The street in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. will be renamed “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” if a new bill to that effect can be passed by Congress. This symbolic move is meant to honor a human rights activist, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was put in jail for years by the Chinese Communist Party, and died of liver cancer recently. The Chinese Communist regime has become obsessed with the possibility that Congress will pass this legislation and has demanded in recent senior-level interactions that the Trump administration bury the bill.
As a sovereign nation and a beacon of freedom and democracy, the United States has every right to pass such a bill to remind the Chinese Communist Party of their crimes against human rights. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, proposed the “Liu Xiaobo Plaza Bill” under the Obama administration, and the Senate unanimously backed it in February 2016. However, after the Chinese government warned of “serious consequences” if the proposal was enacted, it was reported that President Obama had determined to veto the legislation before it reached his desk.
As Senator Cruz stated, it was ironic that Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, threatened to veto a bill honoring Liu, the 2010 prize winner. While both were back to back Nobel Peace Prize laureates, their lives and fates could not be more disparate. In 2009, the prize was awarded to US President Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” In 2010, the prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a prisoner in China, “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Seven years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama finished his two terms and is happily enjoying his retirement from the White House and worldwide recognition; Liu was persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and died in jail after 11 years of confinement.
Most Chinese, including my parents, are familiar with the name Obama, but more than one billion Chinese have never heard of Liu. In China, Liu’s publications are banned and his name censored, because the Chinese Communist Party considers his writings subversive. Liu’s writings are not subversive; Liu’s writings are about the truth, inspiring and encouraging people to get rid of the dictatorship and pursue a free and democratic China.
As a brilliant literary critic, writer, and poet, Liu received his doctoral degree in literature in 1988 from Beijing Normal University. As a young scholar and university professor, he was invited as a visiting scholar to Columbia University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Hawaii. However, Dr. Liu was not only a scholar but also a human rights activist. On April 27, 1989, Dr. Liu, then, 34, at the time a visiting scholar at Columbia University, left the United States and returned to China to support the students’ democratic movement.
Dr. Liu advocated for non-violent demonstrations. During the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, he led the students to peacefully plead with the government to transform China into a country that embraces democracy, freedom and human rights. More than two months of peaceful demonstrations did not change anything – the government rejected the students’ petitions and threatened to suppress the movement by military force. To try to prevent the bloodshed and encourage the government to have a dialog with the students, Liu initiated a four-man three-day hunger strike. Yet, this did not stop the brutal “Tiananmen Square Massacre.”
The night when tanks surrounded the students in Tiananmen Square, Dr. Liu and his colleagues negotiated with the student leaders and the army commander so that several thousand students who remained in Tiananmen Square would all be allowed to leave peacefully. But Dr. Liu was arrested and imprisoned by the Chinese government immediately after the massacre. He was forced to sign “a letter of repentance.” He was expelled from Beijing Normal University, where he was employed as a lecturer.
No job. No life. Persecution to this dissident was brutal. The government’s media labeled him a “mad dog” and a “dirty hand,” very derogative terms in Chinese used by the government to defame dissidents, referring to his “crime” that he had incited and manipulated the student movement to overthrow the government and socialism. Dr. Liu became a freelancer, publicly voicing the need to redress the government’s wrongdoing in regards its violent suppression of the student protest of 1989. He was jailed in a “labor education camp” for three years. In 2008, he was rearrested and sentenced to11 years in prison for co-authoring and first signing the Charter 08, a manifesto signed by hundreds of Chinese activists and intellectuals calling for freedom, equality, human rights, democracy and constitutional government in China.
Sadly, Dr. Liu’s call for political reform is largely unknown among the general Chinese population. Renaming the street in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. in his honor will educate millions of young Chinese in the United States, and hopefully, they will spread Dr. Liu’s story in China. Passing the “Liu Xiaobo Plaza” Bill means that the U.S. stands and speaks for truth and for freedom.
I strongly support Senator Cruz and his proposed legislature. It is the time to stop making concessions to an authoritarian Communist regime at the expense of pro-democracy dissidents.
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” Albert Einstein
Let’s stand and be counted!