China Cracks Down

China has sentenced a dissident who started a petition calling for democracy in China to 11 years in prison.  The Financial Times has a good story.

I find this extremely disturbing.  I had believed that China, while generally intolerant of dissent, was not an evil government.  Rather, I saw them as obsessed with order, governing an unruly country of more than a billion people.  On a number of occasions,  the government had responded to public opinion.  I had assumed that, over time, the government would continue to succumb to public pressure and begin to relax the political oppression.

Now, I’m not so sure.  Liu Xiaobo courageous launched the so-called Chapter 08 petition  that called for the end of one-party rule in China. For that, he will apparently spend the next 11 years of his life in prison.  More troubling is the fact that he was sentenced in a one-day trial that was held largely in secret.

At a time when China is becoming much more engaged on the world stage, this behavior does not bode well for the future.