SINOGRAPH Beijing should let sleeping Nobel dogs lie
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING - What is the value, the weight, and the pain of a Nobel Prize for the
Chinese government? A few days after the announcement of the Oslo prize and the
self-celebrating rivers of ink shed abroad for wounding the pride of the
emerging power, the pain and the damage of the Nobel within China seems
negligible.
People in the streets know little about the Nobel and much less of Liu Xiaobo,
the imprisoned Chinese dissident who was awarded the Peace Prize. Internet
users who are accustomed to jumping the Great Firewall dividing the Chinese
network from the rest of the world know better, but do not get too excited in
one direction (in favor of Liu) or the other (against the prize-awarding Oslo
academy).
These are trivial facts and have to be partly discounted because of
the official control over the media. Still, this Nobel Prize is very different
from its predecessors.
Andrei Sakharov, who won the Peace Prize in 1975, was a huge person in the
Soviet Union. He was the father of the Soviet atomic bomb, the ultimate weapon,
with which Moscow threatened the West at the height of the Cold War. The award
to the great physicist was a message to the West: "Among nuclear scientists,
there are also people who think like us." And it was a message to those inside
the Soviet empire who respected the physicist: "We support those who think like
us and join Sakharov."
In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won in 1991, was (and is) an even bigger
person. She was the leader of the party that in 1990 had won elections,
although she was at the time under house arrest and was kept so for most of the
next 20 years. The Cold War had ended and Myanmar was a small country. The
prize was a strong solidarity message to the Burmese people who had been
deprived of victory at the polls, and a cry for democracy in that country and
throughout Asia.
Similar things apply for the Peace Prize to the Dalai Lama in 1989. He is the
leader of Tibet in exile, recognized and adored by most Tibetans. The Nobel was
a message to China, and it identified, rightly in the question of Tibet, a
fracture point for the country. At the time, Moscow was embracing the West, the
Chinese economy was less than one-quarter of the Italian one, and Beijing,
after the Tiananmen crackdown, seemed marginal in the global market.
In all those cases, the Nobel Prize went to great people who had or have a
great influence in their communities, giving them an international platform.
In this case, however, Liu doesn't have the same standing in today's China. The
stature he gained in these hours is mostly a "foreign loan" and therefore
likely to crumble and fall for those inside and outside who cheered for his
Nobel.
If the 1998 prize had been given to Li Hongzhi, the Falungong leader who was
living in China and then had perhaps 100 million followers, it would have been
a major blow for the government. If after the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the
prize had been awarded to the now exiled-in-America dissident Wei Jingsheng,
the situation might have been even worse, because Chinese intellectuals were
then furious at the government.
But now Liu has a fraction of the support Li had in 1998, nor does he have the
influence that Wei had among intellectuals in 1989. The prize is very annoying
to Beijing and gets the support of some people abroad who oppose the
government, but it does not create a crack in the country between the people
and government, as was the case for other similar Nobel Prizes.
In fact, it is creating rifts among dissidents, as more than one - starting
with Wei - raised their voices in protest against Oslo's choice. The fact that
the judges could perhaps not spot a better candidate in China for the
Nobel Prize than the not immensely popular Liu Xiaobo could be revealing of the
state of dissent in China.
So there is a profound discrepancy in perception inside and outside of China on
this issue. It is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the
last.
In the end, perhaps the negative publicity that China will receive abroad and
inside the country will depend only on the anger of the government, should it
decide to vent in response to the prize.
This does not mean that Oslo academics were wrong when they called on China to
be better than this, and said that a major emerging power cannot keep its
dissidents in prison. But it does mean that this award is likely to solve
little, and it may have the opposite effect to what was hoped for.
It could be useless or even harmful. The Chinese government rules some 22% of
the world's population. The country's gross domestic product has been growing
at 10% per year for the past 30 years. China holds the largest currency
reserves, has contributed in the past two years to around half of global
growth, and thrives while much of the rest of the world is still mired in
crisis.
Now, a world without China would possibly be split in a worse fashion than at
the time of Sakharov and the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But today there
is no Cold War - at least nobody has announced it - unless someone is dreaming
of it. These dreamers could be many outside of China - and also within it.
"Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, the other candidate for the Nobel Prize
for Peace, the one who was rejected by the Oslo academy, reunified Germany
after half a century of separation during the Cold War, began the process of
economic and political integration of the European Union, and brought the
German people to a peaceful standing in the world, leaving behind the bloody
legacy of two world wars. What did Liu Xiaobo do? Twenty years ago during the
Tiananmen movement he was a prominent personality, but today he is isolated."
So argue Chinese intellectuals close to the Communist Party.
Some of them had known Liu Xiaobo 20 years ago in Tiananmen Square, yet now
they fear Western anti-Chinese plots more than the communists in power. Even
then, at the time of the student movement, they add, Liu was not the most
famous leader or the one with the largest following. But he remained in China
and did not want to go abroad.
Many common people shrug off human-rights issues and care only about how to set
aside money to buy a first or second home and a first or second car. So why
didn't the Norwegians choose a Chinese person for their prize before or after
the Nobel to Sakharov? A victim of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution would
have been a suitable candidate.
The many nationalist hawks in the party are sure of it: the award came now
because there is an ongoing conspiracy against Beijing. China is guilty in the
eyes of the West of having emerged too quickly with its economy while the West
is mired in an ongoing economic crisis, and of being too independent of the
West.
In fact, with the Nobel given to Liu Xiaobo, China in 2010 is put in the same
category as Myanmar in 1991, the Soviet Union in 1975 and Nazi Germany in 1935,
when it shut Carl von Ossietzky in a concentration camp. These precedents seem
inconsistent with the present image of Beijing, dotted with bars, neon lights,
restaurants, clubs, discos, and boys and girls chasing relaxation and fun in
the night.
This Nobel Prize seems to the end the truce that began with the attack on the
twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001. Then the West turned its
attention from China to focusing on the Islamic threat, which was very powerful
and real because of the thousands of deaths inflicted in the moral capital of
America.
Today, however, the Islamic threat appears reined in, under control, and in
some ways not so serious. The war in Iraq was declared finished, and the
seemingly infinite - and perhaps impossible to finish - Afghan war was put on
the media backburner. They are local problems and big headaches, but a bunch of
exalted extremists will not change the world balance.
Instead, over the summer, the news that the Chinese gross domestic product had
actually leapfrogged Japan's set different priorities. As China had surpassed
Japan, tomorrow it could surpass the United States. This pushed China and its
many unresolved problems into the spotlight. There is the human-rights record,
but also the problems of cooperation on the environment in Copenhagen last
December and the Chinese silence after Pyongyang's apparent sinking of a South
Korean corvette in March. After all, the West had already proven the efficacy
of awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to criticize Beijing by awarding it to the
Dalai Lama in 1989.
The thesis may be outlandish, but beyond the conspiratorial fantasies of the
many Chinese nationalists, certainly the current difficulties and foreign
embarrassment for China have doubled because of the threats Beijing recently
shot at Oslo. China had thundered against Liu's nomination and announced trade
retaliation against Norway in the event of a prize to the dissident. Beijing
now has been proven weak abroad twice because it yelled at Oslo and the screams
were ignored.
This weakness could spill gasoline on the nationalist fire, and Beijing could
stiffen to try to compensate for the setback. Or it could lead to a deep
rethinking about its politics. Beijing could see that in any case, screaming is
counterproductive. If someone obeys the screams, he is in most cases not
convinced but only intimidated, something that primes dissent and darkens one's
image. If people do not listen, it simply reveals weakness.
The Taiwan case proves the point. The island was drifting away when Beijing
blasted military threats; when Beijing softened its tone, the island inched
over.
If this was the goal of the Oslo academics, then yes, they will probably
achieve it. The prize to Liu was a profound shock to China. China's newly
acquired wealth and power could easily be muddied, even by a bunch of old
fogies from a city at the end of the world, This problem abroad could then spin
within China, and thus set a new pattern for the "efficacy" of the Nobel Peace
Prize, from the outside to the inside - unless there is rethinking in Beijing.
Francesco Sisci is the Asia Editor of La Stampa. His e-mail is
fsisci@gmail.com
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