In June 1998, while U.S. President Bill Clinton was on a state visit to China, three activists in Hangzhou publicly announced the first local preparatory committee of an opposition party — the China Democracy Party (CDP) — and published an open declaration founding it. The declaration, dated June 25, 1998, is one of the clearest programmatic statements the Chinese democracy movement produced in that era. What survives as a verified text is the English translation published by Human Rights Watch in September 2000; the original Chinese wording has not yet been verified from that source. This article presents the declaration as that verified text preserves it, with the surrounding context the record supports and nothing it does not.
Background: a party announced during Clinton’s visit
According to the body of Human Rights Watch’s report Nipped in the Bud: The Suppression of the China Democracy Party (September 2000, Vol. 12, No. 5), Wang Youcai, Wang Donghai and Lin Hui announced the first local preparatory committee of the China Democracy Party during Clinton’s June 1998 state visit. The three are described in the report as the founders of the Zhejiang Preparatory Committee, based in Hangzhou. (The corresponding Chinese characters for the three names have not been verified from this source and are not given here.)
The founding was public by design: the declaration was issued openly, and it called on democracy-movement activists across the country to join the CDP and to prepare and establish local committees of their own — an open, nationwide organizing appeal rather than a clandestine program.
The declaration’s program
The full title is “Open Declaration on the Establishment of the Zhejiang Preparatory Committee of the China Democracy Party,” issued in Hangzhou on June 25, 1998. The text quoted here is the English translation by Jan van der Made, as credited in the Human Rights Watch report (Appendix I, pp. 26–27), reproduced in the report’s exact wording:
“The CDP firmly believes that all political power can come only from the public and can only be [used] in the service of the public; that a government can only come into being according to the wishes of the public and [can only] act according to the wishes of the public; and that a government is the servant of the public and not the one which controls it.”
The declaration grounds its claims in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
“The CDP firmly believes that the various articles on human rights in the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ are the equally sacred and inviolable rights of mankind that come with birth. The CDP will struggle with human rights violators from beginning to end.”
Its stated purpose is sweeping:
“The purpose of the CDP is to realize direct democratic elections and to establish a constitutional democratic political system, and to establish a mechanism of separation of political powers; to allow the political powers to restrain each other and to guarantee that they go forward in a virtual circle; to prevent any individual or any group from establishing a power base of violence; to realize the nationalization of the army; to thoroughly root out soil which produces political dictatorship and political corruption; and to allow the Chinese nation to thoroughly shake off the tyranny of power.”
The declaration closes with an organizational appeal:
“The CDP calls upon persons of the democracy movement in the various regions nationwide to enter the CDP, to prepare and establish local committees of the CDP in the various provinces and cities, to elect and appoint delegates, to take part in the National Delegates Congress and to organize a nationwide committee.”
In substance, then, the June 1998 declaration proposed a constitutional-democratic political system with directly elected government, separation of powers, and a depoliticized national army — and a concrete mechanism for building the party that would pursue it: local committees feeding delegates into a national congress.
Read together, the passages stake the party’s claim on a single principle stated three ways: that political power originates with the public, that governments are servants rather than masters, and that human rights arrive with birth rather than by grant of the state. The declaration’s targets — dictatorship’s “soil,” corruption, a politicized military — are named as the conditions to be rooted out, not as factions to be fought.
Aftermath: arrests and a related prohibition
A crackdown followed. A first wave of arrests is recorded for November and December 1998; the record reviewed here does not supply further detail on those arrests, and none is added.
The same Human Rights Watch report covers a related case from the same period: the China Development Union, a separate civic grouping, was prohibited in October 1998. It is documented in that report as a comparison case alongside the CDP suppression, not as part of the Zhejiang declaration’s own history.
A note on the document itself
Two cautions attach to the text as it stands. First, what is verified here is the English translation published by Human Rights Watch in September 2000; the original Chinese wording of the declaration has not yet been verified from this source and should not be treated as established. Second, the June 25, 1998 Zhejiang declaration is a distinct document from the more radical declaration of the China Democracy and Justice Party issued on February 22, 1998 (associated with Wang Bingzhang); the two should not be conflated.
No contemporaneous Free China Movement response to this event is on record in the sources reviewed.
Sources
- Human Rights Watch, Nipped in the Bud: The Suppression of the China Democracy Party, September 2000, Vol. 12, No. 5 — the declaration in English translation by Jan van der Made appears in Appendix I, pp. 26–27: https://www.hrw.org/reports/china009.pdf