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TFCivilCourageNewsV8-2-p6:TF - Civil Courage Newsletter 8/30/12 1:08 PM Page 1 Civil Courag e News Journal of the Civil Courage Prize Vol. 8, No. 2 • September 2012 For Steadfast Resistance to Evil at Great Personal Risk Columbia University Chinese Author Yu Jie Wins 2012 Civil Professor Philip Bobbitt Courage Prize for Leading Freedom and to Deliver Keynote Pro-democracy Efforts in China Address at Ceremony u Jie, of Chengdu, China, will hilip Bobbitt, receive this year’s Civil Courage Pthe Herbert YPrize Medal and a prize of Wechsler Professor $50,000 granted by The Train Foundation. of Jurisprudence at Mr. Yu, an award-winning writer, is a Columbia Univer - notable figure in Chinese pro-democracy sity and the Director and freedom efforts and a co-author of of the Center on Charter 08, a manifesto calling on the National Security Communist Party of China to adopt an promised to use his new-found freedom at the Columbia Law School, will give independent legal system, eliminate to “put forth my voice on the broader the keynote address at the Civil one-party rule, respect human rights and international platform on behalf of the Courage Prize Ceremony this October enact other reforms. struggle for democracy and freedom in 17th in New York City. Professor Bob - Yu Jie is well known as a close asso - China”. He has stated that he plans bitt, whose scholarly interests include ciate and biographer of the 2010 Nobel to continue his influence in China constitutional law and interpretation, Peace Laureate, Liu Xiaobo. Though through the use of the Internet and his international security and the history of long a target of negative attention from Twitter account, which has over 38,000 strategy, also serves as a Senior Fellow the Chinese authorities, Mr. Yu has suf - followers. at the Robert S. Strauss Center for In - fered from a lengthy period of constant Mr. Yu’s multiple writings are ternational Security and Law at the harassment, a year of house arrest and censored in China, he having been put University of Texas. eventually life-threatening torture, on a blacklist of banned authors, but Professor Bobbitt has served the beginning shortly after the announce - continue to be published abroad. Mr. U.S. government during six adminis - ment of Mr. Liu’s Nobel Prize. Mr. Yu’s Yu has been described as ‘very blunt trations, both Democratic and Republi - abuse included brutal physical beatings about the shortcomings of Chinese can, including acting as Associate and burns, and death threats which politics and society’, with one of his Counsel to the President of the United eventually led, on his release, to his essays comparing China to the story States, for which he received the Presiden - move earlier this year to the United of the Emperor Who Had No Clothes tial Certificate of Merit, as the Counselor States, where he has applied for asylum with the Chinese people ‘so cowed by on International Law at the U.S. State and now continues to write. Mr. Yu political intimidation that they dare Department and Senior Director for speculates that he was allowed to leave not speak simple truths’. His first Strategic Planning at the National the country because the authorities book, Fire and Ice, was reviewed as a Security Council. He presently serves believed he would be less of a threat ‘scathing work of social and political on the Advisory Committee on living abroad during this year of criticism’ and he was subjected to many International Law to continued on page 2 leadership change in China. He has interrogations and continued on page 2 TFCivilCourageNewsV8-2-p6:TF - Civil Courage Newsletter 8/30/12 1:08 PM Page 2 Letter from the Chairman Chinese Author Yu Jie Wins 2012 Civil Courage Prize hen the Civil Courage Prize began, inspired and encouraged Wby Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, our great national strategic con - continued from page 1 threats from the authorities for cern was the threat presented by the Soviet Union, which had gobbled his critical biography of China’s Premier, entitled up much of Europe, and was applying tremendous pressure to many if China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabo. Another thorn for not most other countries. We helped Solzhenitsyn get the Templeton the authorities has been his latest book, a biography Prize, worth as much as the Nobel, and accompanied him to Bucking - of Mr. Liu, now serving an 11-year prison sentence, ham Palace to receive it. Solzhenitsyn’s writings did a lot to destroy which was recently published in Hong Kong. Mr. the reputation of communism. Yu is currently working on a critique of Hu Jintao, Times have changed, and according to this year’s Civil Courage the President of China, which he expects to publish Prize winner, with the Soviet Union gone, China is the next threat. in Hong Kong this year. Here is what he writes: Mr. Yu, who wrote his first book at age 13 and “I arrived in the United States a month ago, thinking that I had escaped went on to receive a Master’s in Literature from the reach of Beijing, only to realize that the Chinese government’s Peking University in 2000, portrays himself as a shadow continues to be omnipresent. Several U.S. universities that I ‘true patriot’ and a ‘truth-teller’. He describes his have contacted dare not invite me for a lecture, as they cooperate with path to becoming a political dissident as a culmi - China on many projects. If you are a scholar of Chinese studies who nation of three different influences: his experience has criticized the Communist Party, it would be impossible for you to of hearing about Tiananmen Square on the BBC be involved in research projects with the Chinese-funded Confucius and Voice of America as a high school student in Institute, and you may even be denied a Chinese visa. Conversely, if Chengdu; his meeting and subsequent collaboration you praise the Communist Party, not only would you receive ample with Liu Xiaobo in 1999; and his conversion to research funding but you might also be invited to visit China and even Christianity in 2003. be received by high-level officials. Western academic freedom has been In addition to his writings, Mr. Yu has been distorted by invisible hands. involved in working with other Chinese writers to I believe that China is a far greater threat than the former Soviet organize the Independent Chinese PEN Center, Union ever was: unfortunately, the West lacks visionary politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, to stand up to this threat. serving as its vice-president from 2005-7. He has The Chinese Communist Party remains a tiger that will bite. For also helped to organize Chirstian ‘house churches’, working on human rights with Liu Xiaobo, after he was awarded the and worked to defend the rights of China's Nobel Prize, I was tortured by the country’s secret police and nearly minorities, especially religious rights. In 2010, lost my life. Since then, dozens of lawyers and writers have been sub - MSNBC named Mr. Yu as one of China’s ten lead - jected to brutal torture; some contracted severe pneumonia after ing dissidents. being held in front of fans blowing cold air and then being baked by an electric furnace. The secret police threatened me, saying that they had a list of 200 anti-Communist Party intellectuals whom they were Bobitt to Deliver Keynote Speech ready to arrest and bury alive. Over the past year, the number of political at Civil Courage Prize Ceremony prisoners in China has increased, and the jail sentences have become longer, yet Western voices of protest have become weaker. continued from page 1 the Secretary of State. Harsh internal repression and unrestrained external expansion are The author of many essays and articles and of two sides of the same coin. The Chinese Communist Party recently seven published books, Professor Bobbitt’s works vetoed the U.N. Security Council’s resolution on Syria because include: Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution; killings, not unlike those committed by Damascus, continue in Tibet.” The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of My own view is that China, like Russia formerly, has much to fear History ; and, most recently, Terror and Consent: the from internal unrest, but that the U.S. and China are not natural ene - Wars for the Twenty-First Century . His forthcoming mies, and should be friends. book, My Robes of State: Machiavelli and the World He Made , will be published in 2013. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Page 2 September 2012 TFCivilCourageNewsV8-2-p6:TF - Civil Courage Newsletter 8/30/12 1:08 PM Page 3 Recent News of Past Winners 2005 CCP winner Min Ko Naing of Burma, 2009 CCP winner Aminatou who had been sentenced to 65 years in jail, was Haidar of the Western Sahara finally released from prison in January of this year. received further intimidation and Min Ko Naing, a prominent leader of the 1988 shocking news when her teenage student protest movement, was probably the most children were beaten by unidentified important dissident still in jail to be released by the assailants in July of this year, while trav - extensive government amnesty of political prison - eling by bus from Agadir in Morocco to ers. President Thein Sein said the newly freed prisoners could “play a constructive El Aiun in the Western Sahara. The role in the political process”, and the move was hailed by many as a significant attack, not the first harassment they breakthrough for reform by Burma.

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