Around this time last year, I wrote an article saying peace would have been better served had the Nobel peace prize gone to a Chinese activist instead of President Obama and urged him to live up to his prize during his trip to China. I wrote as the son of an imprisoned activist -- my father, Wang Bingzhang, is serving a life sentence in China for his political activities.
As Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize ceremony takes place in Oslo on December 10, Human Rights day, it is uncertain whether this award will benefit Chinese activists. Indeed, the effects on the ground thus far have been almost wholly negative. Activists in China are more closely scrutinized and repressed now than before, and families and friends have been collateral damage. Liu's wife, Liu Xia, is under house arrest. Liu's colleagues have been prevented from leaving the country. Kindred spirits have been prevented from entering China -- last month, my aunt and my sister were denied visas to visit my father. I hope to visit soon, but fear I will also be denied.
Nonetheless, the Chinese people know as well as anyone that history is not decided in only a few weeks. The writing of the post-Nobel chapter for Chinese activists has just begun. Ultimately, what the prize means depends on what happens next, and that battle is intensifying.
An attitude gaining popularity is that scolding China is counter-productive. This echoes the advice a Chinese lawyer gave me when I last visited. He said my family should shun the international media, and even visit less frequently. That, he said, would improve my father's prospects for release.
Needless to say, kowtowing to my father's jailers would be a bitter pill to swallow, regardless of its efficacy. Besides, my father would not want that. Nor, I suspect, would Liu. Further, whatever the pragmatics may be, the ethics are clear. To stay quiet would be to submit to the unreasonable demands of a bully. To stand for what is right, however, without equivocation or fear of backlash, is usually to stand on the side of history.
Another argument gaining currency says that imprisoning Liu and other activists is a necessary sacrifice because challenging the Party's legitimacy in any way threatens stability and economic growth. However, Party rule has never been the main driver of China's success -- that noble distinction belongs to the entrepreneurship, talent, and work ethic of Chinese people. The Party has indeed competently shepherded the process along, but there is no reason to believe a more democratic government could not perform substantially as well.
There is also no reason to believe that allowing Liu to express his views freely would be disastrously destabilizing, or would unacceptably impede economic progress. Liu does not advocate revolution, or a return to a Communist economy. Imprisoning Liu is a naked act of self-preservation for self-preservation's sake, and does not in any way benefit the Chinese people. If only the average Chinese citizen knew the unfiltered facts, they would reject such self-serving behavior.
Unfortunately, demonizing the West in the domestic press and inciting nationalism has become the last refuge of the Party's scoundrels, and the average citizen gets their facts through this lens. The Party's hysterical portrayal of the prize's sponsors as "clowns" and of the prize event as an international conspiracy is rivaled in its absurdity only by its desperate creation of a rival peace prize, and its shrill denunciation of Liu as a despicable Western stooge, the likes of which China has never known before. The saddest irony of this strategy is that Liu is the first Chinese person to win the Nobel while still a citizen--of all China's laureates, only he chose to live in China. Yet instead of pride, the Party fills its people's hearts with hatred.
Will it work? And what of the cause of peace? The prize has imbued activists with moral strength, but it has also painted a target on their backs. Whether peace is enhanced depends on how activists proceed. If the Party's arrows keep finding their marks, the status quo, which is at best a profoundly imperfect stability falling far short of meaningful peace, will persist. If, on the other hand, activists skillfully seize and maintain the moral high ground while avoiding the arrows, peace may yet stand a chance.
And who are these activists? They are people like Liu Xiaobo, my father, and countless other allies inside and outside China. And increasingly, with the support provided by the Nobel, they are their families and friends -- ordinary people like me.
John Lundberg: Liu Xiaobo's Poetry to Be Published in English
Rev. Chuck Freeman: Elijah's Empty Chair of Freedom in Oslo
Jack Healey: Reclaiming the Roots of the Human Rights Movement
Instead of wasting time criticizing Beijing, Americans would serve their country better by really taking a look at what their "representatives" really are representing, and doing, in their name.
Western democracies "choose" their leaders by elections. But these elections have largely degenerated into periodic public entertainment, and nothing more. The "leaders" so chosen are not chosen based on performance or ability, other than the ability to raise a lot of bribes (legalized as "campaign contribution") and looking good on TV.
In contrast, there is no dispute that the leaders are not chosen by open elections. So? China's system is demonstrably BETTER at choosing capable and dedicated public servants. 30 years of miraculous economic performance validates that. China's meritocracy, in which ALL top leaders have to go through decades of on the job training, plus vetting and continued critiques by peers, ensure that only the best of the best rise to the top. And there they do well for the Chinese people.
That's why Beijing enjoys 87% support amongst Chinese citizenry. Performance talks, ideological B.S. walks.
Moreover, this is a government with a plan and the talents to execute such plans, all thanks to the proven meritocracy under Chicom rule. Big education in China generates the HIGHEST high school test scores on earth (reading, math, science), bar none, and graduates more scientists and engineers than the next 5 nations combined. Biggest-in-the-world steel, cement, aluminum, rare earths, lowest cost power gen (hydro, wind, solar, coal, now nuclear, AND the most advanced high voltage transmission systems), biggest high speed train system, fastest supercomputer, and now the largest gene based industry (just Shenzhen city alone has more gene mapping capacity than the entire U.S.). It is building success upon success only the Chinese know how to do.
If anything, the world should be humbly learning from the Chinese, not berating Beijing. So why this vicious attack on clearly the best performing government on earth (for the last 30 years)? Are Westerners doing it out of mindless jealousy? Can't bear the sight of the other guy doing well?
Bananas on the other hand, would be a totally different story.
2. But if you have to ask, in the abstract, would it be worth it to do so? It has to be resounding YES - as the 87% approval rate for Beijing demonstrates.
Western democracy is inherently and systemically corrupt. Pay to play, block your opponent at all cost (and I mean all costs - even if it causes the nation's demise, the partisan pols don't care), writing laws to favor only the paying constituents, bailing out the criminals (handing over more than $3 trillion to the banksters AFTER they caused the loss of 8 million jobs) because you know there'd be table scraps for the pols.
Look at the Western politicians running around like headless chickens after the 2008 debacle, clucking furiously and achieving little - with America still mired in deep depression and European states literally failing. Then you look at China. This 2010 China is growing again at 10.5%
The fear that the Chinese model actually works, is what's behind a lot of these silly chest thumping about so called "human rights." Since when was the "right" to take foreign government money and attack the mother nation's very Constitution a "human right"??
China does not seek to export ideology - China leads by example. The better the nation performs economically, the more it is likely that the world would follow.
Living well is the best response.
for the sake of argument i'm going to assume you're living in a western country right now, that these views are your own, and you're not a member of the 50-cent party, or wumaodang (paid chinese commentators for the unitiated). if the country you lived in took its political cues from the party, and you posted an article on an equivalent site based on your comments, you would probably eventually wind up in jail or otherwise suffer for your expressiveness, like lxb. isn't it nice, though, that you can say whatever you want and not have to worry about your son growing up without a father?
if you don't think having this ability is worth the challenges that come with democracy, or if you don't think chinese citizens should have this ability, then relinquish your right and bother responding.
moreover, the main thrust of the article and of much of the opinions, including opinions held by people who are just as chinese as you, is far narrower than you acknowledge. it doesn't "ultimately boil down to the contest of the systems," it boils down whether imprisoning lxb is justified. make a case for that, and we'll continue exercising our glorious right to express our opinions without fear of being imprisoned.
The general consensus is that, experientially, the fewer parties the better efficiency and less waste. 2 parties (U.S.) is much better than 23 parties (India) or even multiple parties (Europe); and of course 1 party has been the best performing in the last 30 years.
The other day my son asked me to take him to Japan to see the Kabuki Theatre. I asked him why. He said he'd love to go laugh at the silliness.
That's exactly what the so called "Nobel Peace Prize" had degenerated into. Irrelevance; merely colorful spectacle.