Writer in residence Bei Ling - Exile, lost languages and censorship around the world
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"I must say that I don't think creative writing is necessarily innocent. It is possibly to advocate violence and hatred through creative writing. If creative writing wasn't thought to have a real impact - that is, a status quo-changing impact, then writers wouldn't be persecuted in the way they are throughout the world. But my view is that governments rightly perceive that creative literature has the power to change things.
"It doesn't surprise me at all that governments like those of China and Vietnam are afraid of writers. They're afraid of writers because they're not actually confident of their own legitimacy. It's really only countries that are confident of their legitamacy and integrity who can accept criticism as a way of improvement."
Whether it be a political manifesto, an underground paper or an innocent literary journal such as Bei Ling's 'Tendency', which later landed him in jail, under governmental law, Chinese writers remain unprotected from unlawful incarceration and NGOs such as PEN can do little for the many cases of imprisoned writers in China. This lack of protection and helplessness on the part of NGOs and citizens is, says Director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism Chris Nash, the reason why right to write is so important in democratic nations such as Australia.
"Ultimately if you live in a democracy, you've got to have information about what's going on in that society, particularly what the powerful people in that society are doing, what governments are doing, what big businesses are doing, what powerful unions are doing - you basically need to know what's going on in the society, in order that you can exercise your democratic rights to vote, to lobby, to complain, to basically be a citizen. As the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson I think once said, 'if I was faced with the choice between having a government with no newspapers or a newspaper without government, I would go for a newspaper without government every time' - that is what is fundamental to a democracy."
Cases like that of Bei Ling, who was saved from imprisonment by his writer friend Susan Sontag who lobbied on behalf of the international community, asking Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright to negotiate American settlement for her incarcerated friend, are all too rare for the majority of Chinese writers whose offences can lead to years in years in prison, such as internet writer Guo Qizhen, who has been in detention since May 2006 "on subversion charges for his critical writings and pro-democracy activities."
Nash says that there has been increase of monitoring in Australia since the 'war on terrorism' (seen in legislation such as the Anti-Terrorism Act (No. 2) 2005, which offers a broad definition of police's rights to monitor, search and detain suspects) and, owing to the fact that Australia does not have a bill of rights, journalists and writers in Australia are even less protected than those in the US and Britain.
"In Australia ... there's also been quite draconian limitations on freedom of speech and the rights of the press far beyond anything that's been implemented in the United States or Great Britain, who have both in fact experienced terrorism on their own soil - September 11 and the Oklahoma bombing in the United States and the IRA campaign on mainland Britain and around London and so on. So because both those countries have got bills of rights, even though they've experienced terrorism, they haven't gone as far in limiting rights of the press as we’ve gone in Australia.
"Terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda are a very serious threat. However, and, turning what is effectively a police campaign around security into a larger social war against certain groups in society and using that war as a way of entrenching a much more authoritarian control of freedom of expression, does Australia no good at all."