Signposts:

As long as there shall be stones,
The seeds of fire will not die

Lu Xun, December 1935
Cited in Seeds of Fire, Chinese Voices of Conscience
Eds. Geremie Barme and John Minford
Far Eastern Economic Review Ltd., 1986

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another.

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung
1st edition, Foreign Language Press, l966

I could read any amount of samizdat in Moscow. The most widely-read of all these underground publications was The Chronicle of Current Events [a samizdat periodical documenting human rights violations and underground publications in the USSR, which appeared regularly from 1968 to 1982]. I also sometimes saw copies of it and, like others, I retyped it and passed it on.
Vitaly Shentalinsky
The KGB’s Literary Archive
Harvill Press, London, 1995

You can’t explain why you’re here. It happened that you were on a train and this person mentioned a place called Lingshan. He was sitting opposite and your cup was next to his…You asked him where he was going.
“Lingshan”
“What?”
“Lingshan, ling meaning spirit or soul, and shan meaning mountain.”

Gao Xingjian
Soul Mountain
Flamingo/HarperCollinsPublishers, 2000

Signposts are like first principles. They tell us exactly where we are, so we can better gauge where we’re going. So long as the People’s Republic of China yokes itself to the medieval notions of Central Europe, in the form of the Soviet criminal justice and police powers system, there can be progress toward freedoms of expression only in fits and starts: a technology slips through the cracks here or a local police authority tires of imposing the irrational cruelties there. 

Whether the fax machine, in June 1989, or Internet blogs up until operation ‘Golden Shield’ brought in Cisco’s routers and Yahoo!’s ISP services and Microsoft’s operating environments, in 2002, results will always be the same:

Brave souls create a samizdat record of the state horrors being brought down upon them and pass it around in every way they can. This truth remains: the Internet is not your friend and if under state scrutiny for your stories, only your family and other writers will seek to tell the world of your plight.

Why do other writers care? Because whether we view it as a gift or incurable neurotic disease, we must and will write. So our only hope is to follow Ben Franklin’s good advice to the Continental Congress of what became the Unites States of America:

We must hang together gentlemen for, if we do not, we will surely hang separately.

He was a printer, publisher, scientist, writer and revolutionary, and an invasion force of 40,000 British and Hessian mercenary troops had just landed to bring the rebels to heel. He knew all too well about that of which he spoke.

What can we do to protect free speech?  Use laws, lists, letters and hanging together in ever better and more effective ways:

Laws: Yahoo! Hong Kong claim their surrender of Shi Tao’s identity was, in ways so far unspecific, in accordance with mainland China’s “laws, regulations or local customs,” according to press reports quoting its owner, Jerry Yang.

1) Legal actions to force Yahoo! to name specifically and publicly which of these were invoked, and in what form they chose to obey, should be considered

2) Since businesses like Yahoo! HK are such ardent believers in rule of law, efforts should be made to encourage sympathetic countries to introduce their own laws and regulations that invoke penalties for violations of their own ‘customs’ and values upon their business entities operating overseas. This would at least put moral decisions about the free flow of information on par with the importance of a host government’s friendliness to enhance their bottom lines.

3) Constant calls and efforts to assist the National People’s Congress should be made to cause them to address the need for constitutional and police powers reforms in China, that would empower ordinary citizens with the means of redress to abusive exercises of state powers, at every level of government.

Lists:  Every effort should be made by PEN centres and other writers’ organizations to research court papers and compile lists of the imprisoned and, in some countries, the ‘disappeared,’  for purposes of helpful feedback to both host governments and those governments willing to raise the issues of such people with their counterparts.

1) Toward that end, an effort should be made to create a central feeding system for lists of prisoners of conscience or writers under duress around the world, by bringing together and culling existing lists of organizations like PEN’s WIPC or Dui Hua Foundation, or Reporters Without Frontiers and the Committee to Protect Journalists, International Federation of Journalists, etc.
2) Grants should be sought to fund foreign language students for research into international court records and news media for records of detentions, arrests or disappearances and killings.
3) Efforts should be made to assure that such research should be made to be seen as minimum curricula requirements for students in schools of international law or diplomacy or public administration around the world.
4) Releases of individuals on lists should not be allowed to become seen as a replacement for systemic improvement to governance, judicial and police power systems.
5) Improved methods of dissemination of lists should be pursued, via articles, books, blogs and direct mailings to identified audiences with a likely interest in the fate of oppressed writers or the professions they represent.

Letters: Careful studies of ways to standardize procedures and ease the burden of individual letter writing by members of various Rapid Action Networks should be sought and funds to underwrite development of innovative techniques of database management and posting procedures should be sought, and such methods applied as appropriate.

Hanging together: Transparently seeking financial support and technical assistance from private foundations and government or quasi-government bodies should be a high priority, with care given to assuring that any funding received is without strings attached and without connection to any political agendas or interests identifiably seeking to harm a given country.

Every effort should be made to develop an environment of international opprobrium toward individual nations who oppress their writers, similar to the generic programmes now undertaken by International PEN, such as those against arbitrary killings of writers for any reason (anti-Impunity programme).

Fred Armentrout