Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee

Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee
By Debbi Wilgoren and Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 10, 2010; 7:46 AM 



The blue-and-white upholstered chair reserved for him was empty. At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo Friday, jailed Chinese dissident and intellectual Liu Xiaobo was nowhere to be seen.
Yet his campaign to bring universal human rights and democracy to China was recognized at a somber and formal ceremony made more visible, in many ways, as a result of Beijing's efforts to suppress it.
"We regret that the laureate is not present. He is in isolation in a prison in northeastern China," said Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad. "Nor can his his wife or closest relatives be with us....This fact alone shows that the award was necessary and appropriate."
The audience of several hundred dignitaries, diplomats and officials responded with sustained applause and a standing ovation. An oversize portrait of Liu, 54, had been hung on the stage in the stately hall. His eyes, behind his trademark spectacles, appeared to take in the proceedings.
"Liu has only exercised his civil rights. He has not done anything wrong," Lundestad said. "He must be released."
When he finished speaking, he placed the medal and certificate normally awarded to the laureate in the empty chair upon the stage, triggering another ovation.
China blocked broadcasts of the ceremony on television and Internet sites. Just before 8 p.m. in Beijing, as the ceremony was beginning, CNN and BBC television channels went blank - as they had intermittently throughout the day. Chinese television news led their programs with stories on the latest economic figures, and new worries over inflation.
Also, some text messages containing the words "Liu Xiaobo" and "Nobel prize" were being blocked from delivery.
Chinese Internet users, or "'Netizens," tried to start an online campaign of support for Liu by changing their avatars either to yellow ribbons or empty chairs. One image being passed around online and via Twitter showed a black chair, in the shape of a human with arms and legs, and with handcuffs around the ankles.
Meanwhile, police in Beijing maintained a heavy presence outside the apartment compound of Liu's wife, Liu Xia, who has had her telephone and Internet communications cut off for several weeks, since the announcement of the prize.
The government prohibited the Lius and their family members from leaving China to attend Friday's ceremony, and barred other activists from traveling or even gathering at cafes or public places for fear that they would find a way to celebrate the occasion.
The crackdown triggered outrage and condemnation from around the world. It was the first time the award was not presented to a laureate in person since 1936, when Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist jailed by the Nazi regime, was prevented from attending the ceremony.
The absence of Liu and his family members also meant that the $1.4 million cash prize went uncollected.
Foreign embassies in Norway were warned that if they sent representatives to the Nobel ceremony, they would risk unspoken diplomatic "consequences." China broke off trade talks with Norway. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu denounced the Nobel committee members as "clowns" and accused them of "orchestrating an anti-China farce."
As of Dec. 6, the Nobel committee said, 46 countries had announced they would send representatives to the prize ceremony. Fifteen countries--China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia,Pakistan, Iraq , Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Egypt, Sudan, Cuba and Morocco--said they would stay away.
The government of Serbia had planned to boycott the ceremony in order to maintain good relations with China, but reversed that stance on Friday in the face of an outcry at home and from the European Union and said it would send an human rights official--not a diplomat--to witness the event.
"We had to affirm our relation with China and respond to Serbia's interests with regard to the European Union," Human Rights Minister Svetozar Cipliche told the Associated Press. Serbia is a candidate for EU membership.
President Obama, chosen to receive the prestigious prize one year ago, said in a statement that Liu "is far more deserving of this award than I was."
"I regret that Mr. Liu and his wife were denied the opportunity to attend the ceremony that Michelle and I attended last year," Obama said. "...The values he espouses are universal, his struggle is peaceful, and he should be released as soon as possible."
Liu was jailed after authoring Charter '08, a pro-democracy manifesto that was published Dec. 10, 2008 and has since been signed by more than 10,000 people inside and outside China.
Obama said Liu "reminds us that human dignity ... depends upon the advance of democracy, open society, and the rule of law."
Scores of activists, lawyers and professors have been prohibited from leaving the country in recent days, or placed under house arrest, with their telephone and Internet lines cut. As the Nobel ceremony drew closer, some were also told not to speak to reporters.
The Chinese government continued its furious assault on the Nobel committee in the state controlled press on Friday. The lead headline in the Global Times said; "Beijing firm on Nobel." The China Daily lead story claimed: "Most nations oppose peace prize to Liu."
Activists said the crackdown has had one unintended, opposite effect - that of underscoring the need for political reform that Liu was awarded the prize for championing.
"The more people are barred from leaving the country, and the harder the government works to stifle news of the Nobel ceremony domestically, the more meaning the event takes on for the curious ordinary Chinese," Renee Xia, the international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said in an e-mailed statement.
Wilgoren reported from Washington. Richburg reported from Beijing.
(See other Nobel laureates, including Poland's Lech Walesa and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, who were prevented from receiving their prizes in person). (Read about how Chinese media have demonized Liu Xiaobo.)

THIS STORY

• Liu Xiaobo, jailed in China, honored in absentia by Nobel committee
• Q&A, 2 p.m.: Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo: China clampdown
• Statement by President Barack Obama on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize

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How China branded Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo a traitor

A afirmação de Liu Xiaobo sobre o colonialismo inglês como tendo feito a prosperidade de Hong Kong, e sobre a necessidade de 300 anos de colonialismo para a China para alcançar o mesmo efeito, é obviamente uma ironia, uma boutade, como diriam os franceses.
No entanto, as autoridades chinesas se baseiam nisso para classificá-lo como agente estrangeiro e traidor à pátria.
Seria cômico, se não fosse trágico, para ele...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

How China branded Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo a traitor
By Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 10, 2010; 12:37 AM

HONG KONG -- The magazine is banned in mainland China. So, too, is its Web site. Its editor is barred from visiting the land of his birth. Yet Chinese authorities have repeatedly cited reporting from the blacklisted publication.

"If they paid for using my work, I'd be much better off," joked Jin Zhong, the editor of Open Magazine, a low-budget Hong Kong monthly dedicated to criticism of the Chinese Communist Party.

China's frequent reference to a tiny media outfit it loathes is a curious by-product of its even fiercer loathing for Liu Xiaobo, the jailed dissident who will be honored in absentia Friday as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Though sent to prison for "inciting subversion of state power," Liu has been pilloried most harshly in China not for his alleged violations of the criminal code but for his affronts to Chinese nationalism. A slew of articles in China's tightly controlled official media lambast Liu as a traitor - and offer as evidence comments published in back issues of Jin's Hong Kong magazine.

Most frequently cited in this campaign of denunciation is an interview Liu gave to the journal in 1988. Visiting Hong Kong for the first time and dazzled by the city's prosperity, liberties and public order, Liu cracked that since the then-British colony had "become like this after 100 years of colonialism, China is so big it will of course need 300 years of colonialism. . . . I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough."

At the time, his comments attracted little notice: they were typical of the provocative irreverence that characterized debate among Chinese intellectuals before the 1989 military assault on Tiananmen Square. "Nobody paid much attention," recalled Jin, who relegated the interview to the back of his magazine, then called Emancipation Monthly.

Today, Liu's words have been revived with gusto by the mainland media, stirring "patriotic" attacks on the jailed literary scholar on the Internet, where criticism of the Nobel Prize - unlike praise for it - has no trouble getting past censors.

Debate over whether China can find its own uniquely Chinese path to economic and political modernization or take the road pioneered by the West has raged since the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in 1911. Liu, a literary critic and essayist, stands firmly at the pro-Western end of the spectrum, a position that has put him sharply at odds with China's prevailing orthodoxy.

Over the last 30 years, the Communist Party has steadily cut its roots in Marxist dogma imported from the West and put Chinese nationalism at the center of its governing ideology.

"This is the best card they've got and they play it to the maximum," said Bao Pu, a Hong Kong-based publisher whose father, a former senior Communist Party official in Beijing, was jailed in 1989 for supporting pro-democracy student protesters. Bao described efforts to paint Liu as a traitor "as ridiculous" and has just published a collection of the dissident's writings to present a more complete picture of his views. But, Bao said, branding critics of the ruling party as unpatriotic "can be very effective."

Attacks from Chinese press
"What on earth has Liu Xiaobo ever contributed to human peace?" thundered a recent article in the ruling party's main mouthpiece, the People's Daily. "Many Chinese remember that the '300 years of colonialism' theory came from Liu. Contempt for Chinese culture and support for thorough Westernization have been his political stand."

Xinhua, the state-controlled Chinese news agency, took up the same cudgel in an angry editorial. Quoting Liu's remarks in his 1988 Hong Kong interview, the editorial asked "what qualification does someone who hails colonial history and culture have to talk big about 'democracy' and 'freedom'?" Liu's true goal, Xinhua said, is to "make China a servant of the West."

Global Times, another Beijing newspaper, delivered a similar attack. Its headline: "Liu Xiaobo: It is not enough to be colonized for 300 years."

The article triggered angry attacks on Liu by writers on Global Forum, an online venue affiliated with the newspaper. Liu "is not a human being and should be shot," commented one.

Not everyone is convinced of Liu's treachery. "I don't believe he is advocating colonialism but only . . . a thorough change in China's national character, system and culture," said He Guanghua, a professor at Beijing's Renmin University. And whatever Liu's real views, added He, "you can't convict him of a crime because he said these words."

But with Chinese media barred from publishing articles written by Liu, his widely publicized remark about colonialism is about all that many Chinese know of his thinking. His less-incendiary contributions to China's political debate have been purged by censors. Among these is "Charter 08," a manifesto in favor of democracy that the Nobel Prize Committee cited as evidence of Liu's "long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."

This filtering helps explain why a dissident whom many foreigners view as a hero is often seen in China as tool of the West unworthy of the Nobel Prize. In the absence of opinion polls in China on sensitive political issues, it is impossible to gauge what ordinary Chinese really think of Liu.

China's propaganda apparatus
Barry Sautman, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a critic of Liu's Nobel Prize, says that China's case against Liu cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda. Liu, he said, "wants to see China completely Westernized in a way that most Chinese would not want."

Sautman recently co-wrote an article for a Hong Kong newspaper that, citing Liu's 1988 interview with Jin and ignoring his voluminous writings, derided the Nobel Peace Prize as "morally bankrupt."

China's propaganda apparatus first put the spotlight on Liu's allegedly treasonous views in the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. Liu was jailed for his role in the student protests - and targeted for vitriolic attack by the official media. Liu, said the People's Daily at the time, is a "traitor from head to toe." It, too, used Jin's Hong Kong magazine as a witness for the prosecution.

Writing for the same magazine in 2006, Liu declined to retract his "300 years of colonialism" quip and described it as an "extreme expression" of a core conviction: "China's modernization can only be achieved after a long period of Westernization."

Jin, the editor who conducted the 1988 interview, said he has no regrets about publishing comments that have provided so much fodder for Liu's critics in Beijing. "That's how a free press works," he said. But he wishes that Liu's enemies would quote what was said in full instead of cutting out a key line that makes clear the jailed dissident's true take on imperialism: "The age of colonialism has already passed."

higginsandrew@washpost.com Researcher Wang Juan in Beijing contributed to this report.

THIS STORY

How China branded Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo a traitor
ARTICLE | HONG KONG -- The magazine is banned in mainland China. So, too, is its Web site. Its editor is barred from visiting the land of his birth. Yet Chinese authorities have repeatedly cited reporting from the blacklisted publication.

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Dissidents against Chinese favorite for Nobel peace prize

Unusual Opposition to a Favorite for Nobel
By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD
The New York Times, October 6, 2010

BEIJING — With just a day until the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, the usual whirl of speculation over the winner is in full force, with many human rights advocates contending that an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, has emerged as the favorite.

If selected, Mr. Liu, a former literature professor who has spent the last 20 years cycling in and out of Chinese jails for championing democratic reform, would be the first Chinese citizen to win the prize. The prospect has clearly alarmed Beijing, so much so that the Nobel Institute’s director said last week that a senior Chinese official had warned him such a decision would “pull the wrong strings in relations between Norway and China.”

But the idea of selecting Mr. Liu has also stirred objections from a somewhat more surprising contingent: a group of fellow activists.

In recent days, a group of 14 overseas Chinese dissidents, many of them hard-boiled exiles dedicated to overthrowing the Communist Party, have been calling on the Nobel committee to deny the prize to Mr. Liu, whom they say would make an “unsuitable” laureate.

In a letter, the signatories accused Mr. Liu, below, of maligning fellow activists, abandoning persecuted members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and going soft on China’s leaders.

“His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading and influential,” they wrote.

Among the signers were Zhang Guoting, a writer now living in Denmark who spent 22 years in Chinese prison, Bian Hexiang, who describes himself as a New York-based member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Social Democratic Party, and Lu Decheng, who was jailed for throwing paint-filled eggs at the Mao portrait on Tiananmen Square and now lives in Canada.

The letter and calls from other detractors have infuriated many rights advocates, inside and outside of China, who say the attack distorts Mr. Liu’s record as a longtime proponent of peaceful change.

Supporters, among them Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president and dissident, say that Mr. Liu has been a pragmatic advocate since 1989, when he helped persuade the students occupying Tiananmen Square to leave just as army tanks were preparing to move in.

More recently, Mr. Liu was given an 11-year prison sentence last Christmas for his role in shaping a manifesto, known as Charter ’08, that called for popular elections and an end to the Communist Party’s unchallenged grip on power.

“Liu Xiaobo has always worked to advance the peaceful democratic transformation of Chinese society, and to avoid the violence, rebellion and bloodshed of the past,” said Zhang Zuhua, a former high-ranking official in the Communist Party Youth League and a chief force behind Charter ’08.

Cui Weiping, a social critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, called some of Mr. Liu’s more radical opponents “highly irresponsible.”

“Just the fact that he was sentenced to 11 years in prison is enough to answer those who question how critical he is of the government,” said Ms. Cui, one of 10,000 Chinese who signed Charter ’08 before government censors effectively pulled it from the Internet.

Whatever the merits of the anti-Liu Xiaobo camp, their very public sentiments provide a window into the state of the overseas Chinese dissidents, a fractured group beset by squabbling and competing claims of anti-authoritarian righteousness.

Many of its prominent members fled to the United States and Europe after the failed democracy campaign of 1989 and have tried, with limited success, to build a broad-based movement against the Chinese government.

Even if they have differences over strategy, many intellectuals and activists inside China describe Mr. Liu as a dynamic thinker who appealed both to members of the party and many of its die-hard opponents.

Bao Pu, a Chinese book publisher whose father spent seven years in prison for supporting negotiations with protesters as a top associate to the Communist Party chief, Zhao Ziyang, said the lack of unity among dissidents living outside China was dispiriting.

“All exile movements are fractured, but the community has reduced themselves into oblivion,” said Mr. Bao, who lives in Hong Kong. “We have a long way to go.”

Mr. Liu’s critics are unbowed by suggestions that their campaign against him may play into the Chinese government’s efforts to discredit his qualifications as a Nobel laureate.

Yi Xu, a linguistics professor in London who translated the anti-Liu letter into English, said he had no reservations about the effort to deny Mr. Liu the award.

“I don’t believe the Nobel Prize is so important that once we have one, China will be entirely changed,” Mr. Yi said. “Look, the Dalai Lama won and China didn’t change.”