Democracy2008.net

First published on May 1st, 2006

 

April 2006. Chinese President Hu Jintao makes a visit to U.S. President George W. Bush, his first official trip to the United States.
On Thursday 20^th, when Hu Jintao gives a speech in front of the White House, a woman who had obtained a temporary White House pass shouts to him to stop the persecution of the Falun Gong group. Bush later apologized. The day after, Hu Jintao visits Yale University. He answers some selected questions, submitted in advance in writing. When a CNN reporter shouts a question asking if Hu Jintao has seen the protesters, gathered on the city green, he is thrown out. We can probably safely assume that Yale representatives also later apologized. While these reactions may perhaps be expected, they serve as an excellent illustration of the approach often taken by Western leaders, towards the Chinese leadership: “Sorry that you were bothered by this human rights issues. We can’t really help it, you know. Now, let’s talk business.”

China is the world’s largest dictatorship. Only one political party is allowed and the people cannot choose their leaders. Freedom of speech and press is severely restricted, books are banned and the Internet is censored, so that people cannot access pages containing “wrong” information. Workers are forbidden from forming free unions, and religious believers are also not allowed to organize. People expressing the wrong opinions can be imprisoned, and even tortured.

The economic and military power of China is constantly increasing. In 1949, China invaded the independent nation Tibet, which it still occupies. A brutal campaign to replace the ancient Tibetan culture with Chinese culture followed. 1.2 million Tibetans, one-fifth of the country's population, died as a result of China's policies; many more languished in prisons and labor camps. More than 6000 monasteries, temples and other cultural and historic buildings were destroyed and their contents pillaged. Today, China’s military threats is mainly directed towards Taiwan, which has been more or less independent, from mainland China since 1949, after the communist victory in the civil war. Taiwan is today a reasonably democratic country, and the inhabitants certainly deserves, like all other people, to determine their own destiny. However, China threatens to use military force, should Taiwan declare itself formally independent. A sad part of this story is that many of the democratically elected, but spineless, leaders of the west today seem to have no problem with this. Instead, they claim to support the idea of “One China”. The same thing goes for the Tibet issue. The most important thing for these leaders is to be friends with the Chinese regime, so that the companies of their countries can get their slice of the Chinese market.

Another example is the EU:s removal of the arms export restrictions, that was put in place after the massacre at Tiananmen Square 1989, when demonstrators were attacked by tanks that left between 400 and 800 civilians dead, and between 7,000 and 10,000 injured. Any country could have questioned why we should sell our most advanced weapons systems to the worlds most powerful dictatorship, but no one dared. All China had to do, was to flex its economic muscles, and let it be unofficially known that countries making the wrong choice would not feel very welcome to the market.

But if we do not stand up for human rights today, what will we do in 20 years, when the biggest economy on earth might be represented by a Chinese dictatorship? Tomorrows wars between superpowers are not fought with weapons, they are economic wars. The key is to control the resources and the production. China’s share of world production is increasing all the time. Being at the same time a market economy and a dictatorship, China has an unfair competition advantage in that it can exploit its workers as it pleases. In a democracy, workers would form unions and under the threat of strikes demand things like better working conditions, 8 hour shifts, paid vacation, overtime compensation, and better pay. This would give them a better life, but also make them more expensive for the employer. This would be the normal development in a democracy when the economy is expanding and there is a strong trade surplus. Also, if the workers get better paid, they can afford more imported goods from other countries.

Another thing that would normally happen in such a situation is that the relative value of the currency would increase, making the produced products somewhat more expensive to buy for foreigners, and the imported products somewhat cheaper. This process would over time level the playing field for competitors worldwide. But in the Chinese dictatorship, this process is not wanted. The leaders want to keep their advantage as long as possible. Hence, the currency is pegged to the dollar and workers are not allowed to organize, strike, or even speak their minds. The workers should remain cheap. If they also remain poor consumers from a western perspective, that’s just a bonus. Poor profitability for western companies means they are pushed to move their production to cheaper places, like China.

Now, a lot of Chinese people will become rich in the process, of course. They are the privileged “elite” class, which any dictatorship needs for support, in order to stay in power. They are what the noblemen were for the medieval kings, and the ethnic sunni were for Saddam Hussein. This group will actually not be particularly interested in democracy, since it does not benefit them if the lower classes organize and demand their rightful share. Groups that gain economic power are also more likely to demand political power, since they can back up their words with their influence. But if the group is small and privileged, they may choose to demand to be part of the oppressing system, rather than overthrowing it, since the latter would risk distributing their wealth to others.

So, the increasing income gaps in China are not necessarily something that is seen as negative by the regime, despite their communist roots. Relatively poor workers, prepared to work until they are exhausted, and a rich upper class that are in control of business and media, while being thankful that they are so much better off than others, that’s the way they want it.

The Chinese workers, the oppressed Tibetan and the threatened Taiwanese people deserve a better situation. But obviously, our political leaders are not going to stand up for them, since they have too much to lose from doing so. Indeed, the likelihood that they will is constantly decreasing, as China’s economic muscles grows. Hence, to some extent it’s up to the rest of us, those who do not need to care about risking any market share. What the Chinese people needs is democracy. Sure, it might occur by itself someday, but we cannot be sure of that. Hence, we must do all we can to help. We can do it for egoistic reasons, because we don’t want a dictatorship to take over the largest share of world production, or we can do it for moral reasons, because we want better lives for the Chinese people, and because we believe all people deserve the right to democracy.

Should we boycott Chinese goods? I don’t think so, this would not make life better for the Chinese workers. What we need to do is to stand up for their rights, by using our own democratic rights to protest, demonstrate and speak our minds.

The Games of the XXIX Olympiad, Beijing 2008, will take place 8-24 August 2008.
Approximately 10,500 athletes are expected to participate in the Games with around 20,000 accredited media bringing the Games to the world. One can wonder why a dictatorship was awarded the games in the first place, and the regime of course hopes that it will be a great PR event for them. Billions of eyes will be watching. Should we boycott these games? To some extent, yes. We should not be buying official merchandise and things like that. Let them stand there with a million unsold t-shirts and hats. But we certainly should take the opportunity to go there. To protest. Peacefully, of course.

Think about it. We go down there looking like sports supporters, dressed in our countries respective colours, acting like sports supporters, living with sports supporters. It’s the perfect cover. But at and outside the arenas, where hundreds of live tv cameras are watching us, we chant “Freedom! Democracy!” over and over. We boo at Chinese officials. We wave our country flags, but a minute before we write messages on them, like

“Democracy Now!”
“Free Speech for all!”
“Free Tibet!”
“Respect Human Rights!”

and make sure the cameras sees it. We should also try to persuade our athletes to make statements promoting democracy when they get the chance. A gold medal winner that shouts “Democracy Now!” so the world hears it, that would be something.

Will the police go to attack? Not if there are thousands of us, dressed in our countries respective colours, and all the cameras can see it. But we must of course be totally non-violent, otherwise we might be in trouble.

Perhaps some locals will also want to join in. We should at least give them the chance, by letting them know what our plans are.

But everyone can’t go to Beijing, of course. But many of us have a Chinese embassy or consulate nearby. On the 8^th and 24^th of August we should go there (or as close as possible) to demonstrate for freedom, democracy and worker rights. Let’s do it 2006, let’s do it 2007, let’s do it 2008, and every year after that if necessary!

Now is the time to start getting organized!

Help spreading the word!

There are several ways to help passing on this message. The Chinese regime has a quite sophisticated system for censoring the Internet, so that Chinese citizens cannot view web pages touching on “sensitive” issues. However, making things difficult for the filter is easy to do. Here is what you can do:

If you have a web page, preferably one on a totally irrelevant subject, and containing no “suspicious” words in the text, put a copy of the Adobe Acrobat PDF file containing this text locally on you server. Give it an unsuspicious name. Also put an image like the ones below on the page, and link it to the PDF file. Make sure it is an image, not plain text, and give the picture file an equally unsuspicious name. Don’t call it “democracy.gif” or something like that. If you do this correctly, an automatic filter that scans your page would find no reason to block it, unless it analyzes your image with character recognition software, or analyzes the PDF file after the image has been clicked on.  

Click button to download this page as a PDF	Click button to download this page as a ZIP file

Make your own link image in your favourite painting/imaging program. The Chinese might find ways to filter out some of these images, but if hundreds or thousands of users uses their imagination, there is just no way to block it all.

If you want, you can also put the PDF in a zip file that is protected by a password. Put the password in an image also.

Putting up your own site containing the same or a similar stuff as this one is also a great thing to do. Feel free to change or add things to the text. And feel very free to make it look better :). I don’t care, as long as you spread it. The Chinese might have some hackers that can shut down sites temporarily, but if enough people put up their own, they can’t do them all. Tell other people about your site and ask them to link to it (using a clickable image of course…) if they don’t want to put a PDF on their own sites.

If you use your imagination, you can perhaps think of other ways how we can make this information spread in a way that, in the end, no filter can stop.