Liu Xiaobo Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison

The socialist government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) just sentenced Liu Xiaobo to eleven years in prison for “inciting to subvert state power.”

Liu is one of the authors of Contract 08, an open letter calling for legal reforms, democracy and protection of human rights in China.  Contract 08 has been signed by over 300 of China’s leading intellectuals, many of whom have since been harassed by the government.

Contract 08 is reminiscent of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, but with a great deal of (unfortunately bad) thinking from the French revolution thrown in.  It also reminds me of New Gingrich’s Contract With America.

The document makes some very important statements which, though they were evident to our own founding fathers, are far less obvious to the current governments of either the United States or the PRC.  The first fundamental concept struck me very personally, “ Freedom is at the core of universal values. The rights of speech, publication, belief, assembly, association, movement, and to demonstrate are all the concrete realizations of freedom. If freedom is not flourishing, then there is no modern civilization of which to speak.”

Our own government would do well to remember words like “Human rights are not bestowed by the state, but are rights that each person is born with and enjoys” and “Constitutionalism is the principle of protecting basic constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms and rights of citizens through law and a rule of law, delimiting the boundaries of government power and actions, and providing corresponding systemic capacity.”

Luckily for the current generation of Americans, our forefathers had the wisdom to limit the power which they granted to the government.  Each succeeding generation has lost more power to the federal government, but we started with such a good baseline that we have been able to prosper for over two hundred years.  The people of China had no similar good fortune, as their government started as a repressive totalitarian regime.  The socialist government has murdered millions of it’s own citizens since it took power:

One positive sign is that the socialists at least have the decency to be embarrassed about this sort of behavior.  The official state news agency, Xinhua, reported Liu’s sentence only in English.