T

he traumatic history of modern China has produced four current “generations” with distinct identities due to formative historic experiences around the age of 20:

• a Civil War generation, born after 1925, raised in an era of war and revolution, now China’s elderly living on meager pensions
• the Cultural Revolution generation, born in the 1950s and raised “under the Red Flag” in the Mao era, sometimes called the “lost” generation, which suffered loss of education when schools closed, loss of family as the one child policy was enforced, and now loss of employment due to forced early retirements in their fifties.
• the Tiananmen generation, born in the late Mao era but raised during Deng’s optimistic period of top-down socialist reform that ended in disillusionment on June Fourth, now in their thirties and forties
• a “Rising China” generation -- today’s twenty-somethings, mostly single children who were born after Mao’s death and grew up during the consumer revolution and rising nationalism of the 1990s. Also called the “post-1980” or “bird’s nest” generation, they may yet be marked more by the looming global recession than the ephemeral fireworks of the Beijing Olympics.

The interaction of these generational groups will shape China’s future. I have long viewed the Cultural Revolution generation, those I know best personally, as a kind of “Moses generation,” one destined to lead the people out of the “slavery” of despotism in Egypt to the “promised land” of democracy, but without actually setting foot in the land themselves. As members of this group turn sixty, however, the memories of youthful ideals stoke a sense of urgency about seeing change and leaving a meaningful legacy.

On December 10th, 2008, 300 leading Chinese public intellectuals unveiled a manifesto calling for China to implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, including freedom of religion and belief, which it signed ten years ago. The name of Charter ’08 echoes the famous Charter ‘77 issued by East European activists as a blueprint to guide gradual democratization over the following fifteen years.

The timing commemorates the date of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the year of the 100th anniversary of China’s first constitution, the 30th of Democracy Wall, and the upcoming 20th year after Tianamen. View the Charter ‘08 text from the January 15th New York Review of Books at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22210

Most of the original Charter ’08 signers are members of the Cultural Revolution generation, the “revolutionary successors” who as Red Guards carried out Mao’s struggle against his enemies. His betrayal in sending 17 million youth to the countryside for a decade of hard labor turned them into the “thinking generation.” During the Tiananmen Square confrontations, they counseled the younger cohort to be more reasonable and practical in their demands, and they tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a compromise to avoid the bloodshed that ended up setting back political reform nearly two decades.

The 53-year-old originator of Charter ’08, Liu Xiaobo, has lived a precarious existence in China since trying to lead students to safety from Tiananmen Square in the early morning of June Fourth 1989. Reflecting back on the fifth anniversary in 1994 he criticized the Chinese worship of “That Holy Word, ‘Revolution.’” He noted how the Maoist struggle culture fosters an emotional martyrdom complex and creates “heroic” zealots who justify radical violence in the name of revolutionary justice and utopian ideals.

Liu now believes that the least costly pathway to democratization is the self-reform of the Communist Party, in which pressure from civil society and international society can play only a modest role. (This kind of internal generational change in fact was responsible for the democratization of formerly communist countries in Europe.) The Charter ’08 manifesto is intended to renew a commitment to democratization by the middle two generations in their thirties to fifties, whether in the political elite or the new business and social elites. It does not establish an organization, which would provoke the state’s counter-attack, but calls for an open, informal association of those pursuing realistic parallel efforts to achieve constitutional politics over the long haul.

Since early December, over 2000 in China have signed the charter, with a supportive statement by prominent Chinese overseas, including the Dalai Lama. The state’s initial response to the manifesto has included detention of Liu and interrogation of dozens of other organizers, while warning state employees that signing or writing about the Charter will result in loss of employment. Both the tentative nature and the internal focus of the response is evidence of widespread sympathy by insiders for the goals of Charter ’08.

A good friend of mine from the Cultural Revolution generation, who has a Ph.D. in agricultural economics and works to aid rural and urban labor in China, views the methods of the Charter as mired in the past. It is too political, adopting a self-righteous tone of moral one-upmanship that pits the intellectuals as “good guys” vs. the “bad guys” in the Party leadership. I think his critique reflects a gap between the Charter activists who are mainly writers, philosophers and legal advocates and others I know with advanced education in social sciences or technical fields. They view China’s leaders as incompetent rather than evil, and they spend their energy on finding concrete policy solutions to China’s urgent problems rather than repeating admirable but general long-term goals. Charter ’08 poses a problem for the thousands of these silent insiders working for change; for them, “to sign or not to sign” comes as a major distraction rather than encouragement. They want to help the government respond to the massive economic dissatisfaction inevitable in the months to come with nonviolent and effective approaches that keep China moving ahead.

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