What is Rebellion?

To define rebellion is not as simple as it might seem at first glance.

We can define rebellion as the behavior of publicly expressing a dissenting political view. It goes without saying that rebellion must be public behavior. If a subjective feeling of yours does not turn into concrete public action, then it does not have much significance. Yet it is not always this case. We know that when Hu Feng and his colleagues were denounced as a “counterrevolutionary clique,” the private letters they had been sending to one another were seized upon as the primary type of incriminating evidence against them.

During all of the numerous PRC political movements, many people have been punished merely on account of having privately expressed various viewpoints. Of course, what has been regarded by the Party as rebellion is not necessarily equivalent to genuine rebellion; otherwise, the many travesties of justice that did occur would not have actually happened. However, because totalitarian rule swallowed up the entire domain of private life, anyone with a modicum of experience would know that even the private expression of dissent could be an extremely dangerous activity. Therefore, when a person is fully aware of the risks involved in a given activity and yet still goes ahead and carries it out anyway, that can indeed signify rebellion. I recall how unofficial publications were banned by order of the regime in 1980, yet some Democracy Movement participants nonetheless printed essays in the format of “published for internal circulation,” and covertly circulated the publications amongst themselves. This no doubt amounts to one form of rebellious behavior.

Let us turn to further discussion of what are called “dissenting views.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once sardonically referred to individuals who strive to toe the Party line as “persons without any dissenting views.” Yet since the Party's views are all-encompassing in their broad sweep and unpredictable in their transience, how can a person forever remain “without any dissenting views”? Hardly likely, unless he is bound and determined to abandon all of his own views and merely parrot the Party's views instead. In other words, for the average person, the issue of “dissenting views” is not a question of whether you have them or not, but rather a question of the quantity and significance of such views.