Over the past two weeks, all of Asia watched with alarm as China forced Japan to back down in a maritime dispute by downgrading diplomatic ties, and tolerating if not encouraging public street protest against Tokyo as well as halting shipments of critical industrial metals to Japan. The face-off symbolizes Beijing's new attitude: once officially committed to rising peacefully in cooperation with its neighbors, China now seems determined to show its neighbors--and the United States--that it has growing military and economic interests that other countries ignore at their peril.
October 2010 Archives
By Sharon LaFraniere | The New York Times
October 26, 2010
In a move to call global attention to the imprisonment of her husband, the wife of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has invited 143 Chinese activists, academics and celebrities to the award ceremony in Oslo.
Her invitation list was released online with a letter saying the Chinese authorities were unlikely to allow her or her husband to attend the event on Dec. 10. "This prize belongs to everyone, everyone who is Chinese and has been fearless in defending their dignity," the letter states.
Mr. Liu is serving an 11-year prison term in northeastern China. He was sentenced a year after being detained in the wake of the publication online of Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto he helped draft that garnered about 10,000 signatures before the government blocked it.
His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest since the prize was announced on Oct. 8, according to relatives. She is unreachable by cellphone, and outsiders have not been able to visit her at home.
Yang Jianli, a friend of the couple who lives in Massachusetts, said he had verified that the letter, posted on the Internet on Monday, was authentic. "I think she wants to share the honor of this award and at the same time, to call upon these people to shoulder responsibility for the future," he said.
Ms. Liu's invitation list includes a number of people who are unlikely to attend. Some are dissidents who are typically kept under close surveillance. One, Zhang Zuhua, another of the main authors of Charter 08, has been confined to his house since the Nobel announcement.
"There is a big cop outside the door, so I won't be able to go," he said with a laugh.
Others seemed a little befuddled about why they were invited. "I would definitely not go myself," said Li Fangping, a lawyer who represented parents whose children suffered problems from contaminated milk products. "I feel like there are people ahead of me. I am not sure what she is trying to do because I have not been able to contact her."
The number of invitees underscored the symbolic nature of the letter. Sigrid Langebrekke, events manager for the Nobel Peace Prize committee, said prizewinners typically invite no more than 30 guests.
"It could be more than that," she said. "But 143 is quite too many." She added that guests must pay their own costs.
Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, declined to answer questions about Ms. Liu at Tuesday's regular news briefing. Asked whether Ms. Liu would be allowed to travel to Oslo, he replied testily: "On what grounds are you asking this question? How do you know that she intends to go?"
When a second reporter said Ms. Liu had been invited, Mr. Ma answered: "Oh, in that case, you should ask her, not me." He reiterated that China considered Mr. Liu a criminal and objected to any attempt to interfere with the country's legal integrity.
Mr. Yang, a pro-democracy activist who left China in 2007, said Ms. Liu had invited celebrities like the film director Chen Kaige, the actor Jiang Wen and the author Han Han because "they are personal friends or colleagues in the democracy work."
On Monday, a group of 15 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including former President Jimmy Carter and the South African anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, issued a letter calling on world leaders to press for Mr. Liu's release at next month's Group of 20 meeting in South Korea.
Mr. Yang said: "We need to continue the effort to try to apply pressure on the Chinese government to return freedom to Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia. This is more important than the award ceremony."
By Bloomberg News
October 24, 2010
China withdrew from the Tokyo International Film Festival in a dispute over how the delegation from Taiwan would be introduced, the Global Times newspaper reported today, citing Jiang Ping, head of the Chinese delegation.
The Chinese delegation had asked for the group from Taiwan to be introduced as "Chinese Taipei" or as "China's Taiwan," the Beijing-based newspaper reported. Festival organizers instead decided to introduce the delegations as China and Taiwan, prompting the Chinese delegation to withdraw from the event, according to the report.
China views Taiwan as a renegade province to be united with the mainland.
Commetary added by Truth About China:
Taiwan's current government has a somewhat misguided perception that there is a peaceful solution to the concept of one China, one Taiwan. The above item, as countless other indications, show once again how deadly serious China is determined that there can only be ONE China - theirs.
By Radio FREE Asia
October 18, 2010
A new report says China's human rights situation worsened in 2010.
Human rights in the world's most populous nation have worsened in 2010, according to the new edition of an annual report by a congressionally mandated commission on China.
"We are deeply concerned, as the findings of this Annual Report make clear, that human rights conditions in China over the last year have deteriorated," the chairman and cochairman of the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) wrote in a statement.
The 2010 Annual Report, which was released along with a list of more than 1,000 political prisoners currently detained or imprisoned in the country, provides members of the U.S. Congress, administration officials, and the American public with an examination of human rights and the rule of law in China.
CECC said that new trends in political imprisonment in China include tighter controls on lawyers and human rights activists, particularly those who carry out their work online or in politically sensitive locations such as Tibet and Xinjiang.
"The threat of political imprisonment affects the work of people and organizations who are engaged in human rights advocacy or who are involved in commercial activity in China, including U.S. citizens," Senator Byron Dorgan and Representative Sander Levin said in the statement.
"The chilling effects of political imprisonment result in lost opportunities for the Chinese government to make progress on, and for Chinese citizens to enjoy, the development of human rights and the rule of law."
The report said that China has achieved success in health and education, and in improved living standards for large segments of the population, compared to several decades ago.
"But the Chinese government now must lead in protecting fundamental freedoms and human rights, including worker rights, and in defending the integrity of China's legal institutions with no less skill and commitment than it displayed in implementing economic reforms that allowed the industriousness of the Chinese people to lift millions out of poverty," the report said.
Political prisoners
As of Oct. 10, 2010, the CECC's Political Prisoner Database contained information on a total of 5,689 cases of political or religious imprisonment in China.
Of those, 1,452 are cases of political and religious prisoners currently known or believed to be detained or imprisoned.
The remaining cases are known or believed to have been released, executed, to have died while imprisoned or soon after release, or who escaped.
London-based human rights organization Amnesty International said Beijing continues to crack down on activists and threaten them with imprisonment for speaking out about rights abuses.
"The human rights defense movement in China is growing, but those who attempt to report on human rights violations or challenge politically sensitive government policies face serious risk of abuse," Amnesty says on its website.
"The authorities make frequent use of vaguely-worded charges to silence and imprison peaceful activists, such as "endangering state security," "subversion of state power" and "separatism."
Chinese activists Amnesty lists as currently in prison, detained, or missing, include pro-democracy activist Liu Xianbin, human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, environmental activist Tan Zuoren, Uyghur journalist and web editor Hairat Niyaz, and Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen.
Reported in Washington by Joshua Lipes.
By CARA ANNA - Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
October 16, 2010
China joined the world in breathless coverage of the Chilean mine rescue, but when a gas blast killed 21 Chinese miners and trapped 16 Saturday, the national TV evening news didn't say a word. Rescuers said they were fighting tons of coal dust to reach the miners, who have been located but whose condition was unknown.
The rescuers also faced dangerous gas levels and the risk of falling rocks as they worked their way into the mine pit.
The early-morning explosion in central China happened as the world still was celebrating Chile's successful rescue of 33 miners trapped more than two months. Chinese media had detailed coverage as the men emerged to cheers.
Some in China asked whether their own officials would make as much of an effort in a similar disaster, and be just as open about the progress of rescue efforts.
The test came quickly for China, whose mining industry is the most dangerous in the world.
Saturday's blast at a state-run mine in Henan province occurred as workers were drilling a hole to release pressure from a gas buildup to decrease the risk of explosions, the state work safety administration said.
Another gas blast at the same mine two years ago killed 23 people, state media said.
Saturday's blast at the Pingyu Coal & Electric Co. Ltd. mine unleashed more than 2,500 tons of coal dust, an engineer for one of the mine's parent companies, Du Bo, told the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
A rescue spokesman told Xinhua that workers had located the 16 trapped miners but must clear tons of coal dust from the mine shaft to reach them.
It wasn't clear if the miners were alive or how far underground they were trapped in the mine in the city of Yuzhou, about 430 miles (690 kilometers) south of Beijing.
China Central Television's news channel had an excited live broadcast from the mine early in the afternoon, but then did not mention the accident for several hours, and there was no word of it on the main TV evening news. A report later in the evening consisted mostly of information from the state news agency read by an announcer, suggesting that authorities had decided to limit reporting on the accident and rescue efforts.
By Radio FREE Asia
14 October 2010
Sentenced youths had led others in protests against Chinese rule.
Chinese authorities in the remote western province of Gansu have sentenced two Tibetan students to two-year jail terms in connection with protests at a local middle school, an exiled Tibetan source said.
"Thubten Nyima is 17 years old this year, and he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment," said Dolkar Kyab, an exiled Tibetan from Gansu's Kanlho (in Chinese, Gannan) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture now living in northern India.
"Tsering Dorje is 17, and he was sentenced to two years in jail," he added.
He said the youths were sentenced on Sept. 12 by the Gannan Municipal Intermediate People's Court and transferred to a prison in Gansu's Tianshui city on Oct. 12.
Both students were detained in March and accused of leading protests by some 30 students from the Machu (in Chinese, Maqu) county Tibetan Middle School on the second anniversary of Tibetan unrest sparked by clashes in Lhasa on March 14, 2008.
Local sources said at the time that at least 40 people were detained following the protests in Machu.
Authorities fired the school's headmaster in the ensuing crackdown. Two Tibetan assistants were also dismissed from their jobs.
The students then staged a hunger strike on campus to call for the reinstatement of school staff.
Official response
An official who answered the phone at the Kanlho county education bureau denied the sentencing had taken place.
"No, no it didn't," said the official. "Where are you calling from?"
A Tibetan official who answered the phone at the county religious affairs department said he was unfamiliar with the case. "I don't know about this," he said. "It wouldn't come through our department."
Calls to the Machu Tibetan Middle School went unanswered during working hours on Thursday.
Dolkar Kyab said two other students, Ngawang Lhamo from Machu's Maza village, and Rabten Dorje from Mama village, were also expelled from school for criticizing the government's patriotic re-education campaign in April this year.
"The police said that no other schools would be allowed to accept them once they had been expelled by their school," he added.
School unrest
Dozens of students at the Tibetan Middle School staged a protest March 14 on the second anniversary of a region-wide uprising against Chinese rule in Tibetan-populated areas of western China.
The students were joined by 500 to 600 other Tibetans, according to local residents, protesting their lack of freedom and calling for Tibetan independence.
Following the protest, the school's headmaster, Kyabchen Dedrol, and two assistants--Do Re and Choekyong Tseten--were dismissed from their jobs, sources said.
Local authorities also fired Sonam Tse, head of the Kanlho Public Security Office.
Classes at the school were suspended for a month, with students instead subjected to courses of "political re-education."
On March 16, students at a second school, Kanlho Tibetan Middle School No. 3, also protested, but were stopped from leaving school grounds by school security officials and teachers.
Police surrounded the students and forced them back into the school compound, according to a resident, who added that 20 students were detained and later released after being interrogated.
Security has been tight inside Tibetan regions of China since a peaceful protest in March 2008 prompted a crackdown and ignited a region-wide uprising.
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
By Radio FREE Asia
October 13, 2010
Journalists and former officials in China demand an end to media controls.
Hundreds of journalists and retired Communist Party officials have signed an open letter calling on China's parliament to put an end to government censorship of the media. The letter also demands legal backing to constitutional freedoms of speech and association.
The move comes as the government implements a clampdown on news and debate about the awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Penned by Li Rui, a former secretary of late supreme leader Mao Zedong, and Party elder Hu Jiwei, along with 21 other authors, the letter was dated Oct. 1 and addressed to the National People's Congress (NPC), China's legislature.
"We recommend that the NPC work immediately towards the drafting of a Press Law, and that all [national and local] restrictions on news and publishing be annulled," said the letter, translated into English by the Hong Kong-based China Media Project.
It said media organizations should be allowed to give up their role as Party mouthpieces and take on independent responsibility.
"We cannot again strengthen the censorship system in the name of 'strengthening the leadership of the Party,'" it said.
"Yes, he signed it," said Li Rui's wife, who answered the phone at the couple's Beijing home. But she said her husband was unavailable for interview because of a heart condition.
The letter based its argument on Clause 35 of China's constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, publication, association, and demonstration to all citizens.
In particular, it called for legal safeguards for journalists to protect them from attack or litigation in the course of their work, and for netizens to be allowed to express opinions freely online.
More signatures expected
The letter was signed by, among others, "Scars of the Past" magazine editor Tie Liu, who said its authors expect further signatures to be added.
"We addressed it directly to the NPC because we had 500 signatures," Tie said. "I think we could get as many as 10,000 people to sign."
Tie said the letter would be formally presented to the parliament ahead of its annual session in March.
"We are asking the authorities to make good on their promises, among other demands," he said, adding that around 70 percent of signatures were from people currently working in the media.
Fellow signatory Yu Haocheng said the time had now come to press for reforms to China's political system.
"This is part of the civil rights movement," Yu said. "Press freedom is a particularly hot topic at the moment."
Clampdown on Nobel mention
China has limited any mention of the award of the Nobel prize to Liu Xiaobo in official media and online in recent days, and has detained dozens of Liu's supporters around the country to prevent them from attending celebratory events.
Officials have slammed Liu's award as an insult both to the Nobel Peace Prize and to the Chinese legal system, as Liu is currently serving an 11-year jail term for "incitement to subvert state power."
"In suppressing the reaction to Liu's award, the authorities are hoping that there won't be a widespread reaction," said a former Chinese media worker surnamed He.
"They don't want there to be an uncontrollable reaction in the immediate aftermath of the award."
The Chinese authorities have recently forced a popular Internet discussion forum, or Bulletin Board System (BBS), to close through strong police pressure on the organizer.
Some journalists and activists using the microblogging service provided by top Chinese Web portal Sina.com said they had been prevented from sending any updates in the wake of Liu's Nobel award on Friday.
China's 420 million Internet users are subjected to a complex system of filters, blocks, and censorship by service providers, known collectively as the "Great Firewall," or GFW.
The authorities use a system of "sensitive words" to weed out content that the government deems subversive, including in recent days the name "Liu Xiaobo" and the words "2010 Nobel Peace Prize."
Reported by Xin Yu for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
By Tini Tran - Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
China on Monday blocked European officials from meeting with the wife of the jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner, cut off her phone communication and canceled meetings with Norwegian officials -- acting on its fury over the award.
As China retaliated, U.N. human rights experts called on Beijing to free imprisoned democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo, who was permitted a brief, tearful meeting with his wife Sunday. Liu dedicated the award to the "lost souls" of the 1989 military crackdown on student demonstrators.
Liu, a slight, 54-year-old literary critic, is in the second year of an 11-year prison term for inciting subversion.
In naming him, the Norwegian-based Nobel committee honored Liu's more than two decades of advocacy of human rights and peaceful democratic change -- from demonstrations for democracy at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989 to a manifesto for political reform that he co-authored in 2008 and which led to his latest jail term.
Beijing had reacted angrily to Friday's announcement honoring Liu, calling him a criminal and warning Norway's government that relations would suffer, even though the Nobel committee is an independent organization.
On Monday, it abruptly canceled a meeting that had been scheduled for Wednesday between visiting Norwegian Fisheries Minister Lisbeth Berg-Hansen and her Chinese counterpart. Berg-Hansen was in China for a weeklong visit to the World Expo in Shanghai.
"If the meeting has been canceled due to the Peace Prize, we find that to be an unnecessary reaction from China," said Norway's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ragnhild Imerslund. "We have not received any reason for canceling the meeting."
Meanwhile, the Dalai Lama criticized China for its response to the Nobel Peace Prize award, saying the government "must change," the Kyodo News agency reported. The Tibetan spiritual leader, who won the prize himself in 1989, said Beijing must recognize that fostering an open society is "the only way to save all people of China."
Also Monday, four U.N. human rights experts released a statement calling for China to immediately release Liu. The independent U.N.-appointed investigators, who examine issues from free speech to arbitrary detention, called on China to release Liu and "all persons detained for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression."
UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights group, welcomed the call from the four U.N. experts and urged U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay to echo their appeal for Liu's release.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, said statements by Ban and Pillay on Friday "glaringly omitted to call for the dissident's release, or even to say a word about the fact that he is currently in prison."
Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky, asked Monday whether the secretary-general thought China should release Liu from jail, said "the secretary-general has stated his views in his statement already." Pressed on whether Ban's views on human rights included not annoying an important U.N. member state, Nesirky gave the same reply.
In Friday's statement, Nesirky said Ban reiterated the importance of human rights but also praised China's "remarkable economic advances" and "broadened political participation." He said the U.N. chief also expressed hope "that any differences on this decision will not detract from advancement of the human rights agenda globally or the high prestige and inspirational power of the award."
European diplomats, meanwhile, were prevented from visiting Liu's wife, Liu Xia, who has been living under house arrest since Friday. Liu Xia has been told that if she wants to leave her home she must be escorted in a police car, the New York-based group Human Rights in China said.
She reported that her phone communications, along with her Internet, has been cut off; both her and her brother's mobile phones have been interfered with, HRIC said. She is not being allowed to contact the media or her friends, the group said.
Simon Sharpe, the first secretary of political affairs of the EU delegation in China, said he went to see her at her home in Beijing to personally deliver a letter of congratulations from European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
Sharpe was accompanied by diplomats from 10 other countries, including Switzerland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy and Australia.
But three uniformed guards at the main gate of Liu's apartment complex prevented the group from entering, saying someone from inside the building had to come out and fetch them.
"We were told that we could only go in if we called somebody from the inside and if they came out to meet us. But of course, we can't call Liu Xia, because it's impossible to get through to her phone," Sharpe told reporters at the entrance to the compound.
Sharpe read out a message from Barroso saying the prize was "a strong message of support to all those around the world who sometimes with great personal sacrifice are struggling for freedom and human rights."
The Nobel Committee has sent the official prize documents, including an invitiation to the Dec. 10 ceremony, to the Chinese Embassy in Oslo, asking Chinese authorities to hand them over to Liu, said committee secretary Geir Lundestad.
The Beijing public security bureau and the foreign ministry had no immediate comment on why authorities were apparently restricting her movements since she has not been charged with anything. But "soft detention" is a common tactic used by the Chinese government to intimidate and stifle activists and critics.
In recent days, Beijing has also stepped up its harassment of other activists, detaining several when they tried to organize a dinner to celebrate Liu's Nobel.
Zhang Jiannan, who runs an Internet forum on political matters, told The Associated Press that he and other activists had gone out Friday to celebrate Liu's victory. He was placed under house arrest Saturday and warned by police not to participate in political activities.
"Our (bulletin board system) had been warmly discussing Liu Xiaobo winning the award and passing the news to more people. I think police feel the pressure. They want to crack down on this circle of dissidents, and I and my site became a good target to set an example for others," he said, adding that he has agreed to shut down his website because he is fearful of police retaliation against his family.
On Monday, lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was the latest to be detained by police, according to his assistant, who did not want to be identified. Pu had sent out a message via Twitter Sunday that said security officials had showed up telling him not to accept interviews with foreign media.
In Australia, Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said he would raise to Chinese authorities Canberra's objections to the 11-year prison sentence imposed on Liu and to restrictions placed on the movements of the dissident's wife.
By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
October 09, 2010
The banquet organized Friday night to celebrate the news that the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo had won the Nobel Peace Prize was over before it began.
While the two dozen bloggers, rights lawyers and academics were arriving at the private room they had reserved at a Beijing restaurant shortly after the Norwegian Committee's announcement, the police rushed in and briskly led the celebrators away, according to those who were there.
On Saturday evening, at least a half-dozen participants remained in custody.
As presidents, religious figures and rights advocates around the world praised the Nobel Committee and called on the Chinese government to release Mr. Liu, one of China's most prominent dissidents, the Chinese government reacted with unrestrained ire.
They called in the Norwegian ambassador in Beijing for a dressing down, placed scores of dissidents under house arrest and angrily described the decision to honor Mr. Liu as "blasphemy" and an insult to the Chinese people.
Mr. Liu, 54, a former literature professor who has spent the past 20 years pressing for political reform in China, is serving an 11-year sentence for "inciting subversion of the stare," based on his writings and a pro-democracy manifesto, Charter '08, that he helped to draft. The document, which demands an end to single-party rule and calls for expanded liberties, gathered 10,000 signatures before government censors blocked its circulation on the Internet.
In an editorial on Saturday, The Global Times, a state newspaper, accused the Nobel Committee of imposing "Western" values on China, showing contempt for its legal system and seeking to split the nation by provoking social strife. "Every Chinese can sense a deliberate maliciousness in doing so," it said.
The English-language version of the same newspaper expanded on the theme, quoting an international relations professor at Renmin University, who said that the decision to select Mr. Liu for the prize was intended to humiliate China. "Such a decision will not only draw the ire of the Chinese public, but also damage the reputation of the prize," said the professor, Shi Yinhong.
On Friday night, scores of journalists gathered outside Mr. Liu's home, but the police refused to allow his wife, Liu Xia, to come out and would not let reporters enter. The police later led her away, promising to escort her to Jinzhou Prison, 300 miles away in Liaoning Province, to see her husband.
Ms. Liu's brother said that she had spoken to family members on Saturday and that she would be seeing her husband on Sunday. Calls to Ms. Liu's cellphone went unanswered on Saturday, and friends expressed concern because they could not reach her.
In an interview last week, Ms. Liu said she had little expectation that her husband would win the prize but said that if he did, she hoped it might prompt the authorities to release him earlier. "As my friends have said, how can they keep a Nobel Peace Prize in Jinzhou Prison?" she said.
Few Chinese citizens seemed aware of the honor accorded Mr. Liu, even 24 hours after its announcement. "Never heard of him, but we also haven't watched TV recently," said Yang Guwen, dressed in a denim cowboy shirt, as he and his girlfriend walked beneath a huge television screen that hangs over one of the capital's ritziest shopping malls.
Had he followed news reports, Mr. Yang would not have learned that a Chinese citizen had won one of the world's most respected prizes. Except for the Global Times editorial and a brief Foreign Ministry condemnation posted on the Internet, Chinese newspapers and Web-based portals ignored the news. Anyone typing the words "Nobel Peace Prize" or "Liu Xiaobo" into Google found themselves facing a blank screen.
A veteran civil rights lawyer, Teng Biao, said he was on his way to meet a foreign journalist on Saturday when he was stopped by national security agents at the Beijing university where he teaches. "The officers say that the police have rigid orders from higher authorities that they must work resolutely to thwart celebratory activities to mark this event," he said in a cellphone interview, having briefly stepped away from the agents to take a call. "They are keeping a strict eye on the most active people, in order to reduce its impact to the smallest degree possible."
The activists who gathered for the celebratory meal on Friday night were no stranger to police surveillance. Earlier in the evening, they had met in a park with yellow ribbons pinned to their shirts and clear plastic sleeves -- the kinds favored by conventioneers -- slung around their necks. The sleeves carried two portraits of Mr. Liu: one dark and somber, the other brightly lighted and decidedly cheery.
When word of the Nobel Prize arrived, they turned the happy photo to face out, walked to the restaurant and tacked a portrait of Mr. Liu on a wall. By the time Paul Mooney, a reporter with the newspaper South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, arrived, the police had already shown up.
After a brief scuffle, the men and women were led away, leaving Mr. Mooney alone with a roomful of police and the crumpled portrait of the Nobel Prize winner on the floor. Out of curiosity, he asked the young officers if they were familiar with Mr. Liu. "None of them even knew who he was," he said.
By Radio FREE Asia
October 08, 2010
The selection of a Chinese pro-democracy activist as recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize is expected to aid his cause.
The awarding of the coveted 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo will boost the global profile of China's pro-democracy and human rights movement, his wife and activists said.
The award will usher in an era of greater visibility but also of greater responsibility for Chinese activists working for human rights and political reform, Liu's wife Liu Xia said in Beijing.
"This prize brings with it great glory, but it also brings additional responsibility," she said after the Nobel Prize Committee announced the award in Oslo on Friday.
"I think that there is still a long road ahead for all the Liu Xiaobos, but if we work together, we can realize our dream of freedom and democracy for China."
Liu Xia thanked the five-member Nobel Prize Committee "for having the courage to make this award to a convicted criminal inside a Chinese jail."
Expected impact
Beijing-based dissident Chen Ziming, who, like Liu Xiaobo, served a long jail term in the wake of the 1989 military crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy movement, said he expects the award to also have an impact on China's political establishment.
"This is the good news that Chinese pro-democracy activists have been waiting to hear," he said.
"It is going to give a huge morale boost to all those people who have been supporting the pro-democracy movement for many years, and it's a huge boost to the process of democratization in China."
"It will also come as a huge psychological shock to those within the current political system ... Of course officials will make a fuss about it, but that is all on the surface."
"What I think is important is the internal sense of shock that they will be feeling."
Boost to Constitution
Bao Tong, former aide to the ousted late Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang, who served a seven-year jail term in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown, agreed.
"The Nobel Committee was right to make this award," Bao said from his Beijing home, where he has been held under house arrest since his release from prison.
"It's an important decision and will provide a huge boost along the road towards a constitutionally ruled China."
"The authorities should know that there is no way out if they go backwards," Bao said.
"I hope that China will become a country that takes responsibility for its own constitution and towards its own citizens. Only then can it start to take responsibility for world peace."
Beijing-based scholar and Charter 08 signatory Zhang Zuhua said the award is also a reward for the hundreds of people who signed Charter 08, and who have been the targets of police harassment and surveillance ever since the document was published online to mark World Human Rights Day in 2008.
"Personally I believe that this prize gives enormous encouragement to the Chinese people in their tireless struggle for freedom, democracy, and human rights," Zhang said.
Call for release
A number of groups in Hong Kong, where people enjoy a greater degree of press freedom and political power than their mainland counterparts, called for the immediate release of Liu Xiaobo in the wake of the announcement.
The Hong Kong Journalists' Association, which has expressed concerns about the erosion of press freedoms in the former British colony since its handover to Chinese rule in 1997, issued a statement calling for the immediate release of Liu Xiaobo and for the protection of freedom of speech enshrined in China's constitution.
Former 1989 student leader Wang Dan, currently based in Taiwan, said the award could signal a change in attitude in Western countries towards China's human rights record.
"I think that Liu Xiaobo's severe sentence had a big impact on Western countries," Wang said.
"It made them realize that taking a softer line with China and refusing to put pressure on the Chinese government wasn't going to improve the human rights situation."
Little short-term change
But while many outside China are hoping that Liu's prize will speed up political reform in China, prominent Chinese blogger Mo Zhixu said he doubts that any real change will be forthcoming in the short-term.
"The government has control over the media and all the means of propaganda," Mo said. "It will be doing its utmost to minimize the impact of this in the short term."
But he said that in the longer term, the award may reap benefits for Chinese political reforms.
"It's a milestone, a marker, on a longer road," he said. "It will spread on the Internet, and by word of mouth, and its influence will gradually soak through the whole of society and encourage more and more people to make an effort."
Meanwhile, Hong Kong-based rights lawyer Pan Jiawei said anyone fighting for their rights in China will be greatly encouraged by the award.
"It is extremely good news for all those people in China who are fighting to defend their rights, for writers with different opinions, and for the whole Charter 08 movement," Pan said.
Reported by Ding Xiao and Xin Yu for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.
By Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield | The New York Times
Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his writings, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of "his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China's best known dissident, is currently serving an 11-year term on subversion charges.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a "blasphemy" to the Peace Prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. "Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," it said in a statement.
Mr. Liu is the first Chinese citizen to win the Peace Prize and one of three laureates to have received it while in prison.
In awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee delivered an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing's authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China's economic rise.
In a move that in retrospect may have been counterproductive, a senior Chinese official recently warned the Norwegian committee's chairman that giving the prize to Mr. Liu would adversely affect relations between the two countries.
In their statement in Olso announcing the prize, the committee noted that China, now the world's second-biggest economy, should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and for broadening the scope of political participation. But they chastised the government for ignoring freedoms guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution.
"In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China's citizens," the statement said, adding, "China's new status must entail increased responsibility."
News of the award was nowhere to be found on the country's main Internet portals and a CNN broadcast from Oslo was blacked out throughout the evening.
Given that he has no access to a telephone, it was unlikely that Mr. Liu would immediately learn of the news, his wife, Liu Xia, said.
Thorbjoern Jagland, the chairman of the five-member Nobel committee, said Mr. Liu Xiaobo had become the "foremost symbol" for the human rights struggle in China. While he acknowledged that China had sought to dissuade the committee from making the award to Mr. Liu, he underscored that the committee acted independently of the Norwegian government and believed that it was right to criticize big powers.
"The Norwegian Nobel Committee has long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace," he added.
"China has become a big power in economic terms as well as political terms, and it is normal that big powers should be under criticism," he said in Oslo, where the prize was announced. Last year, the committee awarded the peace prize to President Obama.
The prize is an enormous boost for China's beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles at the ready.
"If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4," said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.
His most recent arrest in December of 2008 came a day before a reformist manifesto he helped craft began circulating on the Internet. The petition, entitled Charter '08, demanded that China's rulers embrace human rights, judicial independence and the kind of political reform that would ultimately end the Communist Party's monopoly on power.
"For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom," his wife, Liu Xia, said earlier this week.
Given his detention, it is unclear how Mr. Liu would take possession of the prize, which includes a gold medal, a diploma and the equivalent of $1.46 million.
The Nobel committee keeps its deliberations secret, but speculation that Mr. Liu would win was so intense and widespread that one Irish bookmaker refused to take any further bets last week and said it would pay out those who had already wagered on him.
Other contenders among a record 237 nominees included human rights advocates and public figures from Afghanistan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe.
After Friday's announcement, the French government immediately urged China to free Mr. Liu, news reports said.
In London, Amnesty International said the award "can only make a real difference if it prompts more international pressure on China to release Liu, along with the numerous other prisoners of conscience languishing in Chinese jails for exercising their right to freedom of expression."
Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London.ctober 08, 2010
Published by NEWSWEEK
October 04, 2010
China is starting to face consequences for its newly aggressive stance.
China has reopened old wounds with India by publicly raising its claims to territory in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which triggered a troop buildup by both countries along the border. Beijing has proclaimed the South China Sea to be a "core national interest," a term previously used for Taiwan and Tibet (among other places) to signal that Beijing will brook no outside criticism of its claims to a wide swath of the sea, which has strategic value as well as potential oil wealth. Increasingly, the Chinese Navy has harassed American and Japanese vessels sailing in Asian waters. And Beijing has largely stonewalled complaints by countries in mainland Southeast Asia that new Chinese dams on the upper portions of the Mekong River are diverting water and hurting the livelihood of downstream fishermen and farmers. China also has harshly condemned joint U.S.-South Korean naval exercises, and applied growing pressure on Southeast Asian nations to jettison even their informal relations with Taiwan, which once had extremely close ties to countries like Singapore and the Philippines.
China's aggressive behavior represents a sea change in longstanding Chinese policy. Deng Xiaoping used to urge Chinese leaders to keep a low public profile in foreign affairs. During the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s Beijing launched a charm offensive toward its neighbors, who still remembered the revolutionary, interventionist China of Mao Zedong's years, when it backed the genocidal Khmer Rouge and insurgents in Burma, among other causes. This softly-softly approach reaped rewards. Beijing inked a free-trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that came into effect earlier this year and helped make Beijing one of the leading trading partners of nearly every country in the region. In the late 1990s and early 2000s China upgraded its role in Asia's regional organizations, including ASEAN, and shifted the focus of its relationship with India, the other emerging giant, from old hostilities to new commercial links, including partnerships between India's world-leading information-technology firms and their Chinese peers. The region's diplomats praised China's consensus-building approach, and its sharp contrast to the "with us or against us" style of the George W. Bush administration.
In some ways, the change in attitude is an extension of China's enduring interest in protecting its sovereign rights, dating back to well before Deng's time as leader. More than that, though, the global economic crisis has left China in a far stronger international position than many of its neighbors or the U.S., and Chinese leaders and diplomats now seem to feel they can throw their weight around on international issues. Just as Chinese leaders increasingly lecture Western officials in public about the breakdowns of free-market capitalism, so too the Chinese have become more willing to make public demands from other Asian countries. "There is a certain extent of hubris in [China's] actions," says Lam Peng Er, an expert in China-Japan relations at the National University of Singapore. China recently overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy, and some view that as a "coming of age," he says.
But perhaps the biggest reason for the change in Chinese behavior is the tension around the leadership changes in Beijing, planned for 2012, when Hu Jintao is expected to step down for presumptive heir and current vice president, Xi Jinping. Unlike Deng, who fought in the Chinese civil war--or even former leader Jiang Zemin, who had strong relations with the Army--Hu and Xi do not have a clear constituency or link to the military, says Kerry Brown, a senior fellow at the Asia Program of Chatham House, a British think tank. As a result, the new leaders may be less able than in the past to control a defense establishment now pushing for its own hawkish interests, such as expanding China's naval sphere of influence, that aren't always consistent with China's broader diplomatic goals or the more dovish Foreign Ministry. Already, Hu and Xi, lacking Deng's power base, are finding they have to accommodate the armed forces. Many China experts--and, even privately, some Chinese officials--argue that the tension may continue in some form at least until after 2010.
But all this toughness is coming at a cost: an Asia-wide backlash that could cost Beijing a decade's worth of accumulated good will. Earlier this year, a report by the Lowy Institute in Australia found that "rather than using the rise of China as a strategic counterweight to American primacy, most countries in Asia seem to be quietly bandwagoning with the United States." Another survey, by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, found that most elites in Asia said the U.S. would be the greatest source of peace in the region 10 years from now, while China would be the biggest threat.
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