mr. FU. I think Harry would agree with me on this point, but 

I echo what you said, to speak publicly and loudly and repeatedly. 

I think it is very important. Many times, even myself, when I know 

a cell phone number of the Public Security Chief who detained prisoners, house church leaders, I just call them and let them know my 

name, and in several cases by the next day they were released. 

I think the Chinese Government, the leaders know that this Congress, the administration officials, from the President, the Cabinet 

members, they do care. But raising the names of Liu Xiaobo, Liu 

Xia, on every occasion when they meet with Chinese officials, I 

think that will make a difference. 

Representative SMITH. Okay. With regard to accountability, I 

want to thank Chai Ling for—even in the case of Nie Lina—listing 

the names of people that need to be held to account. It seems to 

me that 31 years of doing human rights work, even the most brutal 

dictator and dictatorship fears an ultimate accounting for the atrocities they’ve committed. We saw it with Milosevic, we saw it with 

the people in the former Yugoslavia, including Karadzic and 

Maladic, all of whom resisted with every fiber of their being, being 

held to account. 

We saw it with Charles Taylor and Joseph Kony, who was still 

on the loose with the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army, naming 

people, ICC [International Criminal Court] indictments, and certainly the barest minimum, denying a visa to people who have committed atrocities, which H.R. 2121 would do, as you pointed out, 

Ms. Chai, in your statement. 

But I think the more chronicling of perpetrators is accomplished 

by the Chinese themselves and certainly when there’s a penalty 

phase, it does sharpen the mind no matter where you are, including in a dictatorship. So, Chai, did you want to respond to that? 

Ms. CHAI. I’d love to add to that, yes. So, thank you so much for 

confirming. We’re still going to move forward to push for—and advocate for the U.S. Congress to pass H.R. 2121. We believe that’s 

a very effective way to influence, deter, and change the behaviors 

of human rights abusers in China. 

Recently, our attention was brought to this man, Li Qun, who 

came to the United States in 2000. He was given a visa to study 

at the University of New Haven. He interned at the mayor’s office, 
37 

and went back to Linyi. He is largely responsible for Chen 

Guangcheng’s imprisonment and torture, and is largely responsible 

for implementing the 130,000 forced abortions and forced sterilizations. 

So that just draws attention to say, one, I absolutely agree with 

Reggie Littlejohn and Bob Fu’s statement that we need to talk. We 

need to speak more, rather than be silent, not just at the government level, but at all levels. 

Every time we meet with a Chinese official, every time we meet 

with Chinese visitors, we should tell them about the values of 

America, talk to them about forced abortions, forced sterilizations, 

talk about ending gendercide. That would help them open their 

eyes, open their mind, and change their heart. 

Recently we did a little bit of investigation when we discovered 

about Li Qun’s appearance in America. Supposedly his record in 

America is short, but really boasts of his record being Chinese Government. Now not only is he going to be demoted, he was promoted 

to potentially be a Party leader in charge of the entire Shangdong 

Province, and he’s posted his resume for his experience in America. 

So we see China is sending loads of these bureaucrats, cadres of 

officials to America, for short-term, six-month business administration and training. Again, the business administration and training 

does not talk about human rights, morality, values. 

When they go back, they say we learned how to govern our country better from America, and by the way, they emphasize, to further oppress their people. That’s not what America is all about and 

not what it should be all about. Thank you. 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. Mr. Chairman, I’d like to bring up another aspect of accountability, which is not simply the accountability of the 

human rights atrocities and perpetrators in China, but also corporate responsibility of people who are investing in China. For example, I brought up the example in my testimony of Relativity 

Media. 

Relativity Media is a huge film company. They have many films 

that have won multiple Academy Awards. They really touted the 

fact that they had this big partnership with Chinese Communist 

Party officials in Linyi county to film in Linyi county, so that they 

were filming this comedy about a young man who goes wild on his 

21st birthday right next to where Chen Guangcheng is languishing 

near death under house arrest. 

I believe that companies need to exercise social responsibility and 

a conscience for human rights and do their due diligence in terms 

of figuring out where they’re doing business and with whom they 

are doing business, because it is likely that some of the same officials that were forging this deal with Relativity Media are also the 

ones who are signing off on the orders to torture Chen 

Guangcheng. I personally hope that the film ‘‘21 and Over’’ that 

they filmed in Linyi is going to be a huge commercial failure and 

would urge people to boycott that film. 

Mr. FU. Just one more point about Internet freedom. I completely 

agree with what Harry just mentioned about the Cisco problem, or 

almost pandemic. I think the Cisco CEO should be subpoenaed to 

come here to testify on what they have been doing to nurture the 

dictatorship. 
38 

I think the State Department should have an all-out campaign 

with the congressional appropriation funding to build software to 

break the so-called Great Firewall. I think that will, itself, serve 

as a real instrumental door for freedom in China. 

Representative SMITH. The Chair recognizes Anna Brettell, who 

is our senior staffer who helped do a great deal of work on this particular hearing, and I want to thank her for that. 

Anna? 

Ms. BRETTELL. Thank you, Congressman. Thank you all for coming here, from quite far distances, some of you. 

I have just one question. I’m curious about the lawyers that were 

affected by the 2011 crackdown. Did their experiences affect their 

work or the way that they approach legal cases? Are they still taking human rights cases? 

Mr. FU. Some of the lawyers that we have been working with 

were totally silenced. They were silenced because of the tremendous torture they experienced and with the continuous threats they 

faced, even up to now. So they’re not able to take up cases or speak 

up even now. But some are regrouping. 

For instance, with lawyer—attorney Jiang Tianyong, who bravely 

received interviews and spoke up. Because, he said, he would go 

crazy if he did not speak up about the torment he had experienced 

during his 60 days of forced disappearance. 

I still see hope that some other human rights lawyers that we 

have been working with are still actively taking up cases, so these 

are the three different situations for human rights lawyers. 

Ms. CHAI. Anna, I’d like to add that, regarding your question, 

thank you again for putting this great hearing together. I know you 

worked really hard. I think at one of the hearings we shared about 

Ma Jihong’s murder. She was seven months pregnant with her second baby. She was forced, dragged into a forced abortion clinic, and 

by 9 o’clock p.m. she was gone, together with her seven-month-old 

baby. 

The human rights attorneys we are working with inside China, 

are able to take this case, to file a lawsuit against the abusers. So 

despite the fact that some human rights lawyers are being silenced, 

many more are moving forward with determination and courage to 

seek justice for the helpless people. 

Ms. LITTLEJOHN. I’d like to add that this Arab Spring crackdown, 

I believe, was more or less an excuse or pretext for cracking down 

on lawyers. Many of these lawyers had already experienced tremendous oppression and abuse. 

I’ll never forget testifying with Jiang Tianyong in 2009 at the 

one-child policy hearing, and then we gathered in, Mr. Chairman, 

your office afterward. And as we were leaving, Jiang Tianyong 

said, ‘‘If anything happens to my wife and my child, would you 

please help me? ’’ And we all immediately prayed for him, but then 

when he got back to China, in fact, very shortly thereafter, he was 

dragged off right in front of his daughter and detained and beaten. 

We had a press conference for him. These people have unbelievable 

courage. 

As an attorney in the United States, I look at the human rights 

attorneys in China with awe, but also at the Chinese Communist 

Party and the way that they are targeting human rights attorneys 
39 

for torture, for forced disappearance. I believe that they are deliberately turning people who were the defenders of victims of human 

rights atrocities into victims themselves and trying to disable the 

entire human rights legal community in the nation of China. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you very much for that answer. 

Is there anything you would like to add as we close this hearing? 

Do you have any realistic expectation that Liu Xiaobo will be free 

in the near term? 

Ms. CHAI. Yes, I do. 

Mr. FU. We pray for his release. 

Ms. CHAI. I would love to. Can we? 

Mr. FU. Just one more appeal for understanding, since Dr. 

Brettell mentioned about these lawyers. Many were seen as silenced in the public square, but just like lawyer Tang Jitian, for 

a lawyer being captured secretly and put in the so-called Tiger 

Bench naked, having water poured on them with high volume, and 

electricity, lying for 24 hours in a closed-door room for days and 

weeks—like Dr. Teng Biao, a legal scholar and professor of law 

who was both handcuffed and shackled and was chained in a torture chair for a couple of months. For getting food he has to do 

this. Using the toilet room, he has to jump. This is not just one day 

or one week, it’s for a few months, with a death threat to his own 

family members. 

So I just want to appeal for understanding. I think for those who 

are not able to speak up so far, I think we have experienced so 

much more than we had previously even thought. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you so very much for your testimony, for your leadership, which has been extraordinary. Chai, did 

you have something? 

Ms. CHAI. Yes, I’d like to. 

Representative SMITH. Oh, I’m sorry. 

Ms. CHAI. I’d love to. I just want to conclude that in the past two 

years I experienced something very profoundly in dealing with 

China, that when I see suffering and sadness, if I start seeing it 

from God’s perspective I see power and glory. In the Bible, the Lazarus story, God allowed Lazarus to die and then, even though He 

wept with him and Jesus, he was able to bring him from death to 

life and to bring more glory to God. We have such a strong sense 

that the freedom and democracy for China is very near. I cherish 

this promise during Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, saying ‘‘Blessed 

are the poor in spirit for they are the kingdom of God; blessed are 

those who mourn, for they will be comforted; blessed are the meek, 

for they will inherit the Earth; blessed are those who hunger and 

thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,’’ and Liu Xiaobo is 

one of those, ‘‘blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown 

mercy; blessed are those who are pure in heart, for they will see 

God; blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons 

of God; blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.’’ We have seen something very new and never used before, and that’s the power of 

prayer in dealing with China’s human rights situation. So I would 

like to invite anyone who is a believer who wants to try that, and 

you can either raise a hand or just be in agreement with me silently as we conclude this hearing in a prayer. Would that be okay? 
40 

Dearest Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus, we just thank you for this 

beautiful, amazing time to testify about the suffering in China, and 

also your heart to seek justice and set people free. Lord, I thank 

you for Chris Smith, for his 30 years of faithful service to you. He’s 

such an exemplary example and hero and inspires all of us. Thank 

you for the new leadership brought by Paul and many other courageous staff from the CECC. 

Lord, we believe in your promise. We, today, proclaim according 

to your Scripture, freedom for Liu Xiaobo and Chen Guangcheng, 

Nie Lina, and the many others who suffer imprisonment for pursuing righteousness, for there is no imprisonment in the kingdom 

of Heaven. We proclaim comfort for those who mourn under the 

one-child policy and the gendercide, for the end is coming and they 

will be given the oil of gladness instead of the spirit of despair. 

We proclaim mercy and forgiveness for the Chinese leaders and 

oppressors, for if they choose to be merciful then they will be 

shown mercy. We proclaim riches and prosperity for the 486 million poor in China, for they will be given the opportunity to inherit 

the Earth. 

We proclaim righteousness for America’s Government, for if they 

truly hunger and thirst for righteousness, America will be blessed 

as a Nation. It will be filled with everlasting joy. Please join me 

and let this year be proclaimed to be the year of the Lord’s favor. 

In Jesus’ name we pray, amen. 

Representative SMITH. Amen. 

Ms. CHAI. Thank you so much. 

Representative SMITH. Thank you. 

The hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 5:01 p.m. the hearing was adjourned.] 
(41) 

A P P E N D I X 
42 

PREPARED STATEMENTS

PREPARED STATEMENT OF PERRY LINK

DECEMBER 6, 2011

I am honored to be here and I salute the Commission for its wisdom in holding 

this hearing. 

Liu Xiaobo is one of those unusual people who can look at human life from the 

broadest of perspectives and reason about it from first principles. His keen intellect 

notices things that others also look at, but do not see. It seems that hardly any topic 

in Chinese culture, politics, or society evades his interest, and he can write with 

analytic calm about upsetting things. One might expect such calm in a recluse—a 

hermit poet, or a cloistered scholar—but in Liu Xiaobo it comes in an activist. Time 

after time he has gone where he thinks he should go, and has done what he thinks 

he should do, as if havoc, danger, and the possibility of prison were simply not part 

of the picture. He seems to move through life taking mental notes on what he sees, 

hears, and reads, as well as on the inward responses that he feels. 

Fortunately for us, his readers, he also has a habit of writing free from fear. Most 

Chinese writers today, including many of the best ones, write with political caution 

in the backs of their minds and with a shadow hovering over their fingers as they 

pass across a keyboard. How should I couch things? What topics should I not touch? 

What indirection should I use? Liu Xiaobo does none of this. What he thinks, you 

get. 

Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. For about two decades, the prize 

committee in Oslo, Norway, had been considering Chinese dissidents for the award, 

and in 2010, after Liu Xiaobo had been sentenced to eleven years in prison for ‘‘incitement of subversion’’—largely because of his advocacy of the human-rights manifesto called Charter 08—he had come to emerge as the right choice. Authorities in 

Beijing, furious at the committee’s announcement on October 8, 2010, did what they 

could to frustrate celebrations of it. Police broke up parties of revelers in several 

Chinese cities. The Chinese Foreign Ministry pressured world diplomats to stay 

away from the Award Ceremony in Oslo on December 10. Dozens of Liu Xiaobo’s 

friends in China were barred from leaving the country lest they head for Oslo. Liu 

Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, although charged with nothing, was held under tight house 

arrest. Liu himself remained in prison, and none of his family members could travel 

to Oslo to collect the prize. At the Award Ceremony, the prize medal, resting inside 

a small box, and the prize certificate, in a folder that bore the initials ‘‘LXB,’’ were 

placed on stage on an empty chair. Within hours authorities in Beijing banned the 

phrase ‘‘empty chair’’ from the Chinese Internet. 

Liu was the fifth Peace Laureate to fail to appear for the Award Ceremony. In 

1935, Carl von Ossietzky was held in a Nazi prison; in 1975, Andrei Sakharov was 

not allowed to leave the USSR; in 1983, Lech Walesa feared he would be barred 

from reentering Poland if he went to Oslo; and in 1991, Aung Sang Suu Kyi was 

under house arrest in Burma. Each of the latter three prize-winners was able to 

send a family member to Oslo. Only Ossietzky and Liu Xiaobo could do not even 

that. 

Chinese people have always shown special reverence for Nobel Prizes, in any field, 

and this fact has made Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize especially hard for the regime to 

swallow. Two people born in China have won the Nobel Peace Prize—Liu Xiaobo 

and the Dalai Lama. One is in prison and the other in permanent exile. When China’s rulers put on a mask of imperturbability as they denounce these Nobel prizes, 

they not only seek to deceive the world but, at a deeper level, are lying to themselves. When they try to counter Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel by inventing a Confucius Peace 

Prize, and then give it to Vladimir Putin citing his ‘‘iron fist’’ in Chechnya, there 

is a sense in which we should not blame them for the clownish effect, because it 

springs from an inner panic that they themselves cannot control. Liu Xiaobo sits in 

prison, in physical hardship. But in his moral core, there can be no doubt that he 

has more peace than the men who persecute him. 

Liu was born December 28, 1955, in the city of Changchun in northeastern China. 

He was eleven years old when Mao Zedong closed his school—along with nearly 

every other school in China—so that youngsters could go into society to ‘‘oppose revisionism,’’ ‘‘sweep away freaks and monsters,’’ and in other ways join in Mao’s 

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Liu and his parents spent 1969 to 1973 at 

a ‘‘people’s commune’’ in Inner Mongolia. In retrospect Liu believes that these years 

of upset, although a disaster for China as a whole, had certain unintended benefits 
43 

for him personally. His years of lost schooling ‘‘allowed me freedom,’’ he recalls, from 

the mind-closing processes of Maoist education; they gave him time to read books, 

both approved and unapproved. Moreover, the pervasive cynicism and chaos in the 

society around him taught him perhaps the most important lesson of all: that he 

would have to think for himself. Where else, after all, could he turn? In this general 

experience Liu resembles several others of the most powerfully independent Chinese 

writers of his generation. Hu Ping, Su Xiaokang, Zheng Yi, Bei Dao, Zhong Acheng, 

Jiang Qisheng, and many others survived the Cultural Revolution by learning to 

rely on their own minds, and for some this led to a questioning of the political system as a whole. Mao had preached that ‘‘rebellion is justified,’’ but this is hardly 

the way he thought it should happen. 

Chinese universities began to reopen after Mao died in 1976, and in 1977 Liu 

Xiaobo went to Jilin University, in his home province, where he earned a B.A. in 

Chinese literature in 1982. From there he went to Beijing, to Beijing Normal University, where he continued to study Chinese literature, receiving an M.A. in 1984 

and a Ph.D. in 1988. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled ‘‘Aesthetics and Human Freedom,’’ was a plea for liberation of the human spirit; it drew wide acclaim from both 

his classmates and the most seasoned scholars at the university. Beijing Normal invited him to stay on as a lecturer, and his classes were highly popular with students. 

Liu’s articles and his presentations at conferences earned him a reputation as an 

iconoclast even before he finished graduate school. Known as the ‘‘black horse’’ of 

the late 1980s, seemingly no one escaped his acerbic pen: Maoist writers like Hao 

Ran were no better than hired guns, post-Mao literary stars like Wang Meng were 

but clever equivocators, ‘‘roots- seeking’’ writers like Han Shaogong and Zheng Yi 

made the mistake of thinking China had roots that were worth seeking, and even 

speak-for-the-people heroes like Liu Binyan were too ready to pin hopes on ‘‘liberalminded’’ Communist leaders like Hu Yaobang (the Party chair who was sacked in 

1987). ‘‘The Chinese love to look up to the famous,’’ Liu wrote, ‘‘thereby saving 

themselves the trouble of thinking.’’ In graduate school Liu read widely in Western 

thought—Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek, and 

others—and began to use these thinkers to criticize Chinese cultural patterns. He 

also came to admire modern paragons of nonviolent resistance around the world— 

Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Vaclav Havel, and others. Although not 

formally a Christian, or a believer in any religion, he began to think and write about 

Jesus Christ. 

Around the same time, he arrived at a view of the last two centuries of Chinese 

history that saw the shock of Western imperialism and technology as bringing ‘‘the 

greatest changes in thousands of years.’’ Through the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, China’s struggles to respond to this shock cut ever deeper into 

China’s core. Reluctantly, Chinese thinking shifted from ‘‘our technology is not as 

good as other people’s’’ in the 1880s and early 1890s to ‘‘our political system is not 

as good as other people’s’’ after the defeat by Japan in 1895 to ‘‘our culture is not 

as good as other people’s’’ in the May Fourth movement of the late 1910s. Then, 

under the pressure of war, all of the ferment and struggle ended in a Communist 

victory in 1949, and this event, said Liu, ‘‘plunged China into the abyss of totalitarianism.’’ Recent decades have been more hopeful for China, in his view. Unrelenting pressure from below—from farmers, petitioners, rights advocates, and, perhaps 

most important, hundreds of millions of Internet users—has obliged the regime, 

gradually but inexorably, to cede ever more space to civil society. 

The late 1980s were a turning point in Liu’s life both intellectually and emotionally. He visited the University of Oslo in 1988, where he was surprised that European Sinologists did not speak Chinese (they only read it) and was disappointed at 

how naive Westerners were in accepting Chinese government language at face 

value. Then he went to New York, to Columbia University, where he encountered 

‘‘critical theory’’ and learned that its dominant strain, at least at Columbia, was 

‘‘postcolonialism.’’ People expected him, as a visitor from China, to fit in by representing the ‘‘the subaltern,’’ by resisting the ‘‘discursive hegemony’’ of ‘‘the metropole,’’ and so on. Liu wondered why people in New York were telling him how it 

felt to be Chinese. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Was ‘‘postcolonialism’’ 

itself a kind of intellectual colonialism? Liu wrote in May 1989 that ‘‘no matter how 

strenuously Western intellectuals try to negate colonial expansionism and the white 

man’s sense of superiority, when faced with other nations Westerners cannot help 

feeling superior. Even when criticizing themselves, they become besotted with their 

own courage and sincerity.’’ His experience in New York led him to see his erstwhile 

project of using Western values as yardsticks to measure China as fundamentally 

flawed. No system of human thought, he concluded, is equal to the challenges that 

the modern world faces: the population explosion, the energy crisis, environmental 
44 

imbalance, nuclear disarmament, and ‘‘the addiction to pleasure and to commercialization.’’ Nor is there any culture, he wrote, ‘‘that can help humanity once and 

for all to eliminate spiritual suffering or transcend personal limits.’’ Suddenly he felt 

intellectually vulnerable, despite the fame he had enjoyed in China. He felt as if 

his lifelong project to think for himself would have to begin all over from scratch. 

These thoughts came at the very time that the dramatic events of the 1989 prodemocracy movement in Beijing and other Chinese cities were appearing on the 

world’s television screens. Commenting that intellectuals too often ‘‘just talk’’ and 

‘‘do not do,’’ Liu decided in late April 1989 to board a plane from New York to Beijing. ‘‘I hope,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that I’m not the type of person who, standing at the doorway to hell, strikes a heroic pose and then starts frowning in indecision.’’ Back in 

Beijing, Liu went to Tiananmen Square, talked with the demonstrating students, 

and organized a hunger strike that began on June 2, 1989. Less than two days later, 

when tanks began rolling toward the Square and it was clear that people along the 

way were already dying, Liu negotiated with the attacking military to allow students a peaceful withdrawal. It is impossible to calculate how many lives he may 

have saved by this compromise, but certainly some, and perhaps many. 

After the massacre, Liu took refuge in the foreign diplomatic quarter, but later 

came to blame himself severely for not remaining in the streets—as many ‘‘ordinary 

folk’’ did, trying to rescue victims of the massacre. Images of the ‘‘souls of the dead’’ 

have haunted him ever since. The opening line of Liu’s ‘‘Final Statement,’’ which 

he read at his criminal trial in December 2009, said, ‘‘June 1989 has been the major 

turning point in my life.’’ Liu Xia, who visited him in prison on October 10, 2010, 

two days after the announcement of his Nobel Prize, reports that he wept and said, 

‘‘This is for those souls of the dead.’’ 

The regime’s judgment of Liu’s involvement at Tiananmen was that he had been 

a ‘‘black hand’’ behind a ‘‘counterrevolutionary riot.’’ He was arrested on June 6, 

1989, and sent for a bit more than eighteen months to Beijing’s elite Qincheng Prison, where he was kept in a private cell, but not severely mistreated. ‘‘Sometimes 

I was deathly bored,’’ he later wrote, ‘‘but that’s about it.’’ Upon release he was fired 

from his teaching job at Beijing Normal University. 

He resumed a writing career, but now wrote less on literature and culture and 

more on politics. He could not publish in China, but sent manuscripts to Hong Kong 

publications such as The Open Magazine and Cheng Ming Monthly, as well as U.S.- 

based magazines such as Beijing Spring and Democratic China. In May 1995 the 

government arrested him again, this time for seven months. No reason was specified 

for the arrest, but it came in the same month that he released a petition called 

‘‘Learn from the Lesson Written in Blood and Push Democracy and Rule of Law Forward: An Appeal on the Sixth Anniversary of Tiananmen.’’ On August 11, 1996, 

barely half a year after his second stint in prison, Liu joined with Wang Xizhe, a 

well-known dissident from the southern city of Guangzhou, to publish a statement 

on the sensitive topic of Taiwan’s relations with mainland China. Earlier that year 

the Chinese military had fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait, in an apparent attempt to intimidate Taiwanese voters on the eve of presidential elections in which 

the issue of a formal declaration of independence from the mainland was at stake. 

In their statement, Liu and Wang wrote, ‘‘Is the government of the People’s Republic of China the only legitimate [Chinese] government? In our view, it is both legitimate and not completely legitimate.’’ Less than two months later, on October 8, 

1996, Liu was arrested again and sent for three years to a reeducation-throughlabor camp in Dalian, in his home province of Liaoning. (Wang fled the country 

right after the declaration was issued and has since settled in the United States. 

He has never been back to China.) 

The story of Liu Xiaobo’s courage from the mid-1990s on cannot be separated from 

his wife, Liu Xia. Four years younger than he, Liu Xia is a poet and art photographer whom Liu Xiaobo has known since the 1980s and with whom he was living 

after his release from prison in January 1996. During his labor-camp incarceration, 

Liu Xia was allowed to visit him once a month, and, not missing a single month, 

made the 1,100-mile round-trip from Beijing thirty-six times. Shortly after Xiaobo 

entered the camp, Liu Xia applied to marry him. Camp authorities, puzzled at her 

request, felt that they needed to check with her to be sure she knew what she was 

doing. She reports answering them by saying, ‘‘Right! That ‘enemy of the state’! I 

want to marry him!’’ A wedding ceremony inside the camp was impossible, and regulations forbade Xiaobo from exiting the camp, so the two married by filling out 

forms. On April 8, 1998, it was official. 

It was during the three years at the labor camp that Liu Xiaobo seems to have 

formed his deepest faith in the concept of ‘‘human dignity,’’ a phrase that has recurred in his writing ever since. It was also the camp environment that gave rise 

to many of his best poems. Many of these camp poems are subtitled ‘‘to Xia,’’ or ‘‘for 
45 

Xia,’’ but that does not make them love poems in the narrow sense. They span a 

variety of topics—including massacre victims, Immanuel Kant, Vincent Van Gogh, 

and others—that the poet addresses with Liu Xia standing beside him, as it were, 

as his spiritual companion. Liu Xia has prepared a book of her art photographs, 

which are deeply probing in what they suggest about China’s moral predicament in 

contemporary times, and she subtitles her book ‘‘accompanying Liu Xiaobo.’’ 

On October 8, 1999, Liu Xiaobo returned from the reeducation camp, 

unreeducated. He resumed his writing career with no alteration of range or viewpoint, and lived primarily off his manuscripts, for which he was paid the equivalent 

of about US$60 to $90 per one thousand Chinese characters. In November 2003 he 

was elected chair of the writers’ group Chinese PEN, and served in that post until 

2007. During those years the rise of the Internet in China began to make a huge 

difference for Liu Xiaobo as well as for China as a whole. Finding ways to evade 

the government’s ‘‘Great Firewall,’’ Liu now could access information, communicate 

with friends, organize open letters, and edit and submit his manuscripts all much 

easier than before. He also watched with great satisfaction as the numbers of Chinese Internet users passed 100 million in 2006, giving rise to what he saw as ‘‘free 

assembly in cyberspace’’ and ‘‘power of public opinion on the Internet’’ that have 

turned into autonomous forces pushing China in the direction of democracy. In October 2006 Liu took over editorship of the Internet magazine Democratic China from 

his friend Su Xiaokang, who had been editing it from Delaware, and greatly expanded its reach inside China. 

Charter 08, which was conceived in conscious admiration of Czechoslovakia’s 

Charter 77 of the 1970s, and which became the main piece of evidence against Liu 

Xiaobo at his criminal trial, did not originate with Liu Xiaobo. A number of his 

friends had been working on a draft for several months in 2008 before he chose to 

join them. I do not know why he at first stood aside, but my surmise is that he 

felt the project was unlikely to get anywhere. When he did join, though, his efforts 

were crucial, and became increasingly so in the weeks and days immediately before 

the charter was announced. He insisted that the charter not be a ‘‘petition’’ to the 

government; it was a way for citizens to address fellow citizens about shared ideals. 

He persuaded his friends to remove certain confrontational phrases so that a wider 

range of people would feel comfortable endorsing the charter, and this judgment was 

vindicated when more than twelve thousand people eventually signed. He personally 

did more than anyone else to solicit signatures, but his most courageous move in 

the days before the unveiling of the charter was to agree to present himself as its 

leading sponsor. He was already known as the most prominent ‘‘dissident’’ inside 

China; taking primary responsibility for this text would only put him more in the 

government’s spotlight and at greater risk for punishment. 

He was not the only person punished for Charter 08. In the days right before and 

after it was unveiled, several others who had worked on drafting it saw their homes 

raided, or received from the police ‘‘invitations to tea’’ (i.e., interrogation) of the kind 

one is not at liberty to decline. Then came a nationwide campaign to suppress the 

charter itself. But even in this context, the eleven-year prison sentence that Liu received surprised many observers for its severity. Liu himself said of the ruling, 

which arrived on Christmas Day 2009, only that it ‘‘cannot bear moral scrutiny and 

will not pass the test of history.’’ In his ‘‘Final Statement’’ he thanked his captors 

for the civil treatment he had received during his detention and declared that ‘‘I 

have no enemies.’’ Then he appealed the ruling—not because he expected it could 

possibly be overturned, but because he wanted ‘‘to leave the fullest possible historical record of what happens when an independent intellectual stands up to a dictatorship.’’ 

When the police came to remove Liu from his apartment late at night on December 8, 2008, they took him to a police-run hostel at an undisclosed location in Beijing for six months of ‘‘residential surveillance.’’ (Chinese law says that ‘‘residential 

surveillance’’ happens at a person’s residence, but for Liu this was not the case. He 

was allowed two monitored visits with Liu Xia during this time, but those occurred 

at a third location, neither his home nor the secret place where he was being held.) 

On June 23, 2009, he was formally arrested and charged with ‘‘incitement of subversion of state power,’’ after which he was held at the Beijing Number One Detention 

Center. He continued to be held there after his trial in December 2009, and on May 

24, 2010, was transferred to Jinzhou Prison in his home province of Liaoning. (By 

custom, notable Chinese criminals are sent home for punishment.) Liu Xia has been 

granted occasional, but closely monitored, visits at the prison. 

We know very little of his prison conditions. Chinese Human Rights Defenders 

has reported that—as of late 2010—he was sharing a cell with five other inmates 

(although veterans of Chinese prisons suspect that these five, real inmates or not, 

are there to report on him). The other five are allowed weekly visits from family 
46 

members, but Liu is allowed only monthly visits. Whether or not these visits can 

be from his wife depends on his behavior, on hers, and on the political ‘‘sensitivity’’ 

of the times. (A Nobel Prize and an Arab Spring are the kinds of things that generate great sensitivity.) Liu eats low-quality prison food. His cell mates are allowed 

to pay the prison to get specially prepared, better food, but Liu is denied this option. 

He has chronic hepatitis and stomach problems, but receives only cursory medical 

attention. He gets two hours each day to go outdoors. He can read books that Liu 

Xia has brought to him, but only if they are books published and sold in China. 

There is a television set in his cell, and the prison authorities control which programs he can watch—but not, of course, how he understands them. 

This statement is based on my Introduction to No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected 

Essays and Poems of Liu Xiaobo (Harvard University Press, 2012). 
47 
48 
49 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF MARIAN BOTSFORD FRASER

DECEMBER 6, 2011

Chairman Smith, Co-Chairman Brown, Members of the Commission: 

My name is Marian Botsford Fraser, and I am the Chair of the Writers in Prison 

Committee of PEN International. Founded in 1921 and headquartered in London, 

PEN is the world’s oldest human rights and literary organization. Our programs to 

celebrate literature and promote freedom of expression are carried out by 144 centers in more than 100 countries, including PEN American Center in New York and 

PEN USA in Los Angeles, and our global membership includes many of the United 

States’ most distinguished writers. PEN International is a non-political organization 

and holds consultative status at the United Nations. 
50 

I am proud to chair the flagship program of PEN International, the Writers in 

Prison Committee, which in 2011 celebrated its 50th year of advocacy for persecuted 

writers and freedom of expression around the world. We work especially closely with 

our colleagues who are engaged in on-the-ground campaigning in countries where 

creative freedom and free expression are at risk. Among them are the members of 

Independent Chinese PEN Center, which just this year celebrated its own 10th anniversary and is one of the only NGOs still tolerated, though severely restricted, in 

China today. Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is a former president 

of that center, and securing his release from prison is one of PEN’s highest priorities. 

In Liu Xiaobo’s case and in all our international advocacy, we are guided by the 

human rights laws and norms that countries around the world are required to uphold. The right to freedom of expression is enshrined in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was created 63 years ago this Saturday, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which nearly all states 

are party but for 19 U.N.-recognized states which have neither signed nor ratified 

it. The People’s Republic of China is among seven states that have signed the covenant but have not yet ratified it. 

The freedom of expression clause is nearly the same in both instruments, and is 

represented under the same article, Article 19. Article 19 of the ICCPR states that: 

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include 

freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or print, in the form of art, or through 

any other media of his choice. 

Since China hosted the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics—games it had secured by 

pledging to the world to expand protections for the human rights of its citizens— 

the Chinese government has carried out three successive crackdowns on its citizens’ 

right to freedom of expression; the first beginning with Liu Xiaobo’s detention on 

December 8, 2008, in connection with Charter 08, the document that he and 302 

co-signers planned to release two days later, on International Human Rights Day. 

Three years later, Liu Xiaobo’s ordeal stands as a glaring example of China’s failure 

to uphold its citizens’ universally-guaranteed right to freedom of expression. 

On December 25, 2009, a Beijing court convicted Liu of ‘‘inciting subversion of 

state power’’ and sentenced him to 11 years in prison. The verdict offered as evidence of this crime seven phrases that he penned from 2005 until his detention— 

all either quotations from his many essays or from Charter 08, which Liu had 

helped draft. In none of these phrases did Liu call for the overthrow of the government. He merely expressed opinions, offered critiques of the current state of affairs, 

and propounded ways to make life in the People’s Republic of China better, more 

democratic, and more just. 

Earlier this year, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention reviewed Liu’s 

case and ruled that he is being arbitrarily detained in violation of three critical tenets of international law, including Article 19. In its responses to the Working 

Group’s questions about his treatment, the Chinese government argued that the 

charges and conviction did not violate Article 19’s guarantee of freedom of expression because Article 19 also states that freedom of expression carries ‘‘special duties 

and responsibilities’’ and therefore may be ‘‘subject to certain restrictions,’’ including 

the protection of national security or public order. 

The working group, however, emphatically rejected this argument, noting that the 

proportionality that applies to these restrictions was not satisfied in this case, and 

ordered the Chinese government to free Liu Xiaobo immediately. 

We welcome this clear decision by the U.N., as we have welcomed the strong denunciations of Liu’s imprisonment from a number of distinguished organizations 

and bodies, including this commission. PEN has been doing everything we can to 

win Liu Xiaobo’s immediate and unconditional release from Jinzhou Prison in 

Liaoning Province, and secure the right of all Chinese citizens, our writer colleagues 

included, to express themselves freely without fear of censorship, imprisonment, or 

harassment. PEN centers around the world have raised Liu’s case with their own 

governments, urging them to join the international condemnation of this clear 

human rights violation. Our members have brought his plight and his voice to prominence and into the public eye through readings, rallies, articles, letters, petitions, 

and events. Some of our most prominent members around the world, like Wole 

Soyinka, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Tom Stoppard, Paul 

Auster, and Don DeLillo, were the first to speak on Liu’s behalf, signing an open 

letter calling for his release in January 2009. 

We are proud to note that PEN American Center President Kwame Anthony 

Appiah was among the influential figures who nominated Liu for the Nobel Peace 
51 

Prize in January 2010, and even more proud that these endeavors succeeded. In 

Oslo, on December 10, 2010, I was honored to be part of a PEN delegation that was 

invited to attend the ceremony where Liu was awarded the prize in absentia. But 

as gratified as we were by this international recognition of our colleague’s efforts 

to promote peaceful change in China, we were shocked and saddened that the Chinese authorities responded to the award with a second crackdown, this one including the extrajudicial house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia, who has been unable to communicate with the outside world since shortly after the Nobel Committee announced 

its selection of Liu Xiaobo last October.. 

This crackdown was followed early this year by yet another, even more severe, 

wave of repression, this one targeting dissent thought to have been inspired by the 

revolutions in the Middle East and affecting a number of PEN members in China. 

Ye Du, the Independent Chinese PEN Center webmaster, was detained on February 

21, 2011, and placed under ‘‘residential surveillance’’ at an unknown location in 

Guangzhou Province for more than three months. Teng Biao, a renowned lawyer 

and the legal consultant for ICPC’s Writers in Prison Committee, was disappeared 

on February 19, and mysteriously freed two months later. Neither has yet spoken 

of his ordeal, and it was only recently that each began speaking out for freedom of 

expression in his country once again through social media. 

It is worth noting that these arrests and disappearances violate not only international law, but China’s own constitution as well. Article 35 guarantees that ‘‘citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration.’’ 

This summer, deeply concerned over this series of crackdowns, but equally impressed by the incredible endurance of our colleagues, who continue to assert their 

rights despite constant harassment, PEN sent a delegation to Beijing to gauge the 

level of repression and the current climate for freedom of expression, and deliver 

a message of solidarity to our colleagues. What we found in the weeks leading up 

to the trip and, more importantly, on the ground in China, was a mixture of absurd 

restrictions and repression on the one hand, and positive signs and hope on the 

other. 

Professor Appiah, a very public nominator of Liu for the Nobel, was denied a visa 

for the trip. During his first attempts, his passport was inexplicably ‘‘lost’’ by consular officials. He got a new one, and applied again. Consular staff members then 

found his passport, but he was still denied, very likely for his nomination and activism on Liu’s behalf, including his own testimony before this commission last November. Another American staff member’s visa application was denied after consular officials held her passport for three weeks. She traveled to Hong Kong to lend realtime support while we were on the ground in the mainland. 

In Beijing, we were incredibly thankful for the support of American embassy officials, who offered space and time for a roundtable discussion with a number of our 

Chinese colleagues. Of the 14 writers the embassy invited to the meeting, however, 

only three were able to come. Many were visited by the guobao, or security police, 

and received warnings not to attend. We could only assume that their telephone and 

Internet communications were monitored, and that the embassy’s may have been as 

well. Other, private meetings with individuals we arranged ourselves in private telephone conversations were canceled after visits from the guobao as well, suggesting 

our own communications were also being monitored. 

One of our primary ambitions on the trip was to meet with Liu Xia at her apartment in Beijing, but with her compound still guarded by authorities and her Internet and telephone service still cut, we were cautioned not to attempt a visit. Nor 

could we visit with Teng Biao, who was still under a virtual gag order following his 

release, or Ye Du, with whom the PEN community has an especially strong bond 

thanks to his presence at our international meetings, and who indicated he would 

welcome a visit. We were told that, though he had returned home from months of 

detention, he was still under house arrest, and security police required him to check 

in several times a day at a guardhouse erected outside his residence, making it impossible for anyone to visit. 

This was all extremely discouraging. We were frankly appalled by the intrusiveness of the surveillance state and the severity of the restrictions imposed on many 

of our PEN colleagues, even ones who are not alleged to have committed crimes. 

At the same time, we were surprised by the widespread—indeed, almost universal— 

dissatisfaction with state of freedom of expression in China. Many of the writers 

that we were able to meet with, even those not considered ‘‘dissident’’ writers or associated with ICPC, decried the level of censorship, the self-censorship necessary for 

publication, and the one-party rule that has allowed this kind of repression to flourish. 
52 

These frank expressions seem to mirror the aspirations of China’s ordinary citizens. On the tail end of our trip, a high-speed train collided with another outside 

the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, killing 40 people and injuring almost 200. 

The government’s attempts to cover it up—which included trying to literally bury 

the train at the scene—sparked outrage around the country; in five days, Chinese 

citizens posted 25 million messages critical of the government’s handling of the accident on China’s microblogs. That campaign, which seemed unprecedented in its 

breadth and tenacity, has since been emulated in several other scandals and tragedies. These widespread criticisms of course caught the eye of censors, but not before 

the government was forced to reverse course and, in some instances, apologize. 

Similarly, those who attempt to comment on the kinds of ‘‘politically sensitive’’ 

topics that dominate Liu Xiaobo’s essays, and even Liu Xiaobo himself, have discerned new ways to get past the censors, utilizing homonyms (‘‘river crab’’ for ‘‘harmonize,’’ for example), taking and posting photographs of themselves silently supporting political prisoners, as in the ‘‘Dark Glasses’’ Campaign for the blind lawyer 

Chen Guangcheng, and using humor and satire. New forms of expression are being 

found to express bold new ideas throughout the country, despite the government’s 

heavy hand. 

The Chinese government still does not allow the Independent Chinese PEN Center to function fully inside the country. Members are still monitored, gatherings are 

stopped, and members living outside the country are often prevented from visiting. 

After our time in Beijing, we celebrated ICPC’s 10th anniversary in Hong Kong. As 

the American and international delegates were preparing to leave, three ICPC members—including its president, Tienchi Martin-Liao, and prominent writers and ICPC 

founders Ma Jian and Bei Ling—were stopped at the border in Shenzhen and interrogated on their activities and their writings. And, of course, ICPC’s own Liu Xiaobo 

still lives inside a Chinese prison, one of four ICPC members still in jail, and one 

of more than 40 writers whose cases PEN is following today. 

Still, there is an increased awareness of the plight of political prisoners within 

Chinese society, and a new questioning of the reasons for imprisoning these people 

in the first place. This fall, as the ‘‘Dark Glasses’’ campaign for Chen Guangcheng 

spread on China’s microblogs, ordinary citizens began to ask why this lawyer, who 

defended villagers in rural areas and exposed the persecution of those who defy China’s one-child policy, was being confined inside his home after his release from prison, his young daughter prevented even from attending school. Reports that thugs 

were keeping outsiders from entering his village in Linyi, Shandong Province, 

spread, and prompted some to try to visit Chen to see for themselves. 

Murong Xuecun, a well-known and popular writer who we were lucky to meet 

while we were in Beijing, recently documented his own journey to Dongshigu village, and the beating that followed at its gates. Murong had advocated on Chen’s 

behalf on microblogs, but it was at the prompting of one of his students that he first 

seriously considered attempting to visit. He and his group of three other men and 

one woman decided that no matter what, they would not raise their fists if the 

guards raised theirs. In a harrowing account of the group’s encounter with the violent cadres that guard Chen that was published in The Guardian last month, he 

said ‘‘We just wanted to verify what it takes in this country, at this time, to visit 

an imprisoned ‘free man.’’’ Many others have done the same. 

Chen Guangcheng still remains imprisoned in his own home, as does Liu Xia, and 

countless others are still watched closely, taken for tea, warned, harassed, and beaten. Liu Xiaobo sits quietly behind bars in a prison near the border with North 

Korea, and not many even know that one of their own won the Nobel Peace Prize. 

But this surge of activism, of citizens simply asking the question ‘‘why,’’ of seeking 

and imparting information, regardless of frontiers, lends hope that China is changing, and that change has begun with the people and their exercise of their internationally-protected, inalienable right to freedom of expression. People are coming 

to realize, as Murong said of Chen Guangcheng, that ‘‘at the moment his freedom 

was arbitrarily taken away, your freedom came under threat.’’ 

One year ago this week, in his speech officially awarding Liu Xiaobo the Nobel 

Peace Prize, Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn Jagland noted that 

‘‘There are many dissidents in China, and their opinions differ on many points’’; but 

that ‘‘the severe punishment imposed on Liu made him more than a central spokesman for human rights. Practically overnight, he became the very symbol, both in 

China and internationally, of the struggle for such rights in China.’’ He went on: 

But as Liu also writes, ‘‘An enormous transformation towards pluralism in society has already taken place, and official authority is no longer able to fully control the whole society.’’ However strong the power of the regime may appear to 

be, every single individual must do his best to live, in his words, ‘‘an honest life 

with dignity.’’ 
53 

On the anniversary of that important day, PEN would like to thank, again, the 

Norwegian Nobel Committee, this commission, and all the governments, organizations, and individuals around the world that have stood with Liu Xiaobo—and by 

standing with him, standing with all the citizens of China who share this most fundamental aspiration—and we ask everyone to redouble their efforts, so that by this 

time next year, he and his wife Liu Xia are free. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF CARL GERSHMAN

DECEMBER 6, 2011

I have been asked to address briefly three issues: The impact of China on global 

democratic trends, including the significance of its so-called ‘‘China model’’ of 

authoritarianism; the prospects for democratic reform in China, including the necessary preconditions for a democratic transition; and finally, the influence of the 

Nobel Peace Prize on Chinese society and official policy. 

Regarding China’s impact on global democratic trends, it is now common knowledge that China exerts an anti-democratic influence in world politics. Liu Xiaobo 

has said that China serves as ‘‘a blood transfusion machine’’ for smaller dictatorships in North Korea, Cuba and elsewhere. In addition to providing economic and 

political support to such regimes, it shares tactics bi-laterally with autocrats such 

as Lukashenko in Belarus, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Chavez in Venezuela; and it 

cooperates multilaterally with Russia and the Central Asian countries through the 

Shanghai Cooperation Organization. 

China also projects its system of authoritarian capitalism as an alternative model 

to the system of democracy with a mixed economy that exists in the United States, 

Europe, and many other countries around the world. There are some people in this 

country who are persuaded of this model’s effectiveness. Just last Thursday, the 

SEIU’s former President Andy Stern published an article in The Wall Street Journal 

entitled ‘‘China’s Superior Economic Model’’ that praised its system of central planning. 

But this model is flawed for three fundamental reasons. First, as Liu Xiaobo 

pointed out in 2006 in his essay ‘‘Changing the Regime by Changing Society,’’ two 

decades of reform have eroded, to one degree or another, each of the four pillars of 

China’s totalitarian system. Comprehensive nationalization is giving way to a system where independent economic activity ‘‘has given individuals the material base 

for autonomous choices.’’ The system of ‘‘all-pervasive organization’’ that eliminated 

all independent activity ‘‘is gone, never to return,’’ according to Liu, and the society 

is now ‘‘moving towards freedom of movement, mobility, and career choice.’’ The 

‘‘mental tyranny’’ of an imposed ideology has succumbed to the information revolution that has awakened individual consciousness and awareness of one’s rights. 

While the fourth pillar of political centralization and repression remains, people 

have lost the fear of repression, and the victims of persecution, far from being socially isolated and humiliated, now ‘‘inspire reverence’’ in the society and are able 

to put their accusers ‘‘into the moral position of defendants.’’ 

The second reason the model is flawed, according to Yu Jianrong, the well-known 

Chinese scholar and sociologist, is that it is characterized by ‘‘rigid stability’’ and 

‘‘dichotomized, black and white thinking’’ in which the ‘‘expression of people’s legitimate interests’’—land issues for peasants, wages for workers, homeowner rights for 

urban residents, minority rights for Tibetans or Uyghurs— becomes a threat to the 

social order and is adamantly opposed. A rigid system, according to Professor Yu, 

is by definition brittle and can break under stress. It lacks the resilience of democracy where government is accountable and conflicts can be resolved lawfully. Professor Yu fears that without such resilience, China will not be able to escape what 

he calls ‘‘the tragic fate of two millennia of the cycle of alternating chaos and order.’’ 

The third flaw is that the Chinese regime lacks political legitimacy. It has 

achieved a degree of performance-based legitimacy by using market reform to generate material wealth. But such legitimacy is inherently unstable since it is not immune to the business cycle, which is why Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking 

after the National People’s Congress in 2007, described the economy as ‘‘unstable, 

unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.’’ No wonder the recent spike in 

worker protests in Guangdong has caused such alarm in Beijing. Without the authority that derives from receiving popular consent, Andrew Nathan has written, 

the Chinese regime lives ‘‘under the shadow of the future, vulnerable to existential 

challenges that mature democracies do not face.’’ 

Regarding the preconditions and possibility for China’s democratic transition, the 

picture is mixed. The brightest area is media liberalization, with social media and 
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the Internet as a whole driving traditional media over the last five years. As Liu 

Xiaobo noted, this has spread democratic values, including rights awareness and the 

desire to hold government accountable. Even though those most active with social 

media only account for 40 percent of all Chinese Internet users and 14.2 percent 

of all Chinese, they are having an impact throughout the society, with even workers 

using cell phones and social networking platforms to organize informally, despite official restrictions. 

Less encouraging is the fact that civil-society organizations continue to be highly 

restricted. The immense Chinese countryside remains woefully underserved by civilsociety organizations. In addition, the divide between rich and poor is growing, and 

a large part of the population now sees China’s touted economic growth as being 

at their expense. Many have lost faith in rule of law as a result of recent government decisions to give more power and funding to the security apparatus and to bar 

independent candidates for district-level elections. 

Most democrats now look to the rights defense movement as a critical way to advance the possibility of a transition. With increasingly broad participation and a 

convergence between the middle class and the working class, this movement strives 

to bring the struggle of workers and farmers into the mainstream. It is pushing for 

concrete gains in rule of law, more distributive equity, better human rights protection, and more freedom of association and speech. 

However, the government has to date shown little interest in giving this movement the space it needs to foster the conditions for a gradual and peaceful transition. The concern of many Chinese activists is that increasing repression will delay 

a regime transition for so long that, when it does happen, which they think is inevitable, it will be accompanied by bloodshed and social turbulence. Thus, the probability of the regime surviving in its current form dwindles along with the possibility for a peaceful transition and democratic consolidation. 

Finally, regarding the influence of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think it deepened the 

Chinese government’s legitimacy crisis. For one thing, as The Economist noted at 

the time, Beijing’s ‘‘disastrous’’ response to the Prize betrayed for the whole world 

to see ‘‘the government’s insecurity at home.’’ And it didn’t help when the audience 

of thousands rose in repeated standing ovations as Liv Ullmann read ‘‘I Have No 

Enemies,’’ Liu’s final statement at his trial, with his empty chair of honor constituting a powerful indictment of the regime. 

With all its stirring symbolism, the Nobel ceremony represented the confirmation 

by the international community of the sentiments of a good part of Chinese society. 

As Liu himself said three years before the Nobel award, political persecution ‘‘has 

gradually turned into a vehicle for advancing the moral stature of its victims, garnering them the honors for being the ‘civic conscience’ or the ‘heroes of truth,’ while 

the government’s hired thugs have become the instruments that ‘do the dirty work’ ’’ 

Herein lies China’s hope. May its leaders begin to listen to such heroes before it 

is too late. 
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF HARRY WU

DECEMBER 6, 2011

It has been one year since Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and 

now, just as then, he is still in jail. In 1960 I too was put in China’s laogai prison 

camps because of my ideas, and I was there for 19 years. Fifty years later, China’s 
78 

regime has not changed how it handles dissenting opinions. I hope that today’s 

hearing will draw renewed attention to Liu’s case and remind the world what China 

does to those who dare to talk peacefully about democracy. 

Many people know that Liu was sentenced on charges of ‘‘inciting subversion,’’ but 

what crime did he really commit? Over the past few years, Liu has sent over 260 

articles to our Observe China website for publication, and has also written on countless other overseas websites. His verdict mentioned several ‘‘subversive’’ articles by 

name, including three articles published on the Observe China website, including: 

‘‘Can It Be That the Chinese People Deserve Only ’Party-led Democracy’?,’’ ‘‘The 

Many Aspects of CPC Dictatorship,’’ and ‘‘Changing the Regime by Changing the 

Society’’. Observe China is blocked by the ‘‘Great Firewall’’ and is inaccessible to 

most mainland Chinese Internet users. How does the CCP 

block controversial articles, while at the same time tracking their writers and 

readers? We have American technology companies to thank for this, and ultimately, 

for the arrest of great thinkers like Liu Xiaobo. 

Last year I was in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. Although 

many Chinese tried to attend the ceremony in support of Liu, they were blocked 

from leaving China by the government. Not even his wife, Liu Xia, was there to fill 

his empty chair. Even so, I was very happy that a Chinese dissident was finally 

awarded the prize. It is a sign that the world will not sit quietly while the CCP 

cracks down on freedom of speech. 

Many different people came to Oslo to honor Liu Xiaobo. When I opened up the 

program for the ceremony, I was surprised to see a message from John Chambers, 

CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc. He noted that Cisco has been a sponsor of the Nobel 

Peace Prize Concert since 1999 and that, ‘‘Cisco is working to help individuals, companies, and countries to use the Internet to collaborate, educate, empower, and further the ideals and innovations inspired by Alfred Nobel and his legacy.’’ I was 

shocked that Cisco could say this, when around the same time that the company 

began supporting the Nobel Peace Prize, it also began supporting China’s authoritarian regime through its massive ‘‘Golden Shield Project’’. I realized that Cisco 

shows a different face to the international community than it does to its clients. 

Through its decade-long partnership with the Chinese government, Cisco technology 

and training has ensured that Chinese activists like Liu Xiaobo are excluded from 

participating in this vision of what the Internet can and should be. 

Cisco claims to be a company dedicated to encouraging free speech and upholding 

a commitment to human rights. Yet in reality, Cisco is a company that will do business with any partner, so long as it turns a profit—even at the expense of other 

people’s rights and freedoms. One day when Liu Xiaobo is released, I am confident 

that he too will demand to know just how the Public Security officials were able 

to track him down and how the government is able to exert such control over both 

internet content and internet users. 

Unfortunately, Liu Xiaobo’s situation has not changed much since last year. Several months after the awards, his wife Liu Xia—who had previously been under 

house arrest—became unreachable. Prior to this, the Laogai Research Foundation 

had been able to maintain some contact with her in order to provide the couple with 

regular financial support from the Yahoo! Human Rights Fund. We have also sold 

nearly 2,000 copies of Liu Xiaobo’s Chinese publications: Civil Awakening—The 

Dawn of a Free China and Strive for Freedom—Selected Writings of Liu Xiaobo. 

Since February 2011, we have not been able to get either of these payments to 

them. Soon we will publish the English translation of Civil Awakening, so that Liu 

Xiaobo’s message of optimism, democracy, and peaceful dissent can reach the international community, even while he serves out his 11-year prison sentence. 

When I was in the laogai, political dissidents were treated just like all the other 

criminals, if not worse. We worked long hours and were often beaten or mistreated 

by prison guards. At night we had to attend political reeducation sessions and criticize each other for holding counterrevolutionary ideas. Over the last few decades, 

conditions inside the laogai are no longer as severe, but the fundamental principals 

that drive the prison system remain the same: prisoners are forced to labor and are 

forced undergo to political thought reform. 

By the 1990’s China realized that if it wanted to export its prison labor products 

internationally, it would have to conceal the origins of the products. Since 1994, 

China has stopped using the word ‘‘laogai,’’ and now refers to the camps as mere 

‘‘prisons’’. Yet today, Liu Xiaobo remains locked up in Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning 

province, also known as Jinzhou Jinkai Electrical Group or Jinzhou Xinsheng 

Switch Co. According to reports, it is the largest prison in Liaoning province, with 

the majority of prisoners having sentences of 10 years or more. The inmates produce 

a wide variety of electrical equipment including household products, circuits, machine components, transformers, and so on. As of 2008, two of its prison enterprises 
79 

were listed in Dun & Bradstreet, and today, Jinzhou Xinsheng Switch Co. continues 

to be listed on a number of English business directory websites. 

Despite the continued use of forced labor, China has grown increasingly concerned 

about its soft power and international image. Thus, the CCP has afforded more 

prominent political prisoners like Liu Xiaobo better treatment. This fall, he was 

even allowed to return home to mourn the death of his father, and was permitted 

a rare visit by close family. The CCP has learned to treat high-profile dissidents differently, fearing that any word of abuse would enrage the international community. 

Liu may not be forced to do hard labor, but what about those who are not in the 

media spotlight, those who are not lucky enough to escape forced labor? Must a man 

win the Nobel Prize to be treated with dignity and have his most basic rights respected? 

Today we still do not know what kind of persecution Liu and his wife are enduring, but one thing is for certain—it is undeserved. Liu said himself that, ‘‘it is time 

we move beyond a society where words are viewed as crimes.’’ But the Chinese Communist Party has a long 

history of abusing prisoners of conscience in order to minimize dissent and maximize what it views as ‘‘stability’’. In 2009, around the time of his most recent arrest, 

authorities had tried to convince Liu to leave China instead of stirring up trouble 

at home, but he refused. It is clear that Liu Xiaobo will not abandon his democratic 

ideals, nor will he give up voicing his opinions. Therefore, there is no telling if the 

Chinese government will reduce his sentence. So until that day comes, it is critical 

that the U.S. government and international human rights advocates speak out on 

his behalf, telling the Chinese Communist Party that he is not forgotten and that 

his vision of a better future will not quietly fade away. We should not talk about 

‘‘political reform’’ in China, because to the CCP, ‘‘political reform’’ means finding a 

way to keep itself in power even as its people demand more freedoms. True change 

in can only happen in China if and when the CCP falls. The Chinese people will 

not tolerate the Communist Party’s repression forever. 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF REGGIE LITTLEJOHN

DECEMBER 6, 2011

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Commission: 

Thank you for holding this timely hearing about conditions of political prisoners 

in China. It is a truly humbling opportunity to testify about one of the most courageous individuals, not only in China, but also in the world: blind, self-taught lawyer, 

Chen Guangcheng. I begin by commending the Chairman, Congressman Chris 

Smith, for his recent attempt to go to China to visit Chen. Mr. Chairman, your tireless efforts to raise the visibility of Chen’s case are having an impact. 

Chen Guangcheng was arrested in 2006 for helping to expose the Chinese government’s use of forced abortion and involuntary sterilization to enforce its ‘‘One Child 

Policy.’’ He amassed evidence that forced abortions and involuntary sterilizations 

were used extensively on women in Linyi City, Shandong Province in 2005. Time 

Magazine named him one of ‘‘2006’s Top 100 People Who Shape Our World’’ and 

he was given the 2007 Magsaysay award, known as Asia’s Nobel Prize. 

Simultaneous with this testimony, I am submitting a report from Chen 

Guangcheng’s 2005 investigation into coercive family planning in Linyi County, 

Shandong Province. A member of Chen’s team, human rights attorney Teng Biao, 

drafted the report. This report contains extensive witness statements from cases 

Chen and his team were investigating before Chen was jailed. In this report are detailed accounts regarding: 

• A woman forcibly aborted and sterilized at seven months; 

• Villagers sleeping in fields to evade Family Planning Officials; 

• Family Planning Officials who broke three brooms over the head of an elderly 

man; 

• Family Planning Officials who forced a grandmother and her brother to beat 

each other; and 

• The use of quota systems and the practice of ‘‘implication’’ – the detention, 

fining and torture of the extended family of One Child Policy ‘‘violators.’’ 

The Chen Guangcheng report makes clear: the spirit of the Cultural Revolution 

lives on in China’s Family Planning death machine. WRWF has chosen to release 

the names of the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity, so that they can 

be held accountable before the world. 
80 

Things may not have improved in Linyi since 2005. Earlier this year, Family 

Planning Officials stabbed a man to death.1 A woman, six months pregnant, recently died during a forced abortion in Lijing County, also in Shandong Province.2

For exposing and opposing coercive family planning in China, Chen spent four 

years, three months in prison. His defense lawyers were detained on the eve of trial. 

Since his September 2010 release, he has continued to serve a sentence of home detention. Both in prison and under house arrest, Chen has experienced mistreatment 

and beatings. He suffers from a chronic, debilitating intestinal illness for which he 

has not been allowed treatment. 

According to a February, 2011 video, which Chen and his supporters managed to 

smuggle out of China, sixty-six security police surround his home constantly. He 

and his wife are not allowed sufficient food and are isolated from all outside contact. 

No one can enter or leave their home, except officials, who can enter at any time, 

without notice. 

We received evidence that blind activist Chen Guangcheng’s health was in serious 

jeopardy because of repeated beatings and the malnutrition he suffers in house detention. According to a June 15, 2011 letter written by Chen’s wife, and smuggled 

out of China, Chen has faced constant physical and psychological abuse, does not 

get sufficient food or nourishment, and is denied proper medical treatment. Foreign 

journalists have been forcibly denied access to him, and lawyers who tried to help 

Chen were beaten and detained in February 2011, including Jiang Tianyong and 

Teng Biao, who were detained for two months or more.3

In September and October 2011, human rights campaigners and visitors seeking 

to see Chen were beaten and detained.4 Also in September, police detained Chen’s 

brother, who was meeting with activists.5

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and the China Aid Association are spearheading an international effort to free Chen Guangcheng. Thus far, we have collected 6463 signatures from 28 countries.6

WRWF congratulates Rep. Chris Smith on his successful sponsorship last July of 

an amendment to the State Department Appropriation Bill, in support of Chen 

Guangcheng and his family. This amendment, which passed unanimously, urges the 

Chinese government to stop harassing the Chen family, to release them from house 

arrest, and to arrange for immediate medical treatment. It further urges the Obama 

administration to arrange diplomatic visits to the Chen family. Beyond this, it highlights the tragedy of forced abortion and coercive family planning in China.7

In early October, we received an unconfirmed report through Voice of America 

that villagers had said that Chen had died. All efforts to confirm that report failed, 

as it was impossible to gain access to Dongshigu Village in Linyi to verify it. 

Relativity Media, however, was able to gain access to Linyi, in order to film the 

feature-length comedy, ‘‘21 and Over.’’ When challenged on its choice of Linyi out 

of the thousands of possible locations in China, and urged to apologize for its lack 

of sensitivity to Chen Guangcheng and human rights, Relativity Media issued a 

statement defending its action. Women’s Rights Without Frontiers has called for a 

international boycott of ‘‘21 and Over.’’ 

November 12, 2011 was Chen’s 40th birthday. Although no one knew for sure 

whether Chen was dead or alive, brave citizens from many areas of China attempted to visit Chen’s village to wish him a happy birthday. All of them were 

turned back from the village, some violently, by thugs and plain-clothes police. 

Finally, just this weekend, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers received a credible 

report that Chen is indeed alive. In fact, according to a key activist in China, the 

conditions of Chen’s detention have improved slightly. 

According to this source, who requested anonymity, ‘‘Now his mother is allowed 

to go outside to buy food although escorted by three guards, and his health also is 

getting better.’’ 

The source attributed the improved treatment of Chen to the fact that ‘‘Chen’s situation was exposed and got huge public attention.’’ One campaign that brought considerable visibility to Chen’s plight was the flow of concerned citizens attempting 

to visit him, leading up to his 40th birthday on November 12. 

In addition, the Chen Sunglasses Campaigns inside and outside of China have 

raised the visibility of his case. These campaigns post photos of people wearing sunglasses in support of Chen. The source stated, ‘‘I think it’s very helpful for people 

all over the world to show they care about Chen through the Sunglasses Campaigns. 

I think it’s very important to show support inside and outside the country – we can 

work together.’’ 8

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is collaborating with the Dark Glasses Portrait 

Campaign headed by a courageous Chinese political satirist and cartoonist, whose 

pen name is Crazy Crab. 
81 

The source continued, ‘‘Chen’s situation has indeed improved. I have just sent him 

some medicine and covered the expenses for his family in the market . . . Some relatives can visit his mother and deliver some items under surveillance.’’ 

The source cautioned, however, that the slightly improved condition of Chen’s 

house arrest is not a reason to relax the campaign to free him. Most relatives of 

Chen and his wife are not allowed to visit, including their son and his wife’s parents. We do not know what his medical condition is. Moreover, the source indicated, 

the fact that Chen is now allowed food and medicine ‘‘is still far away from our basic 

request, that is, Chen should be freed right away, according to China’s own law.’’ 

According to the source, the persecution of Chen supporters continues. An activist 

who announced that she would wear sunglasses in Linyi’s central square this past 

weekend was detained on December 1. That same day, another activist from Yantai 

and a writer from Beijing, were arrested in Shandong attempting to distribute plastic bags and balloons bearing Chen’s image, in honor of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, celebrated December 3. 

Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is thrilled and relieved to receive a credible 

report that Chen is alive and his health is improving. This improved treatment 

demonstrates the power of the collaborative effort inside and outside China to raise 

the visibility of his case. We greatly admire the brave citizens inside China, who 

are risking their safety to stand up for Chen. 

We commend the courageous and persistent efforts of Rep. Chris Smith to visit 

Chen and urge the Chinese government to grant him a visa. We also urge U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, to visit Chen directly. We demand the immediate, 

unqualified release of Chen Guangcheng and his family. Chen’s ongoing house arrest is illegal and his medical condition remains weak. 

The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to silence Chen, but they cannot 

silence the voices of millions in China crying for his freedom. The report that Chen 

is alive and in improved condition should not be a reason to relax efforts on his behalf. To the contrary, these efforts are having an impact and should intensify until 

Chen is free. 

RECOMMENDATIONS

• The international community should make official interventions on behalf of 

Chen with the Chinese government and raise Chen’s case in bilateral discussion 

and multilateral institutions in which China is a member. 

• Diplomats from the U.S., E.U., Norway, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and 

other countries with human rights dialogues with China – including U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke—should seek access to Chen and his wife Yuan 

Wejing and press the Chinese government to stop its mistreatment of Chen, 

allow for proper medical attention and arrange for his immediate and unconditional release. 

• Organizations and individuals concerned with human rights, women’s rights, 

and religious freedom should call and write Chinese embassies and consulates 

around the world and sign the petition to Free Chen Guangcheng at: 

www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/ 

index.php?nav=chenguangcheng#petition 

lllllllllll 

1 1Ahttp://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/?p=147 

2 1Ahttp://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/?p=429 

3 1AA copy of the original letter in Mandarin can be obtained by emailing ChinaAid at 

bobfu@chinaaid.org or by calling 267.205.5210. An English translation can be found here: http:// 

www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=yuan-weijing 

Here is a three minute video calling for urgent action: Free Chen Guangcheng! http:// 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpVJidDqVJo 4 1A‘‘Chen Supporters Attacked,’’ 9/19/11 http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/attacked09192011123000.html; HRIC Testimony at CECC Hearing on Chen Guangcheng, 11/1/11 http:// 

www.hrichina.org/content/5611 5 1A‘‘Police Detain Nanjing Activists,’’ 9/8/11 http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/activists09082011152203.html?searchterm=None 6 1AThe petition to free Chen Guangcheng can be found here: http:// 

www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=sign—our—petition 7 1A‘‘Amendment for Blind Activist Chen Guangcheng Passes Today,’’ 7/22/11 http:// 

www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/?p=316 8 1AThese campaigns, spearheaded by Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and Dark Glasses 

Portrait, can be found at http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/index.php?nav=chenguangcheng and http://ichenguangcheng.blogspot.com/. 
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF BOB FU

DECEMBER 6, 2011

Esteemed members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, government officials and guests, 

The fact that human rights, the rule of law and religious freedom in China have 

all seriously deteriorated in 2011 is already well known to all. Therefore, this hearing on the anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo is 

highly significant. 

Based on incomplete statistics, we know that about 100 lawyers, rights activists 

and dissidents have been ‘‘disappeared,’’ tortured, imprisoned and even sentenced to 

prison terms in the first 11 months of this year. From February to July, more than 

1,000 rights activists and dissidents across the country were ‘‘invited to drink tea 

and chat’’ with or were threatened by police or Domestic Security Protection agents. 

They included: eight lawyers appearing in a court in Heilongjiang province who 

were beaten up by police—one was a woman lawyer who was so badly beaten that 

she miscarried; human rights lawyers Gao Zhisheng, Fan Yafeng, Cheng 

Guangcheng, Teng Biao, Jiang Tianyong, Tang Jitian, Ms. Li Tiantian, Li Fangping, 

Li Xiongbing, Li Subin and Tang Jingling; and other activists, artists and writers, 

such as Ai Weiwei, Yu Jie, Ran Yunfei, Ding Mao, Wang Lihong, Zhu Yufu, Zhang 

Yongpan, Zhang Dajun, Ye Du and others . 

Although most of the freedom of religion measures that ‘‘Charter 08’’ calls for are 

guaranteed in Article 36 of China’s own Constitution, in practice and in reality, implementation falls far short. Broad discrimination against and persecution of independent religious groups and people of faith have been increasing in the past 12 

months. Just last week, we received reports that at least 11 Uyghur Muslims were 

detained and four were placed under criminal detention. What crime did they commit? They were accused of ‘‘engaging in illegal religious activities’’ because they 

were reading the Koran in their own homes. Since April 10 this year, members of 

Beijing Shouwang Church have experienced weekly detention, harassment and 

abuse for 35 weeks in a row. The entire church leadership has been under house 

arrest, without freedom of movement, the entire time. Many believers have lost 

their jobs and been evicted from their rented apartments. Why? Again, it is because 

they have been accused of ‘‘engaging in illegal religious activities’’ – in their case, 

by worshipping in a public space. Never mind that they were forced to worship in 

an outdoor public area because the government forced the church out of its rented 

worship place and made it impossible for it to move into its own purchased facility. 

Ever since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the Chinese Communist Party has acted as though mafia groups can be tolerated but not independent religious believers. The treatment of house church Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists has been 

far worse than other so-called ‘‘unstable social elements.’’ Torture and brainwashing 

with drugs have been used to achieve what the authorities call ‘‘transferring the 

mindset’’ of these believers. 

As we all know, Liu Xiaobo’s ‘‘Charter 08’’ calls for many freedoms, of which freedom of religion is only one. However, we at ChinaAid firmly believe that freedom 

of religion is the first freedom, and that it cannot be separated from the other freedoms that Charter 08 calls for: 

‘‘9. Freedom to Form Groups. The right of citizens to form groups must be guaranteed. The current system for registering nongovernmental groups, which requires a 

group to be ‘‘approved,’’ should be replaced by a system in which a group simply registers itself. The formation of political parties should be governed by the constitution 

and the laws, which means that we must abolish the special privilege of one party 

to monopolize power and must guarantee principles of free and fair competition 

among political parties. 

10. Freedom to Assemble. The constitution provides that peaceful assembly, demonstration, protest, and freedom of expression are fundamental rights of a citizen. 

The ruling party and the government must not be permitted to subject these to illegal 

interference or unconstitutional obstruction. 

11. Freedom of Expression. We should make freedom of speech, freedom of the 

press, and academic freedom universal, thereby guaranteeing that citizens can be informed and can exercise their right of political supervision. These freedoms should 

be upheld by a Press Law that abolishes political restrictions on the press. The provision in the current Criminal Law that refers to ‘‘the crime of incitement to subvert 

state power’’ must be abolished. We should end the practice of viewing words as 

crimes. 
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12. Freedom of Religion. We must guarantee freedom of religion and belief, and 

institute a separation of religion and state. There must be no governmental interference in peaceful religious activities. We should abolish any laws, regulations, or 

local rules that limit or suppress the religious freedom. 

The persecution that ChinaAid has documented in the first 11 months of 2011 occurred in 11 provinces, one municipality under direct central government jurisdiction and three autonomous regions – that is, in nearly half of China’s regions and 

cities. Nearly 30 house churches were persecuted, affecting more than 1,500 believers. The number of Christians arrested or detained exceeds 300. If we take into account the number of people from Shouwang Church who were detained by police in 

the 35 times the congregation has met for outdoor Sunday worship services, the 

number would be as high as 1,000. Dr. Fan Yafeng, the prominent Christian constitutional law scholar and pioneer in China’s legal rights defense movement has 

been under house arrest December 2010, with all forms of communication with him 

severed; Shouwang Church pastor Jin Tianming and other church leaders have been 

held under house arrest for eight months; the Chinese House Church Alliance is 

under attack, with its vice president, Pastor Shi Enhao, being sentenced in July to 

two years of re-education-through labor; in Xinjiang, in China’s far west, Uyghur 

house church leader Alimujiang is serving a 15-year sentence; while in Beijing, the 

chief representative of a video and film company, Ms. Jiang Yaxi, was criminally 

detained on November 11 for distributing a government-approved Christian documentary. These are but a few of the cases ChinaAid has documented. 

What we have seen in 2011 has been the continuation and escalation of the Chinese government’s comprehensive suppression of independent religious groups and 

dissident groups since the September 2010 Lausanne Congress on World 

Evangelization and the awarding in October of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. 

The Hu Jintao government has since the 2008 Olympic Games reinstated some of 

the Communist Party’s most extreme political ideologies, resulting in a serious and 

overall deterioration in human rights, the rule of law and religious freedom in 

China. 

The October 29 adoption of an amendment to the Resident Identity Card Law provides additional legal basis for this deterioration. The Resident Identity Card Law 

was amended to say, ‘‘When citizens apply for, change or register their ID cards, 

they should be fingerprinted.’’ This measure broadens the scope of the police’s ability to investigate and expose citizens’ private affairs. Furthermore, the amendments 

to Articles 38 and 39 of the Criminal Procedure Law say that, in the case of ‘‘crimes 

that endanger national security and terror crimes,’’ subpoenas can be indefinitely 

extended and notification of family and relatives of an arrest or house arrest can 

be indefinitely delayed. This provides sufficient legal grounds for secret detentions 

and imprisonments. 

The examples mentioned heretofore are just the tip of the iceberg. The persecution 

and suffering that the Chinese people have endured is impossible to measure in 

mere numbers. This year, even the families of those who work for ChinaAid have 

been harassed and threatened in China by the police on many occasions. 

On the one-year anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu 

Xiaobo, Liu is still serving time in prison for the very act for which he was awarded 

the Prize. Meanwhile, his wife, Liu Xia, is still under house arrest. This embarrassing fact not only is China’s sorrow, it is also evidence of the failure of the power 

of world justice. The failure of international efforts to bring about justice is not necessarily because Communist China today is stronger and more powerful than Germany and Japan were during World War II or the Soviet Union was during the Cold 

War. Rather, it is because the international community –in particular the Western 

world—is no longer staunchly guarding and holding fast to the concepts of freedom, 

justice and human rights that it once did. The result is fear when noble sacrifice 

is necessary and retreat when a price must be paid. Added to which is the lure of 

money and personal interests. All of these factors corrupt the spirit and dissipate 

courage, spreading ever wider just like the current economic crisis. 

In America, this great and free country, we have before us the shining examples 

of many great heroes: General George Washington, and, sitting on the other end of 

the Mall as though watching us, is President Lincoln; and there’s also black civil 

rights leader Martin Luther King as well as President Reagan, who faced up to the 

Soviet empire and never gave an inch nor ever considered doing so. The indomitable 

spirit and the commitment to freedom and human rights that they and many others 

who went before us held firm are like a bright torch shining throughout America’s 

history. 

Happily, in the generally disturbing circumstances of 2011, the sudden release in 

Sichuan province of Mr. Ding Mao was an encouraging development and the news 

spread quickly, giving hope to those of us who have become a bit weary in our fight 
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for freedom and human rights in China. Many of you sitting here today perhaps remember seeing Mr. Ding’s petite but strong wife, who came to the United States, 

a country she’d never been to before, to plea in Congress and in the Executive Building and to the media for the release of her innocent husband. This brave Chinese 

woman represents the thousands and tens of thousands of wives in China who 

refuse to bend to the power of an evil government, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder 

with their husbands, defending their families without hesitation—-ever willing to 

make huge sacrifices for the sake of a future China where there is equality, freedom 

and human rights. 

So, let us bravely stand with them, just as you and the consular officers in 

Sichuan stood with Ms. Feng Xia, and in so doing won the quick release of her husband. 

The Lord is with us! May we draw encouragement from the words of Hebrews 10: 

35–36: 

‘‘So do not throw away your confidence; it will be richly rewarded. You need 

to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive 

what he has promised.’’ 

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE

FROM NEW JERSEY, CHAIRMAN, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2011

EXCERPTS FROM HEARING STATEMENT

One year after the independent Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 

to Liu Xiaobo, who is a Chinese intellectual and democracy advocate, Liu remains 

isolated in a prison thousands of miles away from his wife, whom authorities are 

holding under house arrest in Beijing. 

In February 2010, I led a bi-partisan group of lawmakers in nominating Liu for 

the prize – at the same time nominating two other persecuted human rights advocates, Chen Guangcheng and Gao Zhisheng, to be joint recipients – as part of an 

international tide of support for the awarding of the prize to Liu Xiaobo. 

The Nobel Committee awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo ‘‘for his 

long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.’’ H.Res. 1717, 

which I authored, congratulating Liu on the awarding of the prize passed the House 

with a vote of 402–1—exactly one year ago this week. 

Chinese authorities, on the other hand, tried Liu and sentenced him to 11 years 

in prison for ‘‘inciting subversion of state power,’’ the longest known sentence for 

that crime, simply for exercising his internationally-recognized right to free expression. According to Chinese authorities, Liu’s conviction was based on Charter 08 and 

six essays he wrote. 

Liu Xiaobo signed Charter 08, which is a treatise urging political and legal reforms in China based on constitutional principles. Charter 08 states that freedom, 

equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy 

and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these 

values.’’ 

Characteristic of the Chinese government, officials blocked access to Charter 08. 

They have questioned, summoned, or otherwise harassed a large number of Chinese 

citizens for contributing to or signing that document. 

CHINESE OFFICIALS ANGRY OVER AWARDING OF PRIZE TO LIU

Chinese officials apparently remain livid over the awarding of the prize to Liu, 

and they continue in their campaign to malign Liu and the Nobel Committee. In 

addition, they have nearly suspended political relations with the Norwegian government, claiming the awarding of the Peace Prize to Liu had done ‘‘great damage’’ to 

the relations between China and Norway. They blame the Norwegian government 

because it ‘‘supported this wrong decision.’’ 

LIU’S LEGAL CASE

The apparent violations of Chinese legal protections for defendants that have 

marred Mr. Liu’s case from the outset are numerous and well-documented. In addition, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that 

the Chinese government’s detention of Liu and the house arrest of his wife are indeed arbitrary. 
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Mr. Liu’s trial and sentence demonstrates once again the Chinese government’s 

failure to uphold its international human rights obligations and also its failure to 

abide by procedural norms and safeguards that meet international standards. 

While authorities did allow Liu to attend his father’s funeral memorial service in 

October, they continue to limit visits from his wife. Over the past year, authorities 

have allowed her to visit her husband only on a few occasions. 

Beijing authorities are holding Liu’s wife in a de facto form of house arrest. They 

have cut off telephone and internet, and have made her house off-limits to visitors. 

LIU XIAOBO IS NOT ALONE: CHEN GUANGCHENG

As we all know, sadly, Liu Xiaobo is not alone. As of September 1, 2011, the 

CECC’s political prisoner database, perhaps the greatest database in the world, contained information on 1,451 cases of known political or religious prisoners currently 

detained. 

Chen Guangcheng is one of these prisoners. Chen is a blind, self-taught legal advocate, who advocated on behalf of farmers, the disabled, and women forced to undergo abortions. Authorities have held him under a form of house arrest in Linyi 

county, Shandong province since his release from prison in September 2011. In effect, Chen’s prison sentence has not ended. 

Chen served over four years in prison on charges of ‘‘intentional destruction of 

property’’ and ‘‘organizing a group of people to disturb traffic.’’ His real crime, however, was publicizing the abuses of local one child policy officials and trying to use 

the Chinese legal system to seek justice for the victims of those abuses. 

For months, officials have confined Chen and his wife in their home, beaten them, 

and subjected them to 24hour surveillance. Officials have set up checkpoints around 

the village where Chen lives to prevent journalists and ordinary citizens from visiting him and his family. According to one report, 37 people who tried to enter the 

village in October were attacked by 100 thugs. 

Under great pressure, authorities recently allowed Chen’s elderly mother to go out 

and buy groceries and other supplies, have allowed his six-year-old daughter to go 

to school flanked by security, and have allowed Chen some medicine sent by supporters, although they have not allowed him to see a doctor about his egregious 

health problems. 

These small concessions mean little in the larger picture. Publicly available laws 

do not seem to provide any the legal basis for holding Chen and his family as prisoners in their own home. I would note parenthetically that as Chairman of this 

Commission, I and members and staff of this Commission tried to meet with Chen 

on his 40th birthday. We were denied a visa. We will try in an ongoing attempt to 

obtain a visa to visit China on a number of human rights issues, including Chen 

Guangcheng. 

GAO ZHISHENG

And now there is the case of Gao Zhisheng. Authorities’ treatment of the once acclaimed lawyer, Gao Zhisheng is even more shocking and illustrates the brutality 

of some officials. Officials revoked Mr. Gao’s law license in 2005 in response to his 

brave efforts to represent fellow Christians accused of ‘‘illegally’’ distributing Bibles, 

and to defend workers and Falun Gong practitioners. In 2006, officials sentenced 

Gao to three years in prison on the charge of ‘‘inciting subversion,’’ but suspended 

the charge for five years. 

The five-year suspended sentence is set to expire later this month. Today, however, there is no word about Mr. Gao’s whereabouts. 

After Mr. Gao wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress in 2007 criticizing China’s human rights record, officials brutally tortured him for 50 days, beating him 

electric prods, abused him with toothpicks and threatened to kill him if he told anyone of his treatment. 

Mr. Gao disappeared into official custody in February 2009. When he resurfaced 

briefly in March 2010, he told friends that he would ‘‘disappear again’’ if his statements about his treatment by his captors since 2009 were made public. After authorities disappeared him again, the press went public about his torture, which included a beating with guns in holsters for a period of over two days, which reportedly made him feel close to death. 

HUMAN RIGHTS AND POLITICAL REFORM

It does not seem appropriate to talk about political reforms in China when there 

has been so little progress in improving civil and political rights and when authorities continue to mistreat people like Liu, Chen, and Gao. The political prisoners for 
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whom we have names are just the tip of the iceberg. No one knows how many other 

citizens in China are persecuted for their religious or political beliefs. 

In mid-February 2011, Chinese authorities launched a broad crackdown against 

rights defenders, reform advocates, lawyers, petitioners, writers, artists, and Internet bloggers. International observers have described the crackdown as one of the 

harshest crackdowns on human rights advocates in years, if not decades. While authorities have released many of those people they first detained in February, the 

rapidity and severity of the crackdown indicates Chinese authorities remain intolerant of freedom of speech and religion and a whole of other fundamental freedoms 

and rights. 

Perhaps the drafters of Charter 08 have it right. The Charter notes that China’s 

policy of ‘‘reform and opening’’ has increased living standards and economic freedoms in China but states that the ‘‘ruling elite . . . fights off any move toward political change.’’ 
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