Prisoner of the State

Imprisoned democracy activist Yang Hengjun faces ‘justice’ the Chinese way.

A Chinese honour guard prepares to welcome Abu Dhabi’s visiting crown prince in Beijing early this week. Picture: AP

The arrest and imprisonment of Australian citizen and democracy activist Yang Hengjun by the Chinese authorities should surprise no one. After six months in prison without charges or access to lawyers, he is now charged with endangering state security.

This, too, should surprise no one. This is what the regime in China does, again and again. It isn’t an aberration and it’s time to make clear that the problem lies with the Communist Party, not with Yang and not with Australia’s behaviour in the matter.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne, the Law Council of Australia and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance have all called for Yang’s release and expressed concern at his treatment. The authorities in Beijing have responded by calling for Canberra to stop interfering in the matter — as if interventions on behalf of one of our own citizens was their affair alone and not a proper concern of this country.

Supporting Payne’s statement that Yang is being detained because of his political opinions and should be released forthwith, the Law Council stated a week ago: “Dr Yang does not appear to have the benefit of any of the traditional safeguards expected of an independent criminal justice system and the rule of law.”

But of course no such rule of law exists in China. This is a problem of long standing and deeply entrenched in the communist approach to government. To state that Yang “does not appear to have the benefit”, and so on, is exceedingly polite. Put bluntly, no one has such benefits in China, nor have they ever had since the Communist Party seized power in 1949.

Repeating the past

While the Australian government or the Law Council do well to couch their concerns in polite language, we citizens of Australia, not least those of Chinese extraction, need to register that what is happening has happened again and again and again. This is why Chinese activists, whether in China or in the diaspora, have been calling for political reform, an independent judiciary, a free press and the legitimisation of political opposition in China for decades.

Yang is 53. That means he was born as the Cultural Revolution began in China (in 1965) and was in his early teens in 1979, when Deng Xiaoping crushed the Democracy Wall Movement and shut down the independent journals April Fifth Forum and Exploration. He was only 22 when liberal reformer Hu Yaobang was sacked as general secretary of the Communist Party by Deng in 1987. He was only 24 in June 1989, when Deng and the party hardliners used military force to crush democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds of them.

The students had entered Tiananmen Square after the death of Hu on April 15, 1989, and they called for the revival and extension of his relatively liberal reform agenda.

Deng and his conservative old guard feared giving ground and declared martial law. Hu’s successor, Zhao Ziyang, opposed the use of force against the students and was sacked as general secretary for doing so. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. His memoir, Prisoner of the State, was smuggled out of China and published in New York, London, Toronto and Sydney in 2009 by Simon & Schuster.

Many of Hu’s circle, many of Zhao’s close advisers and many students who were able to escape the repression fled China after Tiananmen and have lived in exile since — a significant number of them in this country. This is the inheritance of Yang, who wrote a PhD in Sydney in 2009 on the internet and democratic dissent in China.

Yang Hengjun with a family member in 2017. Picture: Yang Family/AP

This same background is why Liu Xiaobo and others drafted and circulated a manifesto in 2008 calling yet again for political reform and accountability in China. It was called Charter 08, echoing the famous Charter 77 put together by political and human rights reformers in Czechoslovakia in 1977. The party arrested Liu in 2009 and accused him of undermining state security. He was sentenced to a long term in prison and died as a consequence in 2017.

When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his stance, the party denounced the award as “an obscenity”.

No one should be under the illusion that Yang’s “crime” is any more heinous than Liu’s. The difference is that Yang is an Australian citizen — who was crazy brave, really, to put himself at risk by visiting the party’s turf last January. His treatment demonstrates, not for the first time, that you are unsafe if you do that, particularly if you are of Chinese ethnicity — and never mind your foreign citizenship.

Calls for democratic government in China are older than the Communist Party. One hundred years ago this year, in the famous May 4th Movement, students demonstrated in Tiananmen Square and called for “science and democracy” in China. Yang stands in that tradition. The Communist Party claims to do so, but it ruthlessly suppresses anything resembling democratic dissent or political opposition.

The issues that are at stake here, apart from the challenging diplomatic ones for Australia’s engagement with China, are entirely about legal process and the quest by Chinese citizens and the ­Chinese diaspora for democratic reform in China. Those issues were openly tabled and widely debated inside and outside the Communist Party between the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the crushing of the student movement in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

Merle Goldman’s still hopeful book Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Harvard, 1994) remains a deeply informative account of those debates. But Xi Jinping is uprooting those seeds, or those that still remain in the ground after 30 years of repression since Tiananmen.

Deng perhaps equivocated throughout the late 1970s and the 80s. Xi is unequivocal: there is no prospect of democratisation in his China. That and that alone are what have landed Yang in prison.

Closed trial if any

The best case study in all this remains the arrest, trial and prolonged imprisonment of Wei Jingsheng after his leading role in the 1978-79 Democracy Wall Movement. In all probability, if Yang goes to trial, it will be a closed trial. The verdict will have been decided in advance. There will not be a right of appeal.

This is the way “justice” is done in Xi’s China — as Australian citizen Matthew Ng found in 2010, when his business was stolen from him by corrupt Chinese officials and he was imprisoned on patently false charges.

The beauty of Wei’s trial in 1979 is not that any recognisable due process or justice was done but that we have records of it that throw into high relief how accusations of undermining state security and releasing state secrets were handled 40 years ago and are still handled in China now.

Wei was arrested, charged, tried and imprisoned for no other reason than that he challenged the arbitrary rule of the Communist Party and called for political reforms of a serious kind.

He had written a manifesto called The Fifth Modernization: Democracy. He was blunt in denouncing the Communist Party’s ideology as a fraud. He then wrote a defiant follow-on, Do We Want Democracy or a New Autocracy? and was arrested four days later. His arrest was personally ordered by Deng, who also decided in advance what the verdict and the conditions of imprisonment would be. This was 10 years before the crushing of the student movement in Tiananmen Square.

Wei spent 14 years of a 15-year sentence in political prison, under brutal conditions of isolation and malnourishment. His health deteriorated steeply. But he did not break. He became, instead, living proof of the party’s bad faith regarding political liberalisation or the rule of law. He was 29 when put on trial. He was 43 when briefly released; then he was rearrested for holding a press conference. After prolonged lobbying on his behalf, he was finally expelled from China in 1997 and has lived in the West ever since.

When he was brought before the Beijing Municipal People’s Procuratorate on October 16, 1979, Wei quoted the Chinese constitution to the court. He had been doing nothing, he pointed out, other than exercising rights guaranteed to citizens of the People’s Republic of China under Article 45 of its constitution, which stipulated: “Citizens enjoy freedom of speech, correspondence, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration and … have the right to speak out freely, air their views fully, hold great debates and write big character posters.”

The court declared he had written “reactionary” and “counter-revolutionary” things; to which he responded with stirring courage that such charges required that one clarify the meaning of such terms as reactionary and counter-revolutionary. The consequence, he said, of many years of propaganda and dictatorship in China was that the claim could be made that being “revolutionary” simply meant doing things in exact accordance with the demands of the ruling party. “I cannot agree,” he stated openly, “with such a vulgar debasement of the concept of revolution.” He was accused of having “slandered Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought” by describing it as quackery. To this he responded that such a description was nothing but the simplest truth, since without exception Marxist-Leninist regimes everywhere deteriorated into fascist regimes, in which a small faction imposed an autocracy over the large mass of working people. One wonders whether this wonderfully spirited candour will even be allowed to be voiced in court if and when Yang goes to trial. Heaven forbid that a prisoner, even be he the citizen of another country, be permitted to exercise freedom of speech in his own defence under Chinese law.

Wei was accused in 1979 of having “flaunted the banner of so-called free speech”, to which he responded: “Allow me to point out that there is nothing whatsoever ‘so-called’ about free speech. On the contrary, it is stipulated by the constitution as a right to be enjoyed by all citizens.”

Suppression reigns

Hold this up in the face of Xi. Forty years later and still we are expected to accept the blatant and unaccountable suppression of any such freedom by the regime ensconced in Zhongnanhai, the palatial and secretive compound of the party elite.

Wei was accused of “conspiracy to overthrow the government”, which is similar to what Yang appears to be accused of now. He responded that the charge was “demonstrably false, since I have done nothing conspiratorial and nothing violent, but have simply argued publicly and peacefully for the democratic reform of the political system. I have criticised political leaders, but this is the sovereign right of citizens, with which no ­individual or government organisation has a right to interfere.”

On the contrary, he argued, such criticism is necessary to hold political leaders accountable and they must be held accountable, since only then can ordinary people breathe freely. The stark choice facing China, he declared, was between a blind faith in the arbitrary leadership of the ruling faction, as imposed by the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution, or a democratic reform of the socialist system based on free criticism and open discussion, uninhibited by the preferences or power of office-holders and party apparatchiks.

These are the precise things at stake in the detention and pending trial of Yang. The fifth modernisation is needed more now than ever. The party refuses to allow it. It has set its face against it for decades, despite Deng’s rhetoric about replacing “the rule of man with the rule of law”. It’s time that changed.

The treatment of Yang, hero of dissent and 21st-century democratic discourse, with an Australian PhD, is a test case and we should all see it as such and make a big issue about it. For a great deal is at stake in the matter, not only in China but for Australia and the liberal international order.

Paul Monk was head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation in 1994-95. He is the author of 10 books, including Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).