Charter 08

A December 2008 Chinese human-rights and political-reform manifesto, explicitly modelled on Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, drafted principally by Liu Xiaobo and released with more than 300 initial signatories.

Matters to this vault as the document at the far end of a person-bridge running from A.E. Clark's one-child-policy essay, through his hobby translation press, to Woeser, its (per a contemporaneous count) sole Tibetan signatory.

References

• claim-woeser-sole-tibetan-charter-08-signatory
• observation-a-e-clark-person-bridges-one-child-policy-cluster-to-woeser-charter-08

Updates

• 2026-08-20: Charter 77 — named here since 2026-08-18 as the model Charter 08 "explicitly modelled on" but otherwise unpaged in this vault — now has its own entity page, and it in turn is unpaged no more: Havel's own essay names the actual catalyst of Charter 77's founding climate as a 1976 rock-band obscenity trial, not a political dispute. See entity-charter-77 and claim-havel-1976-plastic-people-trial-created-charter-77-climate.
• 2026-09-05: The charter's own Chinese-original text (CECC's mirror of the Independent Chinese PEN Center's December 2008 posting, Tier 1) states its own signatory count as 303, twice, at the head and close of the name block — replacing the vault's prior Wikipedia-only (Tier 4) sourcing of that figure. The co-drafter alongside Liu Xiaobo, Zhang Zuhua, now has his own page, reached via Perry Link's contemporaneous account of the December 2008 police raid on his home the night of the charter's release. (claim-charter-08-signatory-list-confirms-303-total)