Over at ESWN, Roland has translated a rather remarkable commentary from The Beijing Daily News, by Shin Minte. (original Chinese here).  It's title says a lot: "The Pursuit of Truth is Tied in with Freedom of Speech."   I don't know Shen (though as this reference suggests, he has long taken a relatively liberal position in Chinese politics), but this piece strikes me as one of the strongest defenses of freedom of speech that I have ever seen published in the PRC.

Here are a few paragraphs:

"Freedom of speech" is written into the constitution of
our nation.  But some comrades do not have a deep understanding about
it.  For example, does "absurd speech" enjoy the freedom of speech? 
That is a frequently asked question.  If you reply without thinking
that "How can absurd speech be given the freedom?" you will fallen into a
"trap."  This "trap" is an unanswerable question: "Please tell me how
do you know that an unspoken speech is 'absurd' or not, so that you can take
away its freedom of speech beforehand?"  I think that unless you claim
that you are an omniscient god who can judge unspoken speech, you will have
fallen into this impossible "trap."

I want to to remind people about a piece of common
knowledge: A certain speech (here, I am referring to rational speech with
some basis as opposed to irrational invectives without any basis) cannot be
judged as absurd versus not (or progressive versus reactionary) before it is
articulated.  The pursuit of truth is only possible if it is allowed to
be articulated and then people can think, classify and judge its nature. 
I think this is freedom of speech.  This is also the famous saying of
Mao Zedong about letting one hundred schools speak.
This leads to another piece of common knowledge: when a
certain speech comes out, people begin to think and classify, but they may
not be able to judge its nature yet. 

This is particularly true of
certain ideas that appear unconventional or are unacceptable to the majority
of the people at the time.  Frequently, it will take a certain period
of time in history before people become convinced of its veracity (or
absurdity).  During this process, the worst thing is for some
"authorities" to emerge and make a "truth judgment" in the form of a single
conclusion about the rights and wrongs of the matter.  Then everybody
hears that call and engage in either "effusive praises" or "mouth-and-pen
condemnations."  The reason why this is the "worst thing" is that the
price may be huge, possibly including bloodshed and loss of lives.

Notice the political point he is making:  we can't know if any particular speech act is "progressive" or "reactionary" (i.e. its full political implications) until a "certain period of time" has passed.  Thus, we should not repress speech acts because, as history develops and circumstances change, what appears to be "reactionary" one day may turn out be be progressive another day.  His mention of Mao, who obviously did not take this view of freedom of speech, is odd (is it a diversion to confuse the censors?) but he illustrates his point with more effective examples:

The most unforgettable and outstanding episode is the
population theory of Mr. Ma Yinchu.  If it had not been declared as
"counter-revolutionary Malthusian population theory" and subjected to mass
criticisms, there might have been 300 million people fewer in China today. 
Instead, the actual population pressure will be with us for at least a
century.  All the problems today about job opportunities, universal
education, healthcare insurance and so on are related to this population
pressure.

Ma was, of course, correct.  He was correct at the time he made his arguments to limit population growth in the 1950s.  But he was silenced.  His speech was true then, it is true now, but the political situation then did not allow for the truth of his arguments to be appreciated.  We know that truth now, only after time has passed.  So, Shen argues, we need to allow for freedom of speech, not suppress it, let ideas, and the people who articulate them,  freely circulate, and let history, not today's Party leaders, be the judge of truth value.

Shen does not shy from the ultimate political implication of his analysis: he directly states that we should not permit assertions of authority (and, I would add, exercises of power) to influence our judgments about empirical truth:

This shows that whether a speech is absurd versus not, or
progressive versus reactionary, cannot decided solely by the authorities. 
Historical practice will decide. 

Bravo Shen Minte!

And I must add (as I promised in the title of this post) that I sense some resonances here with Chuang Tzu, who had a deep skepticism (deeper than Shen's to be sure) of our ability to ascertain the truth value of language.  Here's a passage from chapter 2:

The spoken isn't just bits of wind.  In the spoken, something is spoken.  But what it is never stays fixed and constant.  So is something spoken, or has nothing ever been spoken?  People think we're different from baby birds cheeping, but are we saying any more than they are?

The answer to that last question is, I believe: we can't really know.  Something is spoken, but if we try to fix meaning through assertions of political authority and ideology and power, we are playing at a fools errand.  Meaning is beyond our control.  The profound epistemological problem Chaung Tzu outlines here goes much further than Shen's point, but, at its most basic, it shares the conclusion that speech must be free.  Restricting speech does not gain anything in terms of greater meaning or significance.  So why restrict?  Chuang Tzu fundamentally destroys the affirmative argument for restrictions on speech.  And what is left, then, is freedom of speech.

Remember what Burton Watson, the great translator, says:

The central theme of the Chuang Tzu may be summed up in a single word: freedom.

It is an expansive freedom, a freedom that certainly includes speech freely expressed.