[jyu1]

Every year at this time, as we approach Canada Day, I always feel how incredibly lucky I am to be living in a country called Canada. This feeling wells up despite of the often depressive mood I am in, the annoying and harassing surveillance I know I am constantly under, and the faint hope of seeing justice done for those two innocent children as well as for myself.

Perhaps this amazing feeling comes about because Canada Day falls in the start of summer -- the most beautiful season for Vancouver and much of British Columbia. I always remember my first impression of Greater Vancouver when I came to Canada in a September day more than 20 years ago, catching the tail end of summer. “This must be paradise on earth.” I thought to myself, breathing the air and seeing the sky, the mountain, the sea, the wild animals and most of all, the friendly people.

Or it could be that there are so many things you can do around Canada Day. Community gatherings. Firework shows. Street festivals. My personal favourite in recent years has been the International Jazz Festival and other celebrations at Granville Island. Most of these events are free for anyone to participate in. You can also volunteer to get yourself even more involved. And the sense of belonging will make you extremely proud.

Still, the best part of Canada Day is to see everybody around you so genuinely happy and content. It's contagious. And you realize what a privilege to live in this incredible country. It is at time like this that I become even more sure of my plan to remain in Canada if and when I do get my life back, despite the cruel and unjust persecution by the governments before.

Indeed, my experience in Canada is much more than what the governments put me through over the years. And that is because Canada is a democracy and a democracy is much more than its government.

As someone who grew up in an authoritarian regime, I did not consciously realize this fact until some time after I came to Canada. Surely I was motivated to come here for the promises of both a higher standard of living specifically and a free and democratic society in general. But the few things I heard in China about democracies did not even come close to giving me a comprehensive idea about free and democratic societies. Indeed, when it comes to democracies, perhaps no amount of education can substitute the experience of actually living in one. After all, as I came to appreciate even later, democracy is not just a system of governance. It is more fundamentally an attitude, a culture, a way of life. It's a lived experience, permeating all facets of a citizen's life.

Indeed, in a free and democratic society like Canada, governments come and go, but the society overall is ultimately governed by law, including how governments operate and how they come and go. Individual's rights are also protected by law. Despite the difficulties I encountered and the hardship I endured under successive governments along my journey, I still have faith in Canada's rule of law in general. And I know my file is probably an unique one in Canada and once I get vindicated, I will be treated just like everybody else.

Besides, a free and democratic society does provide for human flourishing much better and I can expect to live to a fuller potential in Canada than in China. Already, I had a completely unexpected achievement here -- my political ideas for China's democratization. While these ideas are rooted in my innate Chineseness, they are completely developed here in Canada, thanks to the free and democratic society I am living in. Indeed, it never even crossed my mind when I came to Canada that I would some day venture into such an intellectual enquiry (and I won't likely focus on it if and when I get my life back), let along seeing them have an impact on China as well as the rest of the world. And I believe they will have an even bigger impact once they are out in the open, even though I do have concern that they will not be completely faithfully adopted by politicians in China or elsewhere.

If you had followed my journey, you would have a good idea already on how I gradually formed my ideas on China's democratization. Here I will provide a brief summary just to illustrate the sheer impossibility for me to develop these ideas had I been in China.

I started paying attention to Canadian politics and thus began my formal education on and experience with democracy when I sensed in 2003-2004 that my personal cause for justice seemed to be connected to federal politics. These connections did not come as a surprise to me given my feeling at the time that there was a federal government coverup of the crimes perpetrated against those two innocent children. As such, my long journey to fight for justice provided me, quite unexpectedly, with a good opportunity to closely follow and observe Canadian democracy in action. Over time I not only learned how democratic processes work, but also convinced that democracy really is a good thing. Since I cared about China, naturally I thought about how a democracy might work for China.

I also paid a fair amount of attention to American politics later on because of its connection to my personal cause, as well as its importance to both China and Canada. All my observations were made with a critical eye, of course, in that I noted the problems or shortcomings in these democracies as well (e.g., the tendency to stretch or even ignore facts, which contributes to excessive confrontation, which in term leads to political polarization) and thought through whether any of their experiences could be successfully transported to China, especially in a wholesale fashion. My intuition was no to wholesale, if only because I sensed that these Western (liberal) democracies are rooted in Western culture and China had its own unique and profoundly powerful cultural traditions. (It is very unfortunate that, when translated into Chinese, “free and democratic” and “liberal democracy” often end up with exactly the same phrase 自由民主. I wonder how many in China's intellectual class realize that a country does not have to be a liberal democracy to be free and democratic.)

Naturally, the next question I asked myself was: “Is it possible to construct a Chinese style democracy, and if it is, what it might look like?” Mostly out of curiosity I started paying attention to comparative cultural studies and political philosophies whenever I had the opportunity. It was not until September 2008 – at the height of global financial crisis, as I recall – that I stumbled on a book which largely dispelled the nagging doubt in my mind. The book is called The democracy of the dead: Dewey, Confucius and the hope for democracy in China, by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames. Perhaps because Pragmatism/Confucianism is my philosophy, reading this book immediately gave me the confidence of an intellectual framework to map out my ideas on China's democratization and its impact on the world, as I did a couple of months later while observing the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

If I had been in China, none of these would have been possible. To begin with, for an average Chinese, he or she can not possibly know what is going on in China's high-level politics, let along being able to have the excellent education on and intimate experience with politics that I had here. Indeed, Chinese politics is such a “black box” that even some Americans, such as Cheng Li, knew more about it than I did when I was supposedly being considered for a top leadership position, as I noted before. Even if I were in the know about the current political affairs, I would not have the free environment to develop my ideas in China. I mentioned in my blogs that when I first stumbled on the above-mentioned book, I tried to read it “in secret” mostly because of my concern that the new ideas I was exploring might be considered out of bound by Chinese politicians. This concern itself was a reflection of the limitation on freedom of thoughts in Chinese politics. Furthermore, although this particular book had a (bad and incomplete) Chinese translation, generally speaking, the flow of information and knowledge in China, with its considerable restrictions and censorship placed on and off the Internet, is not as free as in Canada. Yet I consider this free flow of information especially important for me to explore my potentials, given my strong curiosity and diverse interests. Of course, the level of service provided by public libraries in China, even in major city centres, can not match what I can get here in Canada. (Which is a huge shame, just considering the amount of waste in Chinese bureaucracy along.)

In short, despite the “virtual prison” I am in here, I still maintain the freedom of thoughts and can access information and knowledge quite freely, thanks to the free and democratic society that is Canada. Without any of those as in the case of China, it would have been impossible for me to develop my ideas on China's democratization.

Thank you so much, Canada!