Two key anniversaries coincided in Oslo yesterday with the presentation of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波). For just the second time in the prize’s 109-year history, neither the recipient nor a close family member was able to attend the ceremony because his government would not allow it. An empty chair said it all.
Dec. 10 is notable as the day in 1889 that Swedish chemist and weapons manufacturer Alfred Nobel died. It was also the day in 1948 that the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1950, the UN General Assembly picked the day to be commemorated as Human Rights Day, while the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded on the anniversary of Nobel’s death since Nobel prizes were inaugurated in 1901, with 19 exceptions. Those interruptions have usually been during times of war.
It seems especially fitting this year that Liu is being honored on Human Rights Day, since his life’s work epitomizes what the UN was trying to achieve with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The recognition that human beings, no matter where they live, have an unconditional right to life, equality before the law and fair trials, freedom of thought, conscience and expression and freedom of religion. All these are rights that embody democratic values, not just Western ones.
Perhaps that is what has made Liu’s prize so galling to Beijing, which is known to desperately want to have a Chinese still living and working in China win a Nobel, any Nobel. Liu would certainly fit this category, except for the inconvenient fact that his work, especially in coauthoring Charter 08, goes against everything Beijing stands for.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman in Beijing told reporters with a straight face on Thursday that Liu had not been imprisoned because of anything he had said, but because he went beyond general criticism by trying to persuade others to act, something she said jeopardized society. She could have been quoting Alan Rickman’s character, the Interrogator, in the brilliant 1991 film Closet Land, who accuses a children’s book author of being “guilty of subliminal indoctrination” by trying, through her writings, to teach children to live without fear and being “part of the tribe that thinks too much.”
Perhaps Liu wasn’t the best choice of a Chinese dissident; there were several who said so in the run-up to the announcement of the prize last month. Since then, however, by its very acts, Beijing has made him a prime example of why the peace prize and Human Rights Day can be such powerful motivators and an inspiration to people around the world.
That is also why the list of no-shows among the 65 countries invited to attend the Oslo ceremony by virtue of having an embassy in that city served as a potent reminder of repressive regimes as well as Beijing’s might as a trading power and a UN Security Council member. China led the list of non-believers in free speech, which included Cuba, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. Trade or politics played a role in decisions by Sudan, Venezuela, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Morocco, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and, unfortunately, the Philippines.
The absence of a representative from Manila was the most glaring, despite the Philippine foreign secretary saying his country was not taking sides with China. His government is led by a man whose father was assassinated for standing up for the same rights and freedoms that Liu avows. The ghost of Benigno Aquino Jr will surely be haunting Malacanang Palace this weekend.
Liu now joins a distinguished list of people who have struggled to improve the lives of their fellow citizens through democractic rights and freedoms, including Martin Luther King in 1964, Lech Walesa in 1983, Andrei Sakharov in 1985 and Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991. Some, like Liu, are still fighting that battle, but he can rest assured that he will not be the last.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS