（民主转型与十字方针征文）
作者：高宝玲（LOUISA GREVE）
捷克作家米兰·昆德拉说过：“人反抗强权之争，就是记忆反抗遗忘之争。”他的作家同仁刘晓波，今年夏天在监狱的警卫下服其11年徒刑时去世，为记忆反抗遗忘之争做出了极为重要而显著的贡献。
四千年来，中国的每个新王朝都重写了前朝的历史。1949年以来的统治者中国共产党，也自以为控制了真理。2010年在诺贝尔奖颁奖仪式上，刘晓波的空椅子告诉了我们所需知道的专制强权，在我们时代的中国凌驾于历史和记忆之上。这位诗人、异见者和诺贝尔奖得主体现了乔治·奥威尔所说，“自由的思想习惯，认为真理是外在的东西，是可以被发现的东西，而非自行得以建构的东西。”
1943年8月，中国共产党掌权之前，就曾在《解放日报》上刊登了一篇社论，题为《没有共产党就没有中国》。同年，中共用这个标题创作了一首宣传歌曲，后由毛泽东决定其歌名为《没有共产党就没有新中国》。然而，在毛幸好已死去四十年时，中共已经试图在我们这一代，把物质进步与毛对历史的革命极权控制结合起来。
2006年，对这首歌的一项巨大纪念在北京揭幕。领导人现在要求律师、法官、媒体工作者、教授、学生和军队将军一样，都向共产党宣誓忠诚【1】。维吾尔清真寺被要求，在伊斯兰经文之上覆盖写著“爱党爱国”的大红标语。然而，刘晓波坚拒参与共产党的历史和现实版。在所有的中国文学和社会评论中，他为了生命的尊严和真实，是对更人性化世界的最坚信的倡导者之一。在他于61岁死于癌症时，政府审查者突然采取行动封杀他去世的消息，并封杀其同胞发表对他的悼念。
我们可以向这位椅子在奥斯陆空荡荡的人学习，美国人需要更多地了解他。
2000年，他对一位朋友说：“文字之所以有美，就是为了在一片黑暗中让真实闪光，美是真实的凝聚点。” 他后来就世界万维网在中国的爆炸式发展说：“互联网像一台超级发动机，使我的写作如井喷般爆发。写作挣来的稿费，也足以维持独立的温饱生活。”
他对互联网新媒体满怀热情，甚至称之为“上帝赐给中国人的大礼”——刘晓波确有先见之明。从他1999年在第二次服刑后获释到2008年又遭拘留的大约九年间，据计算，他在海外中文网站得以发表一千多篇弘扬人道主义和民主的文章。他用这种方式得以触及受众，因为他不再依靠在党控大学工作，也不再依靠在党控期刊上发表他的尖锐社会批评。
他开发了数以百万计的受众，不仅在国外，也在国内。然而，与言论自由的途径一样，也存在一定的规律：必须有需求方。这意味著，你不能只是喷发抽像物，而必须直接与人交谈——必须知道受众的关注和担忧。更根本的是，你必须建立和培养一个读者群，给民众带来一种新的思维方式，此时现代专制国家的所有权力都旨在使青年人的思想定型，策划心理和物质鼓励将人们赶入两条路：无害的个体或忠诚的整体。任何设法不在这个严密制度的肠胃中消化的真正独立个体都遭到残酷镇压。
2008年，刘晓波第三次被监禁，恰好与全球专制复兴的开端非常接近，反映了那些专制政府方面利用互联网进行监控和传播宣传的新信心。这一利用通信技术的新层面，不仅谋求审查媒体，也要垄断媒体：任何工具都能够并必将成为宣传和压制工具，否则就是“假新闻”。在前互联网时代的中国，刘晓波说：“中共的意识形态灌输切断了历史，造成一代代人的记忆空白。”在今天的勇敢新世界裡，每一个公民的口袋裡都有一个24-7跟踪装置，中国主要城市的每个街角都预定安装面部识别软件，那麽记忆有什麽机会呢？
刘晓波认识到，如果没有我们称为中间机构的团体，从活动家到追随者的直接通讯就不大值得。他不仅是一位诗人、评论家和知识分子，也不仅是良知之声，而且是一个具有非凡道德勇气的人。他创造了一种真正遗产，属于有血肉之躯的人类，那些受他鼓舞并由他阐述的愿望所塑造的人。而同样重要的是，通过共同努力的经历，建立观念，建立机构，并解决实际问题。
我特别注意两个机构的意义，刘晓波在2000年代中期直到2008年被捕为此工作，而我当时工作的民主基金会，有幸通过资助项目予以支持。
2006年，刘晓波成为一位杂志编辑，那不是一份文学杂志，而是《民主中国》。这个网络出版物以数百位作者的作品为特色，描写中国社会和政治的各方面，包括文化和政治评论。《民主中国》的使命一直是要探索和培育自由、民主、人权、法治、宪政。这些都不是文学想像的素材，而是政治和治理的实际问题。
刘晓波用这个平台培养下一代。他过去作为教师和“沙龙”领导人所做，现在则作为各种作家的导师，鼓励他们挺身而出，发展他们的洞察力和批判观察力。该出版物在动辄会遭到严厉审查的汉语界为他们提供了空间。
刘晓波为《民主中国》掌舵，他解决了不仅是与一个而是两个编辑共同工作的不可避免的困难，生活在有12小时时差的两大洲而密切沟通。他在该出版物推行一项内部淮则的强有力伦理基础。例如，编辑委员会成员不得为自己的文章获取稿费。这一切与倾向于杂乱无章竞争的知识分子文化相反，也与中共统治下的中国文化相反。他不但要应对政府的不断骚扰，而且要应对那些专制政权下流行的自我审查习惯。
刘也是独立中文笔会创始人之一，该会是作家和记者在中国致力于倡导言论自由的首个和唯一的会员组织。2003年，他当选为独立中文笔会会长，连续两任共四年，此后拒绝作为第三任候选人，而为新任领导人作好淮备，并确保《民主中国》编辑的角色不会有任何利益衝突。在笔会，他也培养了下一代的中国知识人才，也坚持理事会每位成员都忠实遵守该机构的道德标准。
在两方面的努力中，刘晓波培植了人道主义援助。独立笔会已经投入了大量精力和宝贵财力资源，通过“自由写作补助”、法律援助和对作为良心犯被劳改的作家们的亲属人道援助。在两个组织中，他都是制度建设者，坚持对工作人员和义工作用的责任分工和问责，适当的理事会会议基本规则，任期选举和轮替的基本规则，以及防范自利交易的一致道德准则——相反于中国国内从学校到公司到国家官僚机构的无处不在的贪腐文化。
刘晓波在履行这些职责的同时，也写了许多自己的文章。他接待了络绎不绝的来访者，那些遭受不公的受害者。他花了无数时间，常常花他自己的钱，为他们联系律师、记者、纪录片制片人以及其他愿意帮助者。
因此，刘晓波既是一位思想家和作家，也是一位活动家。他卓越全面，而不像其他人，他使之合成为一种服务的特殊生活，形成我们可以称为一种民主项目的规划。
在所有这一切中，他认识到，并非每人都能成为英雄，或者会想要成为英雄。大多数人并非尖锐的社会批评家，但他们可以环顾四周，察觉出何时有错。大多数人也非多产作家，但他们能够在他们所服务的机构中坚持伦理规则。大多数人可能不会成名，但他们仍然能够培育下一代（在他们自己的小花园裡）。大多数人生活在各种形式的压力和紧张之下，没有非凡的勇气，但他们可以花时间去尊重死者，并对需要帮助者解囊相助。
刘晓波的榜样教育我们所有人——不但中国民运人士，而且那些在世界各地与暴政抗争者，去思考、说话和写作，即使在受审查和剥夺的情况下，即使你不能发表或只有一点受众，即使当你绝望的时候没有人倾听。他教我们记住死者——特别是那些为真、善和正义而丧失生命者——的行动，就是一种反抗行动，一种良心行动。
在刘晓波作为一个作家、编辑、研究者和记录者的作品中，他教我们无论社会重要性如何在我们注意之下，或者超出我们的认识和行动能力之外。他坚信，中国人民能够形成一个真正的公民运动，尽管几代专制者为他们自己的生存而造成积极地培养对他人的仇恨、犬儒和残忍。
刘晓波从不屈服于挫折，而始终强调，争取民主的斗争是世代的斗争。当他的妻子刘霞获淮去监狱探望他时，他听说自己获得诺贝尔和平奖，就告诉她，他希望把奖金献给那些1989年六四的亡灵。他还要求孩子们参加颁奖仪式。我们向刘晓波学习，在争取自由和民主的斗争中，向那些前驱者致敬，并培养那些后来者。
也许有一段时间，中共党国将能够排除对刘晓波的记忆，使之“消失”在他付出了巨大的努力奋战的失忆黑洞中。但是，中文作家们传播的悼念和纪念，已经在纽约、台北、伦敦、马尔默、奥斯陆等地举行，至少保证这种失忆将不会完成。奥威尔坚持希望，“自由的思想习惯”将比暴君统治更持久的力量。刘晓波现在属于历史。他的良知生存之争是我们要进行的斗争。
【1】自2012以来，中国律师不得不宣读这个誓词：“我保证忠实履行中国特色社会主义法律工作者的神圣使命，忠于祖国，忠于人民，拥护中国共产党的领导……。”去年，习近平主席参观了国营媒体和命令其编辑和记者显示他们忠于中国共产党。他说：“党的新闻舆论媒体的所有工作，都要体现党的意志、反映党的主张，维护党中央权威、维护党的团结，真正做到爱党、护党、为党。”“在思想上政治上行动上同党中央保持高度一致，”
“本文首发于自由基金会的《法律和自由》（Law and Liberty）杂志，在此获淮转载。”2017年9月21日。
高宝玲（Louisa Greve）——致力于亚洲人权30年，最近在《民主期刊》（Journal of Democracy）发表有关藏人和维吾尔人权的文章。
（张裕 译）
Liu Xiaobo’s Fight for Freedom
by LOUISA GREVE
It was the Czech writer Milan Kundera who said: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” His fellow writer Liu Xiaobo, who died this summer under police guard while serving an 11-year prison sentence, made a profoundly important and significant contribution to the struggle of memory against forgetting.
For four millennia, each new Chinese dynasty rewrote the history of the last. The ruler since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, also believes it controls the truth. Liu Xiaobo’s empty chair at his Nobel Prize ceremony in Oslo in 2010 told us all we needed to know of the authoritarian power that is exercised over history and remembrance by the China of our time. The poet, dissident, and Nobel laureate embodied what George Orwell called “the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along.”
In August 1943, before it came to power, the Chinese Communist Party had already published an editorial in the Liberation Daily entitled, “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No China.” Later that same year, the CCP created a propaganda song using this title. Mao Zedong later decided the song was to be called: “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” But while, mercifully, Mao has been dead for over four decades, the Party has in our generation tried to combine material progress with Mao’s revolutionary totalitarian control over history.
In 2006, a gigantic memorial to the song was unveiled in Beijing. The leadership now requires an oath of loyalty to the Communist Party from lawyers and judges, media workers and professors, schoolchildren and army generals alike.[1] Uyghur mosques are required to cover Islamic verses with large red banners that read “Love the Party, Love the Country.” But Liu Xiaobo steadfastly refused to participate in the CCP’s version of history and reality. He was among the most confident advocates of a more humane world in all of Chinese literature and social commentary, for lives of dignity and authenticity. Upon his death of cancer at the age of 61, government censors sprang into action to block the news of his passing, and also to block publication of the tributes paid to him by his countrymen.
We can learn from the man whose chair sat empty at Oslo. Americans need to know more about him.
He said to a friend in 2000: “The beauty of written language is that, in the dark, it shines a light on truth; and beauty is the focal point of truth.” He later said, regarding the explosion of the world wide web in China: “The Internet is like a magic engine. It has helped my writing to erupt like a geyser. Now I can even live on what I write.”
In his enthusiasm for the new medium of the Internet—he even called it “God’s gift to China”—Liu Xiaobo was truly prescient. For some nine years, between his release from his second prison term in 1999 and his detention in 2008, he was, by one calculation, able to publish more than a thousand articles promoting humanitarianism and democracy on Chinese-language websites based outside China. He was able to reach audiences in this way because he was no longer dependent on a job in the Party-controlled universities, or on Party-controlled journals to circulate his trenchant social criticism.
He developed an audience of millions, not just outside his country but within it. Along with that avenue for freedom of expression, though, comes a certain discipline: there has to be a demand side. What that means is, you can’t just spout abstractions. You have to speak directly to people—you have to know the concerns and worries of your audience. Even more fundamentally, you have to build and nurture a readership, to bring citizens along to a new way of thinking when all the power of the modern authoritarian state is geared toward molding the minds of the young, engineering every psychological and material incentive to herd people into one of two paths: harmless individuality or loyal conformity. Whatever genuinely independent individuality manages not to disappear into the maw of this well-organized system is subject to brutal repression.
Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment in 2008, his third, coincides very nearly with the beginnings of the global authoritarian resurgence that reflects newfound confidence on the part of authoritarian governments to use the Internet for surveillance, and for the dissemination of propaganda. This new phase of the use of communications technology seeks not only to censor but also to monopolize the medium: any instrument can and will become an instrument of propaganda, and oppression, or just “fake news.” Of China in the pre-Internet era, Liu said: “Unrelenting inculcation of Chinese Communist Party ideology has . . . produced generations of people whose memories are blank.” In today’s brave new world where every citizen has a 24-7 tracking device in his pocket, and facial-recognition software is slated for installation on every street corner in major Chinese cities, what chance does memory have?
Liu Xiaobo recognized that the direct communication from activists to followers is not worth much without what we call intermediating institutions. He was not only a poet, critic, and intellectual. He was not only a voice of conscience, and a man of exceptional moral courage. He created a true legacy of flesh-and-blood human beings, people inspired by him and shaped by the aspirations he articulated, but also, just as importantly, by the experience of working together to build ideas, build institutions, and work on practical problems.
In particular I note the significance of two institutions with which Liu worked in the mid-2000s until his arrest in 2008, and which the National Endowment for Democracy, for which I worked at the time, was privileged to support through its grants program.
When Liu became a magazine editor, in 2006, it was not a literary magazine, but rather Democratic China Magazine (Minzhu Zhongguo). This online publication featured the work of hundreds of authors, writing about all aspects of Chinese society and politics, encompassing cultural and political commentary. The mission of Democratic China has been to explore and foster freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. These are not the stuff of literary imagination first and foremost, but of the practical problems of politics and governance.
Liu used this platform to cultivate the next generation of writers and readers. What he had already been doing as a teacher and leader of “salons,” he now did as a mentor for all kinds of writers, who were encouraged to come forward and develop their insights and critical observations. The publication gave them space in a Chinese-language world that is otherwise harshly censored.
At the helm of Democratic China, Liu was able to resolve the inevitable difficulties of working not just with one but with two co-editors, living on two continents and communicating closely despite a 12-hour time difference. He reinforced a strong ethical foundation for the publication’s internal guidelines. Editorial board members could not receive fees for the articles they wrote, for example. All this was against the culture: both of intellectuals, who can sometimes be self-absorbed and competitive, and of the CCP, which touted conformity and hierarchy. He did all this while coping with constant government harassment, and also with the habits of self-censorship endemic to authoritarian regimes.
Liu was also a founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, the first and only membership organization of writers and journalists in China dedicated to championing freedom of expression. Elected president of Independent Chinese PEN in 2003, he served two terms, for a total of four years. He declined to be a candidate for a third term, making way for new leadership, and ensuring there would be no conflict of interest with his role as an editor of Democratic China. Here too he fostered the next generation of Chinese intellectual talent, and here too he insisted that every board member faithfully observe the ethical standards of the institution.
In both endeavors, Liu fostered humanitarian assistance. Independent PEN has devoted much energy and precious financial resources to helping those in need, through “Freedom-to-Write Fellowships,” and legal aid and humanitarian assistance to the families of writers languishing in labor camps as prisoners of conscience. In both, he was an institution-builder, insisting on a division of responsibility and accountability for staff and volunteers roles, ground rules for proper board meetings, ground rules for elections and rotations in office, and consistent ethical guidelines to guard against self-dealing—in contrast to the ubiquitous culture of graft and corruption that dominates Chinese institutions, from schools to companies to the bureaucracies of the state.
As he carried out these duties, all the while writing so many articles of his own, Liu also received a constant stream of visitors who were victims of injustice. He spent countless hours, and often his own money, connecting them with lawyers, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and others who were willing to help.
So Liu Xiaobo was a thinker, and a writer, and an activist. He excelled at all; like no one else, he made them into an exceptional life of service, shaping what we might call a program for democracy.
In all of this, he recognized that not everyone can be a hero, or will want to be. Most people are not acute social critics, but they can take a look around themselves and perceive when something is wrong. Most people are not prolific writers, but they can insist on ethical rules in the institutions they serve. Most people may not become well-known, but they can still cultivate the next generation (in their own little garden). Most people live under myriad forms of pressure and stress, and don’t have extraordinary amounts of courage, but they can take time to pay respects to the dead and be personally generous to others in need.
Liu Xiaobo’s example teaches all of us—Chinese democrats but also those struggling against tyranny everywhere in the world—to think, speak, and write, even under censorship and deprivation, even when you can’t publish or have a tiny audience, even when you despair that nobody is listening. He teaches us that the act of remembering the dead, especially those who have lost their lives in service of the true, the good, and the just, is an act of resistance and an act of conscience.
In the example of his work as a writer, editor, and investigator and documentarian, Liu teaches us to regard no matter of social importance as beneath our notice or beyond our ability to recognize and act upon. He strongly believed that a true civic movement could be formed by Chinese people despite generations of authoritarian conditioning that actively fostered hatred, cynicism, and cruelty toward others for one’s own survival.
Liu Xiaobo never succumbed to discouragement but emphasized always that the struggle for democracy is a generational struggle. When his wife Liu Xia was allowed to visit him in prison, and he learned that he would be given the Nobel Peace, he told her he wished to dedicate the prize to those who lost their lives on June 4, 1989. He also asked that children participate in the ceremony. We learn from Liu Xiaobo to pay respects to those who have gone before us, and to nurture those who will come after us, in the struggle for freedom and democracy.
It may be that for a while, the Chinese party-state will be able to “disappear” the memory of Liu Xiaobo into the black hole of amnesia that he did so much to fight. But the tributes that Chinese writers have managed to disseminate, and the memorials that have been held in New York and in Taipei, London, Malmo, Oslo, and elsewhere, are at the very least a guarantee that the amnesia will not be complete. Orwell held out hope that “the liberal habit of mind” would have the strength to outlast the rule of the tyrants. Liu Xiaobo now belongs to history. His fight for the survival of conscience is ours to carry on.
[1] Since 2012, Chinese lawyers have been obliged to swear this oath: “I promise to faithfully fulfill the sacred mission of socialism with Chinese characteristics … loyalty to the motherland, its people, and uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China.” Last year, President Xi Jinping visited the state-run media outlets and ordered their editors and reporters to show their fealty to the Chinese Communist Party. “All the work by the party’s media must reflect the party’s will, safeguard the party’s authority, and safeguard the party’s unity,” he said. “They must love the party, protect the party, and closely align themselves with the party leadership in thought, politics and action.”
“This essay first appeared at Liberty Fund’s Law and Liberty journal and is here reprinted with permission.” On SEPTEMBER 21, 2017
Louisa Greve, who has worked on human rights in Asia for three decades, has written most recently on Tibetan and Uyghur human rights in the Journal of Democracy.
