Guest poster MH reflects on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, including its implications for the prospects for democracy in China. — RM.
Late on Friday it was announced that Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010.
The award was widely anticipated internationally and in Beijing. The Chinese deputy foreign minister Fu Ying had already warned Norway more than a week ago that such an award would damage its relations with China.
Yet the award has still come as a surprisingly exhilarating moment for the global Chinese dissident community and for professional China-watchers in academia and the media. And also it would seem for many Chinese people. Twitter and Chinese blogs were alive last night with the news and anecdotally Chinese students on campuses around the world have been celebrating.
Liu Xiaobo was a young academic in the 1980s, writing highly-regarded work on political philosophy when he came to prominence during the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square. He was as one of a group of university lecturers who sought to modulate the extremism of some of the student protesters and mediate between them and the Chinese government to effect real political change. He contributed legitimacy and intellectual and moral authority to the movement. Liu spent two years in prison after the crackdown and further terms in the mid-1990s for subverting state authority.
In 2008, Liu Xiaobo was the key author of Charter 08, which laid out a detailed manifesto and program for political liberalization in China. Its title referenced the Czechoslovakian Charter 77 and it was released to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In December 2009, Liu was sentenced to eleven years in prison for subversion. He joins Carl von Ossietzky in 1935 and Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991 as Nobel laureates awarded the prize while imprisoned.
The Chinese government reacted quickly on Friday night to criticize the award and set the terms under which it could be reported by the Chinese media. The Chinese government position is that the Nobel Peace Prize is for fostering peace and harmony among nations and ethnicities and that its principles were undermined by giving it to a criminal who had violated China’s laws. Ironically, the Chinese government has actively pursued a Nobel prize in the sciences and medicine as a symbol of national status, and not a few wags, both Chinese and foreign, have noted that China has finally won a Nobel prize, just the wrong one.
Liu himself knows that he was nominated but not necessarily that he won it. His wife was escorted to Liu’s prison by police on Saturday morning but her conversations with him are monitored and highly proscribed.
History reminds us that it waits quietly on Liu Xiaobo’s side. Charter 08 invoked Charter 77 as a key moment in the struggle for democracy in eastern Europe and also the Meilidao activists who commemorated the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1979 in Taiwan. Their movements were broken up by police, the leaders arrested and imprisoned for long terms, and in Taiwan the family of one of the activists was murdered. The more brutal the state, the greater and more implacable becomes the moral force of those who resist it.
However, the legacy of Charter 77 in what used to be Czechoslovakia, the success of the democracy movement in Taiwan and the campaign of another Nobel laureate HH the Dalai Lama also reminds us of the fractures and elisions that lurk within the histories written in the name of freedom. A movement for political liberalization that has as its goal a better society, one more just, more equal and more “harmonious”, risks a monstrous mimesis of China’s present regime. Democratization is unpredictable and distributes power in unexpected ways. The implacable moral force of China’s democracy movement will be tested far more deeply than by the party-state when it faces the freedom sought by those in Tibet and Xinjiang, and those who wish to preserve democracy’s unique expression in Taiwan.