Sandwiched between Russian and China, Mongolia is about to lay 3,542 miles of track across the country and to Russia’s Far Eastern sea ports.

Mongolia has grown increasingly dependent on commerce with China since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 75 percent of exports went to PRC in 2009, according to European Union figures.

“Using the Russia route, Mongolia will have better access to a global market rather than just dealing with China,” Chris Weafer, Moscow-based chief strategist at UralSib Financial Corp. said to the Bloomberg. “You need that to maximize the commercial value of its goods. Otherwise China dictates prices.”

The massive infrastructure investment stems from the Mongolian government’s desire to diversify trade and reduce dependence on China.

“The missing link in the Mongolian gold rush now is transportation infrastructure,” said Roland Nash, who helps manage about US$150 million of Russian stocks at Moscow-based hedge fund Verno Investment Management Ltd.

“The key for the Mongolians is to attract investments from as many different countries as possible to lessen their dependence on China.”

When the Dalai Lama visited Mongolia in 2002, China expressed its displeasure by closing the border.

“Who knows, they could do that any time,” Dashbaljir Nemekhbayar, head of the Transportation Ministry’s Finance and Investment Department, told EurasiaNet.

In addition to the desire to build up its own industrial capacity, Mongolia finds Russia to be a more comfortable partner to work with than China, said Alicia Campi, president of the U.S.-Mongolia Advisory Group.

“The Russians, partners since 1949 in Mongolia’s north-south border-to-border sole railway, are a known, basically reliable commodity to Mongolian policymakers and they share Mongolian concern over rapidly increasing Chinese penetration and monopolization of north Asian economic trade,” Campi continued.

The rail improvements could also help Mongolia capitalize on new rare earth taxes and regulations instituted in recent years by China, the world’s dominant rare element producer.

“Modernization of the country’s transportation infrastructure will make Mongolian mining ventures even more attractive to foreign investors,” John Shearer, president and CEO of GTSO, which is currently working to secure the mining rights to four mineral-rich properties in Mongolia, said to the Business Wire.

Mongolia this year is to start building a link from the Tavan Tolgoi coal basin with an existing rail line north to Russia.

“Tavan Tolgoi is ready to invest US$1.5 billion into 1000-kilometer railway line connecting Tavan Tolgoi to Choibalsan via Sainshand industrial complex,” Kh. Battulga, Minister for Road, Transportation Construction and Urban Development said on April 21 to business-mongolia.com. Mongolian Choibalsan city is already connected to the Russian rail network.

US$10 billion industrial complex in southern city of Sainshand to include a copper smelter, oil refinery, power plants and chemical coking facilities to process the output from both the coal and copper-gold mines.

Feasibility study of the rail-line project is expected to be completed in July 2011, according to the Tavan Tolgoi web site.

While the government has said the railroad will be constructed within two years, some experts said it is more likely to take three to four years.

According to the International Monetary Fund, economic growth may surge to 23 percent in 2013, more than twice the forecast expansion in China, as large mining projects begin production.

Mongolia’s benchmark MSE Top 20 Index is the world’s best performer in the past 12 months and its currency, the tugrik, the fifth-biggest gainer against the dollar.

Agriculture and mining each account for about 20 percent of gross domestic product. Aside from coal and copper, the country also holds oil, potash, iron ore and uranium, as well as rare earths used in electronics, wind turbines and smart bombs.

World Bank data says Mongolian rail network comprises 1,815 kilometers of broad gauge track, of which 1,110 kilometers are on the main line linking Russia to China, 238 kilometers are on a separate network in Eastern Mongolia that has its own link to the Russian railway, and the remaining 477 kilometers are branches from the main line.

Japan’s recent nuclear disaster is not seen to have a lasting impact on the global nuclear industry, he said.

“We don’t think it’s a big problem for the industry as a whole. It’s a little bit of set-back in time frame, but as a whole it will go on” Gombo said. “We want green development and nuclear is the number one choice.”

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mongolia with its proven uranium reserves of about 80,000 tons ranks 16th in the world in reserves of uranium resources and 6th in the Asian continent following Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, and India.

The country untested reserves may raise the estimate to 1.39 million tons, constituting the largest reserves in the world.

However, currently most of the energy in Mongolia is still generated from coal.

Coal provides 80 percent of its electricity (3 billion kWh in 2009), from less than 1 GWe capacity, and 13 percent of electricity is imported from Russia. Air pollution is a major problem in Ulaanbaatar, from domestic combustion, cars, and power generation.

“We have the ambition to build the capability of nuclear energy in Mongolia, and the ambition to supply nuclear power plants in Northeast Asia with nuclear fuel,” Gombo told reporters on the sidelines of a mining conference in Singapore.

He said the country is seeking investment from around the globe to develop its nuclear energy sector, adding that uranium reserves in the country could rise to above 1 million tons.

“Currently there is not much, but we expect there will be huge investment in Mongolia’s nuclear energy sector, because the super powers are interested,” said Gombo, adding that the United States, Russia and China are competing with each other to get into the country’s nuclear sector.

While Mongolian-Russian joint ventures are currently gaining much attention, sandwiched between China and Russian Mongolia is rightfully diversifying investment partners in its nuclear industry sector to avoid over reliance on any single party.

“The government is quite selective, and is opting to cooperate with the most developed countries in the industry, like the United States, Japan and France,” he said, while adding that it is not like Mongolia doesn’t want to deal with China and Russia, “but we want a balance of interest.”

Meanwhile, Atomredmetzoloto, the mining arm of Russian state-owned nuclear giant Rosatom, says that Russia spent the equivalent of US$600 million on uranium exploration and development in Mongolia to 1995.

In December 2011, Bayarbayasgalan, head of the Nuclear Materials department of the Mongolian Nuclear Energy Agency, told the government-run news agency Montsame that about 20 companies, most of which are international, are now exploring for uranium in Mongolian territory.

According to France’s Areva website, Mongolia and France’s governments signed an agreement to let the company to explore and mine uranium in Mongolia last October.

In September 2009 India also signed a uranium supply and nuclear cooperation agreement with Mongolia. Electricity demand in India is increasing rapidly, and the 830 billion kilowatt hours produced in 2008 was triple the 1990 output, though still represented only some 700 kWh per capita for the year. The country plans to increase its nuclear energy production from 3,667 Mwe to 20,000 Mwe by 2020 and 63,000 Mwe by 2032, which will comprise 25 percent of total electricity production.

The Mongolian government has played a leading role in all nuclear-related efforts. And experts’ considers this trend will continue in the near future.

The new Mongolian Nuclear Energy Law (d/d July 2009), gives government the right to take ownership without payment of not less than 51 percent stake in developments explored with state monies, and not less than 34 percent stake in independently explored sites.

According to Amnesty International information, about 300 people gathered in the city’s Fountain Square for a rally held by the Musavat opposition party. Several people were also detained on their way to the event by the police.

“There is no justification for heavy-handed tactics to be used against obviously peaceful protestors,” said Natalia Nozadze, Amnesty International’s Azerbaijan expert who was present at the protest.

Demonstrators chanted “Liberty” and called for the resignation of the president and also called for the release of imprisoned activists.

The opposition activists sent out more than 35,000 invitations for people to support the anti-government group on Facebook and more than 3,000 clicked the “I’m attending” button to support the Friday action.

Observers sound skeptical of a Near-Eastern scenario to be repeated in Baku. But Friday’s protests rattled the authorities enough to cause a wave of arrests that made the regime look both vicious and fearful.

Police said 43 people were detained near the Oil Academy, a major university in central Baku.

Azerbaijan, an energy supplier to Europe and a transit route for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, has been ruled by one family for nearly two decades since Soviet veteran Heidar Aliyev came to power in 1993. He was succeeded by his son Ilham in 2003.

The removal of autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt is being felt in other Central Asian countries as well.

Run by an aging tyrant Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan is nervous too.

State media in Uzbekistan, the only media permitted in the country, has been attacking both Muslim extremists and Western “satanic” rock and roll. This kind of music is created by “evil forces” and is “approaching as dark clouds over the heads of Uzbek youth,” the Radio Free Europe quoted local media as saying.

Meanwhile, in a sign of both corruption and anxiety, last year Uzbeks became the second-fastest growing nationality purchasing luxury residential properties in London. The Moscow Times reports average sale amounts to US$3.3 million.

While Russia has benefited from the turmoil in the Arab world due to the surge in the price of oil, China is worried about its own internal tensions in Tibet and Islamic Turkic-speaking Xinjiang, and at the same time China depends on Central Asia for a considerable portion of its energy needs.

China buys a lot of natural gas from Turkmenistan. Lately, China has been turning to neighboring Kazakhstan for more of its energy needs — 40 percent of its uranium, for example. China National Petroleum Corp. is developing gas deposits in western Kazakhstan for direct export to China via a pipeline under construction.

“But the problem is that a good percentage of energy shipments over land have to enter China via Xinjiang, which can easily become unsafe if disturbances break out,” Richard Lourie, the author of Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, said to The Moscow Times.

From January through October, the total industrial output increased by 177.2 bln.tog or 13.2 percent to 1.517.4 bln.tog compared to the same period the previous year.

The increase in the industrial output was mainly due to significant increases in main mining and quarrying products such as crude oil and coal; products such as milk, yogurt, fodder, metal foundries, flour, soft drinks, beer, wine, alcohol, metal construction; goods such as mutton, goat meat, steel casting, and iron ore.

According to the data, coal mining and lignite extraction of peat showed an increase of 91.3 percent for the first 10 months of 2010, compared to the same period the previous year.

Extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas increased 32.5 percent; other mining and quarrying – 26.6 percent; rubber and plastic products manufacturing – 60.8 percent; manufacturing of wearing apparel, dressing and dyeing of fur – 35.9 percent; food products and beverages – 33.7 percent; manufacturing of chemicals and chemical products – 31.2 percent; coke, refined petroleum products and nuclear fuel manufacturing – 29.5 percent for the first 10 months of 2010, compared to the same period of previous year.

In the first 10 months of 2010, a total of 179.4 bln.tog of construction and installation work were carried out at the national level. Of that, 165.1 bln.tog, or 92.0 percent of the work, were executed by domestic entities and 14.3 bln.tog or 8 percent was done by foreign entities.

During the studied period, Mongolia traded with 127 countries from all over the world and total foreign trade turnover reached US$4.8 billion, of which exports made up US$2.2 billion and imports made up US$2.5 billion.

External trade in the first 10 months of 2010 showed a deficit of US$ 258.0 million, reflecting an increase of US$39.8 million, or 18.2 percent, compared to the same period of the previous year. For the first 10 months of 2010, total external trade turnover increased by US$1.6 billion or 50.7 percent, of which exports went up by US$789 million or 53.1 percent, and imports went up by US$828 million or 48.6 percent, compared to the same periods the previous year.

Mineral products, natural or cultured stones, precious metal, jewelry and textiles accounted for 94.7 percent of the total export value amount.

Statistic figures also show that 55.5 percent of Mongolia’s total foreign trade was with China and 19.3 percent with Russia. Trade with China increased by 9 percent in comparison with the same period of 2009. Russia was the source of 34.3 percent of total imports while 30 percent of them came from China.

Gates is reportedly planning to travel to China early next year.

“I think we are efforting to put together a meeting of that sort when Secretary Gates and his Chinese counterpart are attending the ASEAN-plus ministerial in Hanoi early next week,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters.

Gates is flying to Hanoi on Saturday to participate in the inaugural ASEAN Defense Ministers plus eight meeting, a gathering of the defense ministers of the ASEAN nations, as well as their partners, including Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia and the United States.

It is the first time that that defense leaders from the regions will formally come together and establish a regional security dialogue.

“A more regular exchange of views will help build trust and transparency in the region, which will be important as nations there continue to develop new, more advanced military capabilities,” Morrell said.

With regards to U.S.-China relations, China had suspended such contacts in January in protest over the US$6.4 billion arms package that Washington sold to Taiwan. This led to Beijing refusing to invite Gates to visit during his previous trip to the region in June.
The Associated Press reports that China signaled an end to the freeze last week when the Defense Ministry’s head of foreign affairs, Maj. Gen. Qian Lihua, told visiting U.S. Assistant Deputy Defense Secretary Michael Schiffer that regular dialogue and exchanges on military safety at sea and other issues would be resumed.
“What’s been asked of us now is the Chinese have expressed to us a desire to host the secretary. They’ve asked us to look for opportunities in his calendar.

We’re doing that right now, looking forward to reporting back on some possible dates. Our expectation is that we would be able to travel and engage with the Chinese as soon as possible,” Morrell said.

Beijing also agreed to hold a session of talks focused on naval issues in Hawaii in mid-October and a broader set of defense consultations in Washington later in the year.

“Emerging markets China and India are quoting in the range of 12-13 and 17-18 price to earnings, with India clearly outperforming the rest of the world,” Stephen Corry, director and chief investment officer of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management’s Asia-Pacific region, told Reuters in an interview. “We expect China to outperform India in the second half of 2010.”

“It’s just a relative call,” he said. “The relative valuations went very high compared to other regional equity markets.”

Acknowledging that “Indian equities have outperformed [Chinese equities] year to date,” Corry believes that Chinese stocks represent a good value buy at the moment while Indian stocks are fairly and accurately priced.

“I think Indian equities right now are pretty much priced for perfection,” he said.

Since the beginning of January, India’s Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index (Sensex) has outperformed the primary bourses of its BRIC counterparts with modest growth of 3.2 percent. Brazil’s Bovespa Index has dropped about 3.5 percent so far this year and the Russian Trading System Index has declined by 5.4 percent. Meanwhile, coming in as the world’s third-worst performing index of 2010, China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index has dropped off nearly 18 percent since the beginning of the year. However, the Chinese bourse has looked more promising lately.

Since hitting a 52-week low on July 2, the Shanghai Composite Index has seen its value rebound with growth of 14.8 percent to date while India’s Sensex has increased by 3.7 percent over the same period. At noon on Wednesday in Shanghai, the Sensex was trading at 18,112.34 and the Shanghai Composite Index was valued at 2,663.91.

“I think there is a compulsion we are now beginning to start to see of people shifting out of India and moving their allocations more in favor of China going forward,” Corry said.

This is the third try to pass the law on Casino through Ikh Khural. Two other drafts were rejected by the previous Parliament.

“Neighboring regions of neighboring countries don’t have any casinos or gambling centers, which allows such businesses to flourish in Mongolia,” deputies said to Business Mongolia. Law initiators believe that it will contribute to the Mongolian economy and revenue.

According to the draft document, one percent of casino income will be collected into the “Good Will” Foundation, a social welfare fund. The casino is going to be open only for foreigners and the government of Mongolia will own certain part of its asset.

The government of the country had signed a contract four years ago that will put a U.S. real-estate company, Winwheel Bullion, in charge of building a casino complex with hotels, shopping malls, banks and a modern airport to bring visitors across the vast distances needed to reach it. Neither the company nor the Mongolian side have provided any information about financial arrangements for the zone.

The government first awarded a contract to develop Zamyn Uud to a British Virgin Islands-registered company called Western Paradise, promising tax breaks and other incentives, but that deal fell through.

Zamyn-Uud FTZ is 900 hectares in size and located three kilometers east of the main town and three kilometers north of Erenhot city (usually shortened into Eriyen, Ereen or Erlian), Inner Mongolia, China.

A tiny town and railway depot, Zamyn Uud is about 350 miles northwest of Beijing, has a population of 10.000 inhabitants and is very much dependent upon the commercial activity generated by the neighboring Chinese city Erenhot.

The major employer in Zamyn-Uud is the Government of Mongolia, which employs approximately 700 people to manage and operate the Mongolian Railway. In this location, the railway is very important as it handles goods and products being transported from Russia to China (around 10 million tons per year), facilitates direct cross-border trade with China, and has a container loading and unloading facility (twenty wagons a day) to overcome the difference in rail gauge of the Mongolian and Chinese railway systems. Handling capacity of the transshipment facility is 60-80 wagons a day.

The city of Erenhot is experiencing fast economic growth. Its current population is estimated at almost two -hundred thousand residents while the per capita GDP of the city was at 14,000 Yuan in 2009.

Between Mongolia and China there presently is only one international port of entry operating on a permanent basis and nine bilateral ports of entry operating on a seasonal basis. Most prominent among these is the “Zamiin-Uud – Erenhot,” international port.Nine others, including “Bulgan” port in the province of Khobdo, “Gashuunsukhait” port in the province of South Gobi, and “Shiveekhuren,” also in South Gobi, are very crowded during the short season in which they operate.

According to the state’s statistic data 508.821 of Mongolian citizens traveled through the various ports of entry to Russia and China in 2000, but the majority – 266.221 passing through Zamyn Uud –Erenhot.

“I can report that 20 thousand tons of wheat has been exported to the Peoples Republic of China for the first time,” said Kazakhstan’s Vice-Premier Umirzak Shukeev during the meeting.

Earlier, during negotiations between Kazakhstan’s national corporation ‘Prodkorporatsija’ and China’s leading grain, oil, and food trading group COFCO, the ‘Prodkorporatsija’ stated their readiness to deliver around 150 thousand tons of high-quality wheat to the PRC market.

“The serious barrier to advancement of Kazakhstan grain to world markets is the absence of a direct transit route to seaports. The expense of transfer tariffs for each ton of grain rises approximately 50 dollars,” said Shukeev.

In this regard, the Kazakhstan government plans to initiate and complete export infrastructure construction including a railway grain terminal along the Kazakhstan – PRC border by 2013. The terminal will directly link Dostyk station (Kazakhstan territory) and Alashankou (Sintszjan-Uigur Independent Area, Northwest China). The single storage capacity of the terminal is put at one million tons of grain.

Shukeev also stated that the coordination of the project by governmental order has provided a direct means of reducing the transportation costs of the grain through China and this rate stands at 40 US$ per ton.

According to the ‘Kazakh-grain’ news agency, the country topped world wheat flour exports in 2007 and now maintains 6th place among the world’s largest grain exporters. Last year, the country’s share from the world’s total wheat flour export amount stood at 18 percent.

What Dalai Lama has said and done in the past decades have fully shown that he is not a pure religious figure, but a political figure in exile who’s long engaged in activities to split China and undermine ethnic unity in China under the cover of religion. While claiming that his visits to foreign countries are aimed at spreading religious teachings, he has never stopped defaming the Chinese Government, selling “Tibet independence” proposals and undermining relations between China and other countries. This is well reflected in his remarks during his current visit, including those he made on CNN’s Larry King Live.

In addition, the talks between Dalai’s private representatives and the Chinese Government at the end of January have demonstrated once again that the Dalai group is still clinging to their separatist propositions, including the so-called “greater Tibet region” and “meaningful autonomy”, whose ultimate goal is to separate a quarter of Chinese territory from China. This is something that no sovereign country can allow to occur.

As Dalai Lama claimed on Larry King Live, he regards a foreign country other than China or its Tibetan Autonomous Region as his “home”, and Tibet is “not much concern” to him. Such a political figure is in no way qualified to represent the Tibetan people as self-claimed by him.

Tibet has never been a country in history, but an inalienable part of China from ancient times. Dalai Lama’s repeated calling Tibet a “country” explains nothing but his true mind of splitting Tibet from China. We urge the U.S. side earnestly abide by the U.S. Government’s committment of recognizing Tibet as part of China and not supporting “Tibet independence”, take measures to undo the damages caused by Dalai’s visit, stop providing convenience or platform for Dalai and pro-Tibet independence forces, take concret actions to maintain the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations. We sincerely hope American people see through Dalai’s true nature as a separatist and his ulterior motive of sabotaging China-U.S. relations, understand and support China’s just positions on Tibet-related issues.

In a session that lasted less than ten minutes, a Beijing court on Thursday upheld an 11-year sentence against popular Chinese human rights activists Liu Xiaobo, co-author of the pro-democracy Charter 08.

After the court decision, US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman called on “the government of China to release him immediately and to respect the right of all citizens to peacefully express their political views and exercise internationally recognized freedoms”.

European Union representatives in Beijing said: “The EU believes that the verdict against Liu Xiaobo – for his role as author of Charter 08 and for publishing articles concerning human rights on the internet – is entirely incompatible with his right to freedom of expression.”

Beijing said the prosecution was in accordance with Chinese law.

“China has no dissidents,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said.

The following is an abridged statement by Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, co-author of the Charter 08 campaign for constitutional reform, given in his trial on 23 December 2009. Today the result of his appeal against an 11-year jail sentence for subversion was announced – the court upheld the verdict.

June 1989 was the major turning point in my 50 years on life’s road. Before that, I was a member of the first group of students to take the newly restored college entrance examinations following the Cultural Revolution; my career was a smooth ride, from undergraduate to grad student and through to PhD. After graduation I stayed on as a lecturer at Beijing Normal University.

On the podium, I was a popular teacher, well received by students. I was also a public intellectual: in the 1980s I published articles and books that created an impact. I was frequently invited to speak in different places, and invited to go abroad to Europe and the US as a visiting scholar. What I required of myself was to live with honesty, responsibility and dignity both as a person and in my writing.

Subsequently, because I had returned from the US to take part in the 1989 movement, I was imprisoned for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement to crime”, losing the platform I loved; I was never again allowed to publish or speak in public in China. Simply for expressing divergent political views and taking part in a peaceful and democratic movement, a teacher lost his podium, a writer lost the right to publish, and a public intellectual lost the chance to speak publicly. This was a sad thing, both for myself as an individual, and, after three decades of reform and opening, for China.

Thinking about it, my most dramatic experiences after 4 June 1989 have all been linked with the courts; the two opportunities I had to speak in public have been provided by trials held in the people’s intermediate court in Beijing, one in January 1991 and one now. Although the charges on each occasion were different, they were in essence the same, both crimes of expression.

Twenty years on, the innocent souls of 4 June are yet to rest in peace, and I, who had been drawn into the path of dissidence by the passions of 4 June, after leaving the Qincheng prison in 1991 lost the right to speak openly in my own country, and could only do so through overseas media, and hence was monitored for many years; placed under surveillance (May 1995 – January 1996); educated through labour (October 1996 – October 1999), and now once again am thrust into the dock by enemies in the regime.

But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed 20 years ago in my hunger strike declaration – I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities. This includes the prosecution at present: I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December.

For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

I firmly believe that China’s political progress will never stop, and I’m full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future, because no force can block the human desire for freedom. China will eventually become a country of the rule of law in which human rights are supreme. I’m also looking forward to such progress being reflected in the trial of this case, and look forward to the full court’s just verdict – one that can stand the test of history.

Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife, Liu Xia. She cannot be present in the courtroom today, but I still want to tell you, my sweetheart, that I’m confident that your love for me will be as always. Over the years, in my non-free life, our love has contained bitterness imposed by the external environment, but is boundless in afterthought. I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one.

Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my every cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning. But my love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough to hobble my steps. I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes.

Given your love, my sweetheart, I would face my forthcoming trial calmly, with no regrets about my choice and looking forward to tomorrow optimistically. I look forward to my country being a land of free expression, where all citizens’ speeches are treated the same; where different values, ideas, beliefs, political views … both compete with each other and coexist peacefully; where, majority and minority opinions will be given equal guarantees, in particular, political views different from those in power will be fully respected and protected; where all political views will be spread in the sunlight for the people to choose; [where] all citizens will be able to express their political views without fear, and will never be politically persecuted for voicing dissent.

I hope to be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisition, and that after this no one else will ever be jailed for their speech.

Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth.

I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints.

*This statement was translated from the Chinese by Professor David Kelly of the China Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney. It can be read in the original and in full here ]]> http://communisttaxlawyer.com/location/china/china-has-no-dissidents-1225.html/feed 0