China’s objections to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize emphasise the very reasons why democracy is so important.
By slamming Norway and threatening problems in ties between the two countries, China has once more misunderstood the difference between the state and the public. In democracies, there is no problem if the two are at odds; it is dissidence which makes a democracy strong.
But a state-controlled society may be able to build huge bridges and dams, but their success depends on crushing the human spirit.
Liu, 54, was jailed after the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989, where pro-democracy students clashed with the Chinese army. The Chinese authorities came down hard on democracy and human rights activists and it is only China’s economic clout and superpower aspirations which have stopped much of the world from condemning it outright. So sensitive are the Chinese authorities to criticism that even minor transgressions on the Internet are treated as major crimes.
The Nobel committee has, in a sense, stayed true to form by picking a controversial candidate for its peace prize. Several of its winners have surprised the world and some have left the committee with egg on its face. The omission of Mahatma Gandhi from the list of awardees is shocking to some, although it could well be argued that Gandhi hardly needs a certificate from the Nobel committee to ratify his contributions to the world.
But an act of omission is very different from acknowledging the importance of a pro-democracy dissident in a totalitarian state. The world’s discomfort with China and its resolve to open its economy to the world while keeping everything else under lock and key is well-known. In fact, China was similarly enraged when dissident Chinese writer Gao Xingjian was awarded the
Nobel for literature in 2000.
As the Nobel committee chairman has pointed out, the more powerful China becomes, the more it has to get used to criticism. All governments and nations in the world face this problem but those which are democracies are better equipped to deal with it and some, in fact, celebrate it. This Nobel prize, in many ways, forces both China and the world to re-examine the relevance of totalitarianism today. It will give a fillip to dissidents everywhere, and also demonstrate to China that the party’s writ cannot — will never — run outside its borders. There is a lesson in this for all autocratic states around the world.
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