Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) has instantly achieved global icon status by winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but some dyed-in-the-wool Chinese dissidents are crying foul, seeing the award as a victory for a more moderate, accommodating brand of activism.
Liu, the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize, is a 54-year-old writer imprisoned since December after authoring Charter 08, a manifesto signed by thousands seeking greater rights in the communist nation.
Wei Jingsheng (魏京生) — who spent nearly two decades in prison and is often seen as the father of China’s modern democracy movement — said Liu was more acceptable to the Nobel committee and even Beijing because he worked within the system.
However, Wei said China showed no sign of changing.
“Raising the reputation of moderate reformists would increase people’s desire to cooperate with the government, thus helping stabilize the political situation in China and delaying the time when people overthrow the dictatorial government,” Wei said in Washington, where he lives in exile.
Wei, 60, a former electrician at the Beijing zoo, was sentenced to death row after boldly putting up a poster seeking democracy in 1979. He was finally freed after intervention by then-US president Bill Clinton. Wei was himself often tipped for the Nobel Peace Prize in the past.
He said “tens of thousands” of Chinese other than Liu deserved the award, including Gao Zhisheng (高智晟), a missing human rights lawyer, and Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠), who exposed abuses in Beijing’s one-child policy.
In a controversial move, a group of exiled Chinese — not including Wei — wrote an open letter to the Nobel committee calling Liu unsuitable for the prize.
Diane Liu (劉曉東), who blogs under the penname San Mei (三妹) and helped organize the letter, faulted Liu for not highlighting the treatment of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which she called China’s worst human rights problem.
The Falun Gong says it has suffered systematic persecution, including imprisonment and death, since it was banned in 1999.
“The Nobel Prize is for people who speak for human rights. He is not that person,” said Liu, who lives in Chicago. “He deceives the Western world because they don’t read Chinese and they don’t know how tricky the Chinese communist regime plays its game.”
To be sure, many dissidents have saluted Liu Xiaobo. Harry Wu (吳弘達), a Washington-based activist who spent nearly two decades in Chinese labor camps, has led a campaign on social media urging his freedom.
“Liu Xiaobo didn’t organize a party, he didn’t take action, he just said what his ideals were and got 11 years in a prison camp. So that has exposed what the country is and what we can do,” Wu said.
Timothy Cheek, an expert on Chinese intellectuals at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, said the Nobel committee faced an “invidious choice” in choosing only one dissident worthy of the prize.
Paradoxically, Cheek said that Liu Xiaobo may have had an advantage because he is in jail, giving the award more of an impact than if it had gone to a former prisoner such as Wei or Wu.
“Liu Xiaobo is an important Chinese intellectual because he does two things — he criticizes the government and he lives in China. And in order to do that and not be dead, you have to make compromises,” Cheek said.
“He’s a democrat, he’s a human rights activist — that’s what he’s after, but he’s willing to make tactical adjustments in order to be effective and the most important one has been remaining inside China,” Cheek said.
“Yes, he hasn’t been as emphatic or hasn’t addressed topics we have addressed internationally,” Cheek said. “But we don’t live in China and we don’t have the police coming around the corner.”
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
SEVEN-MINUTE HEIST: The masked thieves stole nine pieces of 19th-century jewelry, including a crown, which they dropped and damaged as they made their escape The hunt was on yesterday for the band of thieves who stole eight priceless royal pieces of jewelry from the Louvre Museum in the heart of Paris in broad daylight. Officials said a team of 60 investigators was working on the theory that the raid was planned and executed by an organized crime group. The heist reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums, with French Minister of Justice yesterday admitting to security flaws in protecting the Louvre. “What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of
RSS