By Jerome A. Cohen
Recent events should make us reflect again on the costs of voluntary martyrdom. Ms. Zhang Zhan, the Shanghai lawyer-journalist who is serving a sentence of four years in prison for reporting on Wuhan’s early mishandling of the Coronavirus, is currently hospitalized and approaching death as a result of the determined hunger strike that she hopes will inspire further protests against dictatorship. Professor Xu Zhiyong has again recently been indicted for another supposedly subversive offense that may ensure his continuing imprisonment and torture, this time for perhaps twelve years.
On the other hand, the distinguished journalist and author Stephen Vines has wisely decided to leave Hong Kong for London rather than risk prosecution, like so many other critics have already suffered, for exposing the Handover that has now become the Takeover. Just before leaving, he published an excellent book entitled “Defying the Dragon; Hong Kong and the World’s Largest Dictatorship”. One of the distinguished observers who have endorsed this book is Joshua Wong, whom the book’s publisher rightly identifies as “Hong Kong’s most famous democracy advocate”. Joshua, sadly, seems destined to spend the coming years in prison.
Wouldn’t Zhang Zhan, Xu Zhiyong and Joshua Wong do more for human rights if they were free and abroad rather than silenced in prison? Was Liu Xiaobo right in believing that political martyrdom would inspire future generations sufficiently to warrant the loss of his further contributions, if only from exile?
I had this kind of conversation with the famous Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng in 2005. He chose martyrdom rather than the less heroic, more practical path that I suggested. Tragically, he has long since been “disappeared” and joined the forgotten.