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Free speech has limits, so think before you speak
By Wu Guangqiang |
March 18, 2011, Friday
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"LIBERTY means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." That's what George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), an Irish dramatist and socialist, said many years ago.
Of course, the same is true of freedom of speech. This is a simple truth. But the realization and acceptance of it may take a long time and some common sense. Like many young people today, in my own youth, I longed for freedom of all kinds.
My favorite verse was: "Life is dear, love is dearer. Both can be given up for freedom." To my undeveloped mind, freedom meant saying whatever I wanted and doing whatever I liked.
By that standard, the West was the place where my dream of total freedom could come true. Needless to say, my hallucination of absolute freedom has long evaporated. If my own awakening came from my acquisition of knowledge and improved analytical faculties, one of my friends learned his lesson about freedom the hard way through his own personal experiences.
Like me, he was a fanatical advocate of Western freedom. But he went further by marrying an American woman and becoming an American citizen.
It did not take him long to become disillusioned. For the past 20 years since his marriage, he has been living and working in China, making only occasional, brief trips to the United States. Well, frankly, it's hard for young people not to be taken in by fascinating Western stuff: Hollywood blockbusters, a wide variety of amusements, colorful online content, and more attractively, uncensored expression of opinions.
All these make them believe that if they lived in the Western countries, they could enjoy unrestricted freedom. Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. First, I have to remind them of one simple fact.
Western elites seldom practice what they preach. When they are trying to convince Chinese young people that they are deprived of freedom of speech, they are covering a truth: As anywhere else, in the Western countries there are sensitive topics that everyone is wary of, and there are many taboos.
In the US, the center of the "free world," even a commoner can't use such terms as negroes, shorty or fatty to describe someone, much less other politically sensitive terms.
The latest example is the firing of John Galliano, the 50-year-old ex chief designer for Dior, one of the world's top fashion houses. He got himself in trouble in France for making anti-Semitic remarks caught on tape on two occasions.
There are other numerous examples of Western politicians stepping down after making inappropriate remarks.
Zhai Tiantian, a PhD student majoring in physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey in the US, almost lost his life last year for his childish practice of freedom of speech in that free country.
School officials contend that Zhai, 26, angered over his suspension from the university for disciplinary reasons, called the switchboard at the campus's main offices and said, "I'm going to burn that building down."
Then he was detained and accused of making a terrorist threat, and later returned to China under a "voluntary departure."
A female doctor in a hospital in Shantou, Guangdong Province, was lambasted by angry netizens after she posted a microblog in February saying that she hoped a dying patient "would hold on" until she got off work.
"You'd better die after I get off work so that I can have a good sleep," she blogged. The stupid woman must have thought she could write whatever she liked in her private space.
At first she denied writing it, saying someone broke into her space and wrote it.
Later, however, she confessed to the wrongdoing and apologized to the public. Her naivete cost her physician's job, since she was transferred to the hospital's laundry room after her "slip of the tongue."
Freedom is valuable only when it is exercised with judiciousness and responsibility.
Of course, the same is true of freedom of speech. This is a simple truth. But the realization and acceptance of it may take a long time and some common sense. Like many young people today, in my own youth, I longed for freedom of all kinds.
My favorite verse was: "Life is dear, love is dearer. Both can be given up for freedom." To my undeveloped mind, freedom meant saying whatever I wanted and doing whatever I liked.
By that standard, the West was the place where my dream of total freedom could come true. Needless to say, my hallucination of absolute freedom has long evaporated. If my own awakening came from my acquisition of knowledge and improved analytical faculties, one of my friends learned his lesson about freedom the hard way through his own personal experiences.
Like me, he was a fanatical advocate of Western freedom. But he went further by marrying an American woman and becoming an American citizen.
It did not take him long to become disillusioned. For the past 20 years since his marriage, he has been living and working in China, making only occasional, brief trips to the United States. Well, frankly, it's hard for young people not to be taken in by fascinating Western stuff: Hollywood blockbusters, a wide variety of amusements, colorful online content, and more attractively, uncensored expression of opinions.
All these make them believe that if they lived in the Western countries, they could enjoy unrestricted freedom. Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. First, I have to remind them of one simple fact.
Western elites seldom practice what they preach. When they are trying to convince Chinese young people that they are deprived of freedom of speech, they are covering a truth: As anywhere else, in the Western countries there are sensitive topics that everyone is wary of, and there are many taboos.
In the US, the center of the "free world," even a commoner can't use such terms as negroes, shorty or fatty to describe someone, much less other politically sensitive terms.
The latest example is the firing of John Galliano, the 50-year-old ex chief designer for Dior, one of the world's top fashion houses. He got himself in trouble in France for making anti-Semitic remarks caught on tape on two occasions.
There are other numerous examples of Western politicians stepping down after making inappropriate remarks.
Zhai Tiantian, a PhD student majoring in physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey in the US, almost lost his life last year for his childish practice of freedom of speech in that free country.
School officials contend that Zhai, 26, angered over his suspension from the university for disciplinary reasons, called the switchboard at the campus's main offices and said, "I'm going to burn that building down."
Then he was detained and accused of making a terrorist threat, and later returned to China under a "voluntary departure."
A female doctor in a hospital in Shantou, Guangdong Province, was lambasted by angry netizens after she posted a microblog in February saying that she hoped a dying patient "would hold on" until she got off work.
"You'd better die after I get off work so that I can have a good sleep," she blogged. The stupid woman must have thought she could write whatever she liked in her private space.
At first she denied writing it, saying someone broke into her space and wrote it.
Later, however, she confessed to the wrongdoing and apologized to the public. Her naivete cost her physician's job, since she was transferred to the hospital's laundry room after her "slip of the tongue."
Freedom is valuable only when it is exercised with judiciousness and responsibility.
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