Non-Violence Principle and Non-Violence Protest Movement

Speech at the 4th Chinese Overseas Democracy Movement Round Table Meeting

Yang, Jian-Li

1/26/2002 Washington, DC

September 11 to a large degree changed people's thought on world order and national security. Although the international anti-torror alliance and war won't last forever and the public will probably go back to the status quo shaped up by the usual economic, political and military interests, we can still predict that studies and actions attempting to track down the root cause of international terrorism will never stop. Some people will continue their seach along the line of religion and culture, while many others may stick with the theory of struggles for economic interests. However, if the anti-terror effort is not put into the context of human rights, we may never find an answer for the root cause of terrorism. Even though the Chinese communist regime also joined the international anti-terror alliance, I am convinced that people will eventually turn their attention to dictatorship, the most convenient resource for terrorism. In other words, people will come to understand that we must eliminate state terrorism if we want to root out other forms of terrorism at all. Seeing a plausible surge of anti-trror theme internationally in place of the human rights theme, many friends are frustrated because they don't see this is a world trend that may actually benefit us. In the mean time, we should, following this trend, refect upon our strategies in striving for a constitutional democracy in China.

On some occasions in the past, I compared the CCP regime to a table with three legs. It looks very stable, but it'll collapse right away as soon as one of the legs is broken. Then what are the three legs? One of them is the loyalty of those corrupted CCP officials, businessmen, and even intellectuals. The second is all those CCP lies.

And the third is state terrorism. State terrorism is a state power that believes and practises control via terror by constantly and systematically using state machines to manufacture violence. Today's Chinese society is just one of such under state terrorism. In this type of societies, ordinary people's human rights are severely impaired or even taken away. This includes the so-called rights of life of the Chinese that the CCP said it had greatly improved. Can't we say that what the CCP ruling elite take from the society, as a result of exchanging power for money and unfair wealth distribution, is exactly what the ordinary people need for their rights of life? Under this condition, what and how should the democracy movement do? Of course, we can continue our effort in refuting the CCP dictatorship and advocating democracy, in lobbying foreign governments and media to continue their support of us, and in nominating appropriate figures for Nobel Peace Prize. These are all important things to do. However, for a long time, we lacked political actions, actions that impact policy making, challenge government, as well as involve directly in system rebuild. In other words, we need a set of action rules and items that match our goal of constitutional democracy.

Because of time limit, I'll today just comment briefly on the most fundamental element of constitutional democracy movement: non-violence principle and non-violence protests movement.

I take non-violence as a rule of action for the movement, not a religion or a part of the so-called peaceism. I take it as a strategy. So I say: let constitutional democracy have nothing to do with violence. Why?

First of all, the thoughts and actions of violence will let go our resources of morality. From the angle of material resources, the Chinese democrats are at an obviously disadvantageous position compared with the ruling dictatorship. Under such an apparent power imbalance, however, we still strongly stick with our non-violence stance. This is because of the moral high land our state goal aims at. Irresponsbile advocate and promotion of violence will get us off the moral high land.

Briefly, we need a PULL and a PUSH to achieve democracy in China. The PULL will be the system. There is a consensus that a constitutional decomratic system is China's state goal. China will eventually embrace such a system. I am convinced that more and more people will realize that only democracy can protect their interests the best in fair terms and therefore would like to see a transition to democracy. However, this is just one side of the coin. The other side is how to transit and at what cost. CCP's dictating rule in the last half of a century has systematically smashed all positive factors of democracy, including even the idea of democracy. China's transition to a democracy will be very hard, even much harder than the Israeli going out Egpt to look for the God promised Ganan land. In this transition, sparks of violence that CCP has long seeded in the Chinese society can be triggered anytime and can flame rapidly once triggered. Without a strong moral foundation, I am afraid we won't be able go through a sea of such flames of violence. Non-violence on the other hand will make us moral resources, which in turn call for rationality that will lead us through the flame and reach our goal. It is the responsibility of the democracy movement to become a force with morality.

Secondly, promoting violence is equivalent to wrestling the CCP's strongest muscle with our weakest. The world has long passed the era of conventional weapons. An anti-government force cannot possibly arm themselves to the degree that would threaten the government. Neither do we have the power to organize "controllable" violence. While advocating to kill a few corrupted officials offers no help to our cause of constitutional democracy, it will on the other hand give the CCP the very reason for brutal crackdown on democracy.

Thirdly, violence will push away the sympathy and support from the civilized outside world. The trend of the world civilization is to get rid of violence, especially after September 11. The whole civilized world detests violence and terror. If we claim we have anything to do with violence, we'll for sure lose the sympathy and support from the world. The most direct evidence is that a Tibet lama was denied visa to come to this very meeting because some of his follow Tibetans advocate violence. Also, I myself help organized a number of events for dialogues among different Chinese ethnic groups. For these events, most never-for-violence Weiuer freinds in China couldn't get their visa to enter the US because some Weiuer fellows do promote violence. We can't deny the fact that the ongoing international anti-terror campaign is granting the CCP some political legitimacy to fight and defeat its enemy forces that may sometimes be violent. In the international scene, we by the same token have an issue of positioning ourselves to be morally undefeatable by advocating non-violence.

Forthly, a spread of violence will only prolong CCP's rule. We can foresee that the public violence at the beginning may be directed to the corrupted CCP system and its officials. A charateristics of this kind of violence is that it will soon get lost in direction and fall upon the parties that started it. Then the public will soon be frightened with the danger of unpredictable violence and start to call for the somewhat predictable order under the dectatorship. They will grow fear towards democracy, which is very often blamed for chaos. This will certainly provide an atmosphere for the CCP to restore its rule at any cost. It won't be a joke that the people then can turn around to welcome the People's Liberation Army again. That'll be a nightmare for democracy. The Cultural Revolution is a vivid example. Soon after the Cultural Revolution started, Mao Zedong called the people to kick aside local CCP committees. The people answered the call and did what Mao hoped, often violently, in a matter of a few months. Of course, some of these people had been wrongfully treated by the CCP for many years and what they did could be justified. But soon the violence wide spreaded to all walks of life, including many innocent people. This created the greatest chaos ever since the CCP took power. It was at this time that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai quickly turned people's desire for a restoration of order to a restoration of an even more cruel dictatorship under tighter control by the CCP.

Next, we should no longer promote malignance in China. In the past half century, the CCP wittily used humen beings' malignance to help sustain its rule - it is still doing so today. We are often saddened by today's moral decay of the Chinese people as a whole, which can be said to be one of the biggest hurdles for establishing a new society.

There is no doubt that violence will only speed up moral decay and promote even more malignance. The democracy movement should have a clear cut and move away from malignance. I can't imagine how a democratic system can be established in a society in which cheating, corruption and violence, all different forms of malignance, are commonplace.

Finally, we have no confidence in violence-for-violence. What I've talked about above basically aims at uncontrollable violence. It could be argued that it may be a good thing to use "controllable" violence to get rid of the dictatorship and then go on to establish a democracy. Sounds good. But who is going to believe that such a capable power in overthrowing the CCP with a force of violence will be willing to subject itself to people's checks and supervision? Our democracy movement as a whole has a moral upper hand in comparison with the CCP, but each idividual in the movement does not necessarily have it comparing with individual CCP officials. Or maybe I should say everyone is equal in front of morality. Therefore, it's hard to convince people that they should count on any promise after overthrowing a regime by violence.

The next question is what we can do following the non-violence principle. The urgent thing, seems to me, is to promote a movement of non-violence protests in China. We know China has evil laws, policies and regulations as well as corrupted, vicious and cruel government officials. People in such a corrupted, vicious and cruel system should form their groups and organizations for non-violence protests. They should have their own professional associations that can openly show their interests to the public to force compromises from the authorities. Of course, non-violence protests will be cracked down, but violence will only be supressed much more brutally. Cracking down on non-violence protests will place the authorities in a more unjustifiable position and trigger more protests, domestic or foreign. It may even split apart the ruling party into different factions. This will generate more and more pressure on the regime and more and more opportunities for political changes in China. There are plenty of works overseas about non-violence protests, in theory or practice. I feel that one of the important things the overseas democracy movement should do is to introduce these works to China.

From the angle of a constitutional democracy movement, we are still in the process of "external pressure on ruling regime". In fact, all we have done in the past few decades, including most of what we are doing today, are generating external pressure. When the external pressure for a representation of various public interests is great enough, the process of "taking part in governing" will follow. This is the process to use available mechanism to present the public interests, as a result of external pressure, to the in-system policy making circles and to solidify these interests at the level of the governing system. This will then prepare for even larger room for taking part in governing. These two processes in fact may coexist for a long time and one may help the other. When these processes have impacted the system long enough, we'll finally come to the process of "constitutionally democratic governing", which is the ultimate solution for China that we can see now. Let me stop here for today. I'll talk more in the future whenever I get the opportunity about the three processes in a constitutional democracy movement.