Credit: Prague Post
Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and his fellow signatories of Charter 08 were awarded the Homo Homini prize at the opening ceremony of the One World documentary film festival this week. The Chinese democrats’ petition is inspired by Charter 77, the Czechoslovak dissidents’ manifesto, and former president Vaclav Havel was on hand to make the award.
The prize is awarded annually by People in Need, the Czech democracy and development NGO, to prominent human rights activists. Liu Xiaobo was recognized as a leading personality in a democratic movement that seeks dialogue and non-violent solutions despite persecution by the state, said PiN.
“Just like Charter 77, Charter 08 is not a subversive manifesto. We do voice criticism but our stance is on the whole constructive,” said signatory Xu Youyu, accepting the award on behalf of the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo.
“We care about the development of a civic society in China, our ideal and objective is a healthy society, and as we reject the conservative political creed, we call for reforms of the political system and changes in the governing style,” he continued. “We spare no effort to engage in a dialogue with the government and we have to wait but also admonish.”
In a forceful and moving address, Cui Weiping, a prominent intellectual who has translated Havel, Ivan Klima and other dissident writers into Chinese, paid tribute to the unsung women who “stand in the first rank of those who call for human rights and democracy”. She cited Liu Xia, Liu Xiaobo’s wife; Zeng Jinyan, wife of the imprisoned Hu Jia; the mothers of Tiananmen Square, including the founder of the association, Professor Ding Zilin; and the mothers of the Sichuan earthquake victims as being amongst those whose suffering and courage consistently appeals to the world’s “conscience, humanity and morality”.
History suggests that change can emerge from the least promising of circumstances, Vaclav Havel suggested:
I would like once more to point out our experience, one that our Chinese friends should adopt in one way or another, the experience that one may never reckon with success, one may never reckon with the situation changing tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in ten years. Perhaps it will not. If that is what you are reckoning with, you will not get very far.
However, in our experience, not reckoning with that did pay in the end, we found that it was possible to change the situation after all, and those who were mocked as being Don Quixotes, whose efforts were never going to come to anything, may in the end and to general astonishment get their way. I think that is important. In a peculiar way, there is both despair and hope in this. On the one hand we do not know how things will end, and on the other, we know they may in fact end well.
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