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story by Isaac Stone Fish and Duncan Hewitt

 

Liu is the principal author of Charter 08, a manifesto modeled after Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, calling for greater freedom of expression and human rights in China. The director for Norway’s Center for Human Rights in Oslo, Nils Butenschon, said earlier this week that Liu is a “classic Nobel Peace Prize candidate, in the same vein as Václav Havel and other eastern European dissidents from the Cold War.” Speaking privately to NEWSWEEK, a Beijing-based Western diplomat said this morning, “Liu Xiaobo represents everything that is forward-moving in China right now.” For Beijing authorities, the fear will be that the award could help reopen political debate among the educated elite in China, something the government has painstakingly tried to neutralize over the past two decades. Beijing has already called the award an “obscenity.”

As it manages breakneck economic growth and struggles with development and environmental challenges across the country’s massive landmass, the Chinese leadership is highly nervous about what it sees as foreign attempts to undermine its authority. And this move by the Nobel Peace Prize committee is arguably the most direct international intervention in domestic Chinese politics since the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, when foreign governments cut off high-level ties with Beijing and the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama.

Giving the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo appears to be specifically designed to focus global attention on China’s lack of political reform, an issue Beijing has been trying to sweep under the rug for the past two decades. The chairman of the Nobel committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, said it was necessary for the outside world to “keep an eye” on what is going on in China and to debate “what kind of China do we want to have?” Such comments have clearly infuriated a government that regularly argues that countries should not interfere in each other’s internal affairs.

 

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Story Compliments Of Newsweek