Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Liu Xiaobo and and the Nobel Peace Prize
[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is chair of the history department at the University of California, Irvine and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010). An essay on protest in China, which he co-wrote with Maura Elizabeth Cunningham, will appear in the next issue Dissent.]
THIS YEAR’S Nobel Peace Prize generated an unusual amount of attention, due largely to the bravery and eloquence of the writings of the winner, the imprisoned gadfly intellectual Liu Xiaobo, but also to the mixture of expected and unexpected steps that the Chinese government took in responding to the situation. There was nothing surprising about Beijing being displeased by the award (many governments have been angered by past decisions of the Norwegian prize committee), nor was it unusual that the Chinese authorities blocked Liu from traveling to Oslo (other past winners have been in jail or denied exit visas). What was out of the ordinary was how far the government went to make sure that no one close to Liu would be able to accept it on his behalf (even Moscow had allowed Laureate Andrei Sakharov’s wife Elena Bonner to serve as his surrogate at the 1975 ceremony).
Also breaking from standard practice was the curious, last-minute effort to gin up an alternative “Confucius Prize” to celebrate someone China’s leaders viewed as more worthy than Liu—even if the prize was not as directly linked to Beijing as early reports in the international press suggested. Much about the prize remains murky, but the head of the prize committee apparently told AP that, while his group was not an official organization, it “worked closely with the Ministry of Culture.” (The idea for the prize was floated in mid-November in the Global Times, an officially endorsed organ tied to People’s Daily.) The inaugural ceremony for the award featured an angelic figure on stage with cash to give to the winner—who did not attend, and was reported to be unaware that he had even won.
In the case of the two unexpected reactions, as others have noted, there is only one clear historical precedent: the response of the Nazi government to the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, a crusading writer. Then, too, neither the laureate nor a family member was allowed to collect the prize (at a ceremony held in 1936); then, too, an authoritarian government created an award of its own, the “German National Prize for Science and Art,” to compete with the Norwegian one....
Read entire article at Dissent
THIS YEAR’S Nobel Peace Prize generated an unusual amount of attention, due largely to the bravery and eloquence of the writings of the winner, the imprisoned gadfly intellectual Liu Xiaobo, but also to the mixture of expected and unexpected steps that the Chinese government took in responding to the situation. There was nothing surprising about Beijing being displeased by the award (many governments have been angered by past decisions of the Norwegian prize committee), nor was it unusual that the Chinese authorities blocked Liu from traveling to Oslo (other past winners have been in jail or denied exit visas). What was out of the ordinary was how far the government went to make sure that no one close to Liu would be able to accept it on his behalf (even Moscow had allowed Laureate Andrei Sakharov’s wife Elena Bonner to serve as his surrogate at the 1975 ceremony).
Also breaking from standard practice was the curious, last-minute effort to gin up an alternative “Confucius Prize” to celebrate someone China’s leaders viewed as more worthy than Liu—even if the prize was not as directly linked to Beijing as early reports in the international press suggested. Much about the prize remains murky, but the head of the prize committee apparently told AP that, while his group was not an official organization, it “worked closely with the Ministry of Culture.” (The idea for the prize was floated in mid-November in the Global Times, an officially endorsed organ tied to People’s Daily.) The inaugural ceremony for the award featured an angelic figure on stage with cash to give to the winner—who did not attend, and was reported to be unaware that he had even won.
In the case of the two unexpected reactions, as others have noted, there is only one clear historical precedent: the response of the Nazi government to the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Carl von Ossietzky, a crusading writer. Then, too, neither the laureate nor a family member was allowed to collect the prize (at a ceremony held in 1936); then, too, an authoritarian government created an award of its own, the “German National Prize for Science and Art,” to compete with the Norwegian one....