Medal contention
Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong
沙伯力、嚴海蓉
South China Morning Post, 12.10.2010

In non-peace related fields, there are Nobel Prizes and, somewhat less
famously, "Ig Nobel Prizes". A group of scientists presents the latter
annually, as a joke, but also to make a point about undeserving
activity in their fields. One of the winners of this year's Nobel
prize for physics had, several years back, also received an Ig Nobel
prize.

The award of this year's Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned dissident Liu
Xiaobo is being celebrated globally, mainly by elites who claim to
know what Liu is about. They say he is for human rights and democracy,
but there is more to it than that, because much of what he is about is
ignoble.

When people living in authoritarian societies demand freedom of
speech, they usually do so with goals in mind that go beyond just
allowing everyone to have a say. Liu's political and social goals have
scarcely been mentioned in the current wave of adulation, yet these
goals are distinctly at variance with the interests of the vast
majority of Chinese, as they perceive them.

What a few people in China know about Liu, but hardly any outsiders
do, is his prescription for China's development, first made when Liu
was already in his 30s. In 1988, an interviewer asked him what
condition China needed to have real historical change.

He answered that China needed to have 300 years of colonisation. Liu
attributed what Hong Kong is today to 100 years of colonisation, so
China would need 300 years of colonisation for it to become like Hong
Kong.

That was more than two decades ago but, in 2007, Liu stated that he
did not want to take back what he had said in 1988, because it
reflected a belief he retained. He attributed progress in China to
Westernisation and said the more that Westernisation existed in the
various spheres of Chinese society, the more progress was attained.

He is either woefully ignorant of the nature of colonialism, which
involved legally mandated racial discrimination and the colonisers'
political and economic monopolies, or Liu finds it a congenial
alternative because he is convinced of Western superiority. This can
hardly be expected to be a sentiment shared by most Chinese.

In his 2007 statement, Liu claimed that, in the economic sphere,
progress could be chalked up to privatisation. Not surprisingly then,
Charter 08, a statement he mainly authored and that called for a
Western-style political system in China, also urges a "free market"
transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership and the
privatisation of land ownership.

Privatisation in Russia resulted in a colossal robbery of public
wealth by a few oligarchs. To the extent privatisation has occurred in
China, it has mainly enriched former officials and has often worsened
the conditions of labour. An agrarian capitalism based on landed
property would have no assured benefit, but might bring back the
execrable system of landlords and landless peasants. Further
privatisation would probably increase the already high level of
inequality in China, which is why surveys show that most Chinese
oppose it.

Many observers recognise that the Nobel Peace Prize is a political
prize, and a morally bankrupt one at that: do something that accords
with mainstream Western elite thinking about what "advances peace",
and you may get a prize. Continue, for as long as you can, a war that
kills thousands or even millions of civilians, as Henry Kissinger did
in Indochina and Barack Obama is doing in Afghanistan, and you may
still get a prize. If you attack China, the perceived potential rival
of the West's hegemon, as the Dalai Lama and Liu have done, your
chances for a prize increase.

The Chinese government has argued that the spirit of the Nobel Peace
Prize has been infringed by awarding it to one who is imprisoned for
violating Chinese law. That, however, is beside the point. There was
no need to imprison Liu and there has been no need for a binary choice
between shutting him up by fiat or treating him as a hero. Rather,
there has only been a need to bring to light Liu's self-proclaimed
goals. If most Chinese, especially the non-elite majority, knew about
his prescribed path for China, they would turn away from him as
someone with things ignoble on offer.

The world has many political prisoners; most are in fact imprisoned in
countries with governments that continue to receive all manner of
assistance from other countries that proclaim themselves beacons of
human rights and democracy. Among those myriads languishing in prison,
most want something far better for the peoples of their country than
does Liu and are far worthier of an award because of it.

Barry Sautman is a political scientist and lawyer at Hong Kong
University of Science & Technology. Yan Hairong is an anthropologist
at Hong Kong Polytechnic University