Call sounds for China democracy

By Kathrin Hille in Beijing

Published: December 10 2008 02:00 | Last updated: December 10 2008 04:37

More than 300 Chinese intellectuals have called for the creation of a new democracy movement in a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the Chinese Communist party’s strategy of encouraging economic reform without meaningful political liberalisation.

The Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a group of lawyers largely organised through the internet, on Tuesday published a document named Charter 08 demanding constitutional reforms, multi-party democracy and the rule of law. The charter has the support of writers, lawyers and university professors from all over China.

Some of the signatories said they were following the spirit of the Charter 77, an appeal issued by intellectuals in Communist Czechoslovakia more than 30 years ago criticizing the government for its failure to respect human rights.

Like its Czech predecessor, Charter 08 does not call for the overthrow of the ruling Communist Party, aiming instead to encourage a broader, more open debate on human rights and democracy.

“We are not a political party and are not seeking to establish one,” said Zhang Zuhua, a well known political activist who is a prominent member of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.

“We just feel that the authorities have long talked about democracy but there has been no real change, so we hope to create a broad consensus in society for the universal values of human rights and democracy which would raise the pressure on them,” Mr Zhang said.

The fact that several hundred intellectuals are publicly supporting the initiative is certain to be perceived as a challenge by the Communist Party, which is scrambling to deal with a sharp economic slowdown that the leadership has warned could lead to unrest if not managed well.

Protests and demonstrations are becoming more common, usually over land rights or issues such as local government corruption and regulation.

The new human rights group said several of its organisers had been detained over the past few days.

Mr Zhang said he had been detained late on Monday night and held for 12 hours. “The police took away all cash and savings account books of me and my family members and haven’t returned them yet,” he said.

Charter 08’s list of signatories reads like a who’s who of China’s dissidents and liberal thinkers.

It includes Ding Zilin, a professor who became famous for documenting the history of the 1989 Beijing massacre, in which her son died; Bao Tong, a former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party who fell out of favour in 1989 and is now under house arrest; Du Guang, a researcher at the Central Central Party School; Li Pu, a liberal former deputy head of the official Xinhua News agency; Dai Qing, the novelist; and Zhang Sizhi, nicknamed the “lawyer of the people”, who has defended more than a dozen people accused of subversion.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008