Wang Lixiong’s acceptance speech for the Light of Truth Award
Peter Terpstra
"Your Holiness the Dalai Lama; honorable Ladies and Gentlemen.
"We are very grateful to ICT for bestowing this group of us with the Light of
Truth Award.
"At this moment of honor, I remain deeply worried for Mr Liu Xiaobo who
participated in the drafting of “Twelve suggestions for dealing with the
Tibetan situation,” and who at this time is being held in a prison in China
for the crime of “incitement to subvert state power”.
"I must also add that there are 308 public signatories; the volunteers who
were responsible for collecting the signatures were threatened by police, they
were hounded out of their jobs, and their email accounts were attacked by
hackers, leading to the ruin of an un-counted number of signatories. And so
there was no way of collecting the names of later signatories. Even though we
will never know their names, they should be included among those receiving
this award today.
"Most of the 308 signatories are from the Chinese mainland, along with
overseas Chinese and people from other countries. Most of them are Han,
although there are people of other ethnicities; and there are many
intellectuals but also workers, farmers, scholars and urbanites. If such a
diverse group of people were to be epitomized by a single common feature, it
would be “of the people”.
"This group of people is in no way what the Chinese police or the Great-Han
nationalists profess us to be: anti-China. The opposite: we dearly love China.
But loving China does not amount to loving the government. Daring to criticize
the government is done for the good of China, but a government that cannot
accept criticism can only bring harm to China.
"Neither is this group what some critics have accused us being: standing on
the side of Tibet. Our position did not arise from choosing camps, it arose
from a pursuit of the truth. Just as it is unthinkable that a ship sailing the
ocean through the black of night would not seek a beacon of light, so the
truth is a light in the darkness for us. And the name of this award, “The
Light of Truth”, conveys this meaning exactly.
"The fake propaganda and information blackouts by the totalitarian power has
made it difficult for the majority of the Chinese people to understand the
truth about Tibet, and they have no way of knowing about the Dalai Lama’s
Middle Way. This is the major long-term obstacle to resolving the Tibet
Question. Removing this obstacle should be the mission of China’s
intellectuals, for there is no greater knowledge than the truth.
"The Tibetan uprising still hadn’t subsided when the turmoil in Urumchi rocked
China once more. The ferocity of the conflict between Han and Uyghurs in
Urumchi presents a most worrying prospect: that ethnic contradictions in China
have now become inter-racial. This disastrous consequence is a creation of
totalitarianism, and yet it could completely explode during a period of
democratic transition. Totalitarianism uses suppression, whereas suppression
is weakened by democracy.
"This is an emphatic warning to us: we cannot rely solely on a change of
systems to resolve ethnic problems, and we cannot assume that everything will
be naturally resolved with the coming of democracy. If we cannot eradicate
racial hatred beforehand and achieve peace among peoples, then even if the
government changes and even if democracy arises, there will still be
animosities between the people, and there will be the possibility of civil
wars and massacres alike.
"The racial hatred created by totalitarianism has perversely become a reason
used by the totalitarians to reject democracy, one which is virulently
supported by Great-Han nationalists. This logic of kidnapper and hostage
living or dying together is a difficult obstacle to remove along the path to
democracy.
"Overcoming this difficulty requires promoting the start of dialog between the
nationalities. It is only when people of all nationalities resolve hatred and
realize unity that the totalitarians’ reason of ethnic conflict for rejecting
democracy can be dismissed.
"Such civic spaces referred to here need to have sufficient popular scale,
with sufficient randomness and coverage, and they need to gain their
legitimacy from the operation and expression of the mechanisms of democracy.
There is a rare paradox in this: in order to guard against the disastrous
consequences of totalitarianism which would manifest with the coming of
democracy, democratic groupings and channels of communication first need to be
founded under the totalitarian system. Although this is a great challenge to
our bravery and our wisdom, all we can do is rise to meet it. For aside from
this, there is no other way.
"In the face of obstacles placed by totalitarian powers, channels of
communication between nationalities within civic spaces will need to rely on
new technologies such as the Internet; unprecedented democratic forms need to
be discovered and greater organizational structures need to be created. And to
this end, we are joining hands. The hardships will be many and there is a lot
of work to do. Fortunately, in today’s era of globalization, such just
undertakings can seek support from all over the world. Our gathering in this
place today is a portrait of these wonderful times.
"Thank you, Your Holiness, for your unrelenting search for common
understanding with the Chinese people, and for your struggle to find a future
where the Han and Tibetan peoples both win; and thank you all of you here for
the support you have granted in the past, and for the support you will grant
in the future.
"Thank you."
http://www.savetibet.org/media-center/wang-lixiong’s-acceptance-speech-light-
truth-award
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Amnesty International Report 2009 on China:
http://report2009.amnesty.org/en/regions/asia-pacific/china