Nobel Prize Is Seen as Rebuke to China
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BEIJING — Few nations today stand as more of a challenge to the democratic model of governance than China, where an 89-year-old Communist Party has managed to quash political movements while creating a roaring, quasi-market economy and enforcing a veneer of social stability.With the United States' economy flagging and its global influence in decline, some Chinese leaders now appear confident in asserting that freedom of speech, multiparty elections and constitutional rights — what some human rights advocates call universal values — are indigenous to the West, and that is where they should stay.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, 54, was a sharp rejoinder to that philosophy. Of course, it was a Norwegian panel that gave him the prize, providing Chinese officials and their supporters with ample ammunition to denounce the move as another attempt by the West to impose its values on China.
But anticipating the criticism, the judges underscored the support in China for the imprisoned Mr. Liu's work and his plight, which they said proved that the Chinese were as hungry as anyone for the political freedoms enjoyed in countries like the United States, India and Indonesia.
"The campaign to establish universal human rights also in China is being waged by many Chinese, both in China itself and abroad," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said. "Through the severe punishment meted out to him, Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China."
The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader who won the prize in 1989, highlighted the grass-roots Chinese push for political reform in a statement praising Mr. Liu, saying that "future generations of Chinese will be able to enjoy the fruits of the efforts that the current Chinese citizens are making towards responsible governance." Yet the Dalai Lama stands as proof that the struggle for rights in China is a hard one, and that winning the Nobel is no guarantee of achieving even minimal success.
Nevertheless, the number of signatures on Charter 08, the document that Mr. Liu co-drafted that calls for gradually increasing constitutional rights, shows that at the very least, there is an appetite in this country to openly discuss the kind of values that hard-line Communist Party leaders dismiss as a new brand of Western imperialism.
The 300 initial signatures on the document snowballed to 10,000 as it spread on the Internet, even as the government tried its best to stamp it out. Certainly many of those who signed it were intellectuals, not exactly representative of most Chinese, but China has a rich history of political reform led by its elites. Chinese lawyers, journalists, scholars, artists, policy advisers — many among them will be heartened by the Nobel Committee's decision.
"Today, many people are making efforts," said Wan Yanhai, the most prominent advocate for AIDS patients in China and one of the initial signers of Charter 08; he left China temporarily for the United States in May because of what he called police harassment. "They're hidden, but they're there," he said. "People are organizing different resistance movements, sometimes in a peaceful way, sometimes in a violent manner."
Cui Weiping, a social critic who teaches at the Beijing Film Academy, said the rights struggle was moving from a local stage to a global one. "Like everything that happens in China today, the democracy movement here exists in a global context," she said. "So this will be a lesson to China: it can't bottle up the democracy movement forever."
The Internet, the vehicle that carried Charter 08 to prominence, simmered with Chinese support for Mr. Liu early Friday night despite extensive government filtering. Liu Xiaobo was the most common topic on Sina.com's Weibo, a popular microblog forum. Microbloggers burned with enthusiasm for the prize and hurled invective at the government: "Political reform and the Nobel Prize, is this a new start? This day has finally come," wrote a user named Nan Zhimo. Another user, Hei Zechuan, said, "The first real Chinese Nobel Prize winner has emerged, but he is still in prison right now; what a bittersweet event."
Even before the announcement Friday afternoon, a group of supporters gathered outside the Beijing apartment building where Liu Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia, lives. They showed little fear of the black-uniformed police officers surrounding them.
"I believe this award will massively open up room for political discussion in China," said one of those standing outside the building, Li Yusheng, 66, a retired journalist, Charter 08 signer and founder of a group that aims to help the poor. "And it will exert pressure on the authorities to change their old ways, so that they will not be able to jail people like Liu Xiaobo in the future. They will have to change or else be driven out of power."
But the authorities clung to their habits on Friday night, as police officers showed up at celebratory gatherings in Beijing and Shanghai to haul people off to police stations, according to Twitter feeds.
Some political experts here say that even China's more liberal-minded leaders have little appetite for pushing vigorously for greater political rights, and will continue to hold back as jockeying intensifies ahead of the 2012 leadership succession — a time when hard-line attitudes tend to dominate. A sharp taste of that came in March 2009, when Wu Bangguo, the head of the National People's Congress, a rubber-stamp Parliament, made a speech in which he dismissed any move toward Western-style democracy, mentioning it no fewer than nine times.
"We will never simply copy the system of Western countries or introduce a system of multiple parties holding office in rotation," he said, adding that "although China's state organs have different responsibilities, they all adhere to the line, principles and policies of the party."
Some Chinese liberals like Mr. Wan say they see a compatriot in Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who as recently as August publicly extolled the virtues of political change. "Without the guarantee of political system reform, the successes of restructuring the economic system will be lost and the goal of modernization cannot be realized," Mr. Wen said, according to People's Daily.
Some liberal economists like Yang Yao and Wu Jinglian have also come out strongly in support of political restructuring, arguing that China's economy, where state-owned enterprises tied to the Communist Party continue to dominate the largest industries, can reach maturity only with the checks and balances that come with democracy.
The exact form of democracy is often left vague in these discussions. Liberals know that calling for multiparty elections — a direct challenge to the primacy of the Communist Party — is a red line. Mr. Wen, whom many Chinese praise but whose actual power is dubious, shies away from mentioning elections. Mr. Liu and the co-writers of Charter 08 were also careful to avoid calling for any immediate, drastic change to the Communist Party's hold on power.
"Our intention was not to threaten the party or the government," said Zhang Zuhua, one of the charter's main authors. "It was to put forth this framework of universal values, and build a consensus within society around it, among both those within and outside the system."
"Except the government," he said, "clearly does not affirm these universal values."
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Li Bibo and Zhang Jing contributed research.
espite Beijing's anger, the DPP, the KMT and President Ma Ying-jeou all issued statements congratulating the dissident on his award
