Chris Eberhardt was an India China Institute Fellow at the New School in 2008.  He is now conducting his dissertation research in China

A fellow of the India China Institute (ICI) has been arrested. He was privately eating dinner with others in Beijing, celebrating that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After hearing that the ICI Fellow had been arrested, I decided to read an article by Liu Xiaobo that was published in 2006 in the journal Social Research titled “Reform in China: The Role of Civil Society.”

The work reminded me of Neither Gods Nor Emperors by sociologist Craig Calhoun, who analyses the student protests of 1989 that culminated in demonstrations on Tiananmen Square and the military response. What I see in both works is an effort by the Chinese people to challenge China to be better at what it claims to be, linking back to movements that emerged when the dynasty system collapsed in the early 1900’s.

While Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, China was celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic. During the celebrations I went multiple times to Tiananmen Square. One night I saw a couple posing in front of flashing lights (pictured), behind which was Tiananmen Gate and Chairman Mao’s picture. I imagine that this man was probably wearing similar clothing when Mao was still alive. Every time I see a man wearing the blue hat and suit, it gives me pause. In Beijing, I am most likely to see people dressed like this fresh off the train or lined up by the thousands at 6am (2hrs early) on Tiananmen Square to view Mao’s remains.

I always wonder to myself how these people who line up for hours to view Mao, sleepy-eyed and just off a bus, understand a China where students pay almost as much or more than my rent to buy name brand clothing. It is these people who come from the heartland of China who are still thought of as the backbone of the country, still composing the majority of the population.

Perhaps it is not as well known, but every day the common people struggle to address problems in their life, with annual figures for protests greater than 80,000.  (Against the Law by Ching Kwan Lee and Popular Protest by Kevin O’Brien are two accounts of protests in China.)

I particularly enjoyed Ching’s work, documenting the balance between those in China’s rustbelt that expect China to live up to a social contract that drove the founding of the People’s Republic of China and those in the South, home to the world’s factories, that expect China to live up to a legal contract that links with China’s efforts to create a market economy.

The People’s Republic of China that is celebrated every October 1st had its roots in a small group including Mao who met in a small room in the French Quarter of Shanghai in the early 1900’s who founded the Chinese Communist Party. What Mao and the Chinese Communist Party was able to do in a way that the ruling Kuomintang could not or did not want to do was connect their vanguard struggle with the struggle of the proletariat during the Chinese Revolution. It was Mao and the Chinese Communist Party who victoriously declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, having made a bridge with the common people.

Although China does not have elections in the same manner as the United States, changes still take place in response to citizens concerns. While individuals like Liu are awarded prizes by outsiders, I will continue to humbly observe how it is that the common people of China respond to their rapidly changing China, and if bridges are made between the common people and the intellectuals.

As China revealed its repressive nature in its response to the prize, the dignity and critical insight of the dissident was revealed in Liu’s own words, as Liv Ullmann read his “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court.”

The same pattern occurred in awarding Michnik’s doctorate, though in his case it was a two part story.

Part One: Michnik was scheduled to receive his degree in a university ceremony in New York on April 25, 1984, commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the University in Exile (what would become the New School’s social science graduate school in which I am a professor) by honoring human rights activists from around the world.  Because Michnik was imprisoned as part of a martial law crackdown on independent thinkers and political and labor activists, Czeslaw Milosz accepted the honorary degree on his behalf and read from his “Letter for General Kiszczak”, in which Michnik declined an offer of exile as the condition for release from prison.

The Polish Nobel Laureate for Literature read the democratic activist’s passionate denunciation of his interior minister jailer and Michnik’s justification of his commitment to human rights: “the value of our struggle lies not in its chances for victory but rather in the values of its cause.”  He explained in the letter how his refusal of a comfortable exile was an affirmation of these values, keeping them alive in Poland.

Part Two of the story actually occurred on International Human Rights Day of 1984.  It suggested and led to much more.

I was in Warsaw for the unofficial ceremony presenting Adam Michnik his honorary degree from The New School after he was released from prison as part of a general amnesty.  I met him the day before the event agreeing upon the logistics.

The ceremony, itself, was moving, not a major international event, but still reported by the New York Times.

“In an apartment across the street from Mokotow Prison where he spent two and a half years, Adam Michnik, the Solidarity adviser and activist, received an honorary doctorate Monday from the New School for Social Reseach.

Mr. Michnik accepted the green and white academic hood presented to him by Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the New School, in the living room of Edward Lipinski, the 98- year-old Polish social activist.

It was in this same apartment that Mr. Michnik and his colleagues formed the now banned Committee to Defend Workers, which was known by its Polish initials KOR and which acted as an intellectual support group for the Solidarity movement.”

The week following the ceremony Adam introduced me to his world.  We spoke around his living room table and the kitchen tables of scholars, intellectuals and artists of Warsaw, and also in a room of a patient, Jan Józef Lipski, at the cardiac hospital on the outskirts of the city.

We went to the hospital the day after the ceremony.  Michnik wanted to share with the respected opposition historian his excitement over the honorary degree (an excitement that really surprised me).  They spoke about Lipski’s recent research on inter war Fascism in Poland.  We spoke about the significance of the Pope for independent minded Poles, workers and intellectuals.  This was one of the many conversations Michnik and I had about contemporary history, politics and political theory.  We shared our fascination in the philosophy and political theory of Hannah Arendt.  We also spoke about common friends in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Upon leaving the hospital, Michnik turned to me and proposed, a seminar idea, “now that we are New School colleagues.”  Vaclav Havel, in Prague, György Bence, in Budapest, he in Warsaw and I in New York would organize parallel seminars on the topics we had been discussing during my visit.  The starting point of the discussions would be Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Each group would read a common assignment, exchange summaries of the proceedings and propose further study.

From 1985 through 1989, the seminar functioned in Budapest, New York and Warsaw.  Political conditions made the seminar impossible in Prague.  The Polish sociologist Jerzy Szacki chaired the Warsaw seminar, because three months after our agreement Michnik was again imprisoned, charged with treason.  There were many twists and turns in the seminar, many interesting discussions and some significant exchanges.  It continued to function into the 90s across the former Soviet bloc.  One of many alternative spaces for free intellectual exchange was established and functioned, a zone of free intellectual life.

Noteworthy from the point of view in December 2010, is that the ceremony on Human Rights Day in 1984, which marked the importance of a human rights commitment as an end in itself, did empower activities that pointed in the direction of 1989, when the repressive regime in Poland and beyond, collapsed.

We know how the Chinese government and other governments have disgraced and distinguished themselves as they responded to Liu’s Prize.  What we don’t know about are the hidden activities, such as my visit with Michnik to the Cardiac Hospital in Warsaw.  Michnik may have been right about the primary value of his actions, but we should note that his actions, along with his colleagues, also led to further quite practical and significant consequences.  In China also?