China’s state media yesterday accused the Nobel committee of using the Peace Prize as a “political tool” — the latest in a barrage of complaints after the award went to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波).
The Xinhua news agency published a commentary personally attacking Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland, who last week wrote his own comment piece in the New York Times about why Liu had been honored.
Liu, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison last December on subversion charges after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 8 — enraging China’s rulers.
“Jagland and his fellows have repeatedly used the Nobel Prize as a political tool,” Xinhua said, recalling that last year’s peace prize went to US President Barack Obama. “Last year, they deployed it to serve the interests of Europe, and this year they did it again to serve the interests of certain forces in the West who still enshrine the Cold War ideology.”
The Xinhua column ridiculed Jagland’s argument that Liu’s win symbolized the idea that human rights trump national sovereignty.
It accused the Nobel committee and the West of using the concept of human rights “as an excuse to interfere in others’ domestic affairs, to trample upon other countries’ sovereignty ... and even to launch military strikes.”
It also said the Oslo-based committee was “reluctant to see a stronger China” and hence had “tried to sabotage the rise of the country through various means, including using the Nobel Peace Prize.”
“Jagland’s arrogance and prejudice cannot deny the fact that China has scored remarkable progress in the cause of democracy and human rights,” it said.
The article reiterates China’s position that Liu is a criminal convicted in the country’s courts and should be treated as such.
News of Liu’s win was largely blacked out in the first few days following the announcement of the prize, with state media only carrying the government’s reaction, but the anti-Liu campaign has intensified in recent days.
On Thursday, the agency published a portrait of Liu on its Web site that portrayed him as “extreme and arrogant,” money-hungry, obsessed with fame and “ashamed of being Chinese.”
It said the government had “spared him criminal punishment” following his “agitation activities” during the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests.
The former university professor helped negotiate the safe exit from Tiananmen Square of thousands of student demonstrators before tanks crushed the six weeks of peaceful protests in the heart of Beijing.
He was arrested immediately after the crackdown and released without charge in early 1991.
Liu was re-arrested and served three years in a labor camp from 1996 to 1999 for seeking the release of those jailed in the Tiananmen protests and for opposing the government’s verdict, acts they said amounted to a counter-revolutionary rebellion.
The Xinhua article said Liu was sent to the camp for “disturbing public order” after returning to his “old ways.”
Liu’s wife has been under house arrest since his Peace Prize win, and many of his supporters have been detained or followed, activists have said.
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