ABSTRACT
On 10 December 2008 a document called Charter 08 was made public in China.1
Inspired by the Charter 77 of Czechoslovakia and published on the sixtieth
anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, it was initially signed by over
300 individuals from inside and outside the government and across wide sectors of
society. The document consisted of a foreword, in which the authors provided a
brief overview of failed political reforms since the Opium Wars, a second part,
which constituted an affirmation of principles of the authors, followed by 19
‘recommendations on governance, citizens’ rights and social development’. Instead
of advocating steady reform, the document called for fundamental change to the
political system in China and is considered to be the embodiment and synthesis of
theoretical and intellectual achievements by Chinese liberal intellectuals over a
decade (Feng 2010). One year after the publication of Charter 08 Liu Xiaobo, one
of the men responsible for drafting the document, was sentenced to an 11-year
prison sentence for subversion. The image of the empty chair placed in his honour
at the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo has become a powerful symbol of the
entrenched positions as far as the question of human rights and political reform in
China are concerned.
