The laureate behind bars

 

 

THE Nobel peace prize committee’s announcement on October 8th that they are giving the award to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, will infuriate Chinese leaders. It may well give extra ammunition to hardliners in China who argue that the West is bent on undermining Communist Party rule. This is the same faction that argues the party should take advantage of the West’s economic malaise to assert its own interests more robustly.

 

China reacted with outrage in 1989 when the Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader in exile, to all appearances as a rebuke to the government for having crushed the Tiananmen Square protests earlier that year. Though China regards Tibet as an integral part of the nation, Mr Liu stands apart as an ethnic Han Chinese who has devoted himself to addressing the politics of China proper.

 

Mr Liu is precisely the kind of dissident that the party regards as most threatening. He is a seasoned campaigner, a veteran of the Tiananmen protests who has shown no sign of succumbing to the party’s intimidation in spite of three periods of incarceration over the past two decades (more than five years in total). He is a mildly spoken literary critic who has created the sort of consensus that is unusual to forge among China’s infighting intellectuals. Mr Liu’s Charter 08, a document that calls for democracy, was signed initially by more than 300 liberal thinkers (and then by thousands of others online). It struck a reasoned tone to which radicals and moderates alike could subscribe. The debate over “universal values” that it helped to fuel still rages within the party today.

 

Mr Liu was arrested in December 2008, two days before Charter 08 was made public. The authorities chose Christmas Day, 2009, to announce his 11-year jail term for “inciting subversion of state power”. The charter and a handful of Mr Liu’s online essays were all the evidence that the court required. In May this year he was transferred to a remote prison, 500km (310 miles) north-east of Beijing.

 

The authorities might take comfort were they to read his essays carefully. In one of them, written in 2006, he said the authorities’ attempts to block the spread of sensitive information meant that “a number of famous mainland Chinese dissidents find themselves in the paradoxical position of a backyard bush that blooms on the neighbour’s side of the wall: enjoying great international fame but not recognised by the general public in their own country, known only within a small circle of people”.  (The full text, along with those of other essays by Mr Liu and his trial documents, can be found on the website of Human Rights in China, a New York-based group.)

 

Mr Liu writes positively about the growth of civil society in China. But he is scathing about the willingness of the Chinese public to bend to party authority, so long as the party continues to provide opportunities (no matter how underhand) to get rich. Mr Liu is despondent about the prospects for a public push for change in China’s authoritarian system. “The repression by the dictatorial authorities is, admittedly, one of the reasons, but the indifference of the populace is an even greater cause,” he says.

There is likely to be much online comment in support of Mr Liu’s award in China, but the Nobel prize is unlikely to galvanise any concerted protest action such as the party would find difficult to suppress. There will be an upsurge in demands from abroad for Mr Liu’s release. Yet major Western powers are little inclined to jeopardise their relationships with China for the sake of individual dissidents. Just two months after Mr Liu’s arrest, Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, said after a visit to Beijing that she had raised human rights but that “our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.”

 

China is a past master of deflecting Western concerns about its treatment of dissidents. In the late 1980s, Deng Xiaoping spoke dismissively to his colleagues about the West’s response to the sentencing in 1979 of a dissident, Wei Jingsheng, to 15 years in prison. “We put Wei Jingsheng behind bars, didn't we?” he boasted. “Did that damage China's reputation? We haven't released him, but China's image has not been tarnished by that. Our reputation improves day by day.”

 

The West in the 1980s was eager to court China as an ally in the cold war against the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen and the Soviet Union’s collapse, China suddenly faced a lot more pressure on human rights from the West, but it was able to use occasional releases of high-profile dissidents to blunt foreign criticisms. In the past few years, China’s rapid economic growth and the West’s desire to profit from it has given China more breathing space.

 

Officials might one day choose an opportune moment to use the release of their Nobel-decorated dissident to win plaudits from Western governments. As Mr Liu has observed, China “has learned that by forcing famous dissidents into exile it kills two birds with one stone: it gives the dissidents a way out and wins favour with the international community; it also gets rid of direct political opponents, and belittles the moral image of dissidents within the country.”  Mr Liu will now have to worry about such a fate for himself. 

 

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2010/10/nobel_peace_prize