Perry Link: A Nobel Vision of a Better China 林培瑞：刘晓波获奖的意义

Liu Xiaobo Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony 2010 刘晓波诺贝尔和平奖仪式/视频

陈凯博客： www.kaichenblog.blogspot.com

陈凯一语：

华语系人们政治文化心态的改变在于每一个在此文化中的个体真正用思维与言行改变自身。 刘晓波是这种真实改变的代表者与传播者。 我希望每一个华语系的个体人意识到这种改变的必要性并用自身脱离专制文化心态的言行加入附义这个必须的改变。

Kai Chen's Words:

To change China, every individual in the Chinese speaking population must be the change itself. (Not just join the change, but BE the change yourself.) Mr. Liu Xiaobo is one who has made a great effort to change himself, by being an integrated individual with his actions matching his words. Liu Xiaobo is the one who realizes and articulates the importance of such a change must come from each and every individual himself/herself. I urge everyone in the Chinese speaking population heed this important principle: To make change, you must be the change yourself.

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Perry Link: A Nobel Vision of a Better China

林培瑞：刘晓波获奖的意义

With Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, China's pro-democracy movement may finally have found its leader.

By PERRY LINK

By awarding Chinese literary critic Liu Xiaobo the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, the five-member committee in Oslo did more than recognize one of the mainland's most prominent and worthy dissidents. They endorsed the idea that "China" can be something different from, and better than, the Chinese government. They may have helped hundreds of millions of Chinese to see and feel this truth more clearly.

Mr. Liu may have trouble picking up his prize. He is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for "incitement to subvert state power." The grounds for the charge were primarily Mr. Liu's support for Charter 08, a citizens' manifesto that was conceived in conscious admiration of Charter 77 in the former Czechoslovakia and published in December 2008 to mark the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It states that "the Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these years [of Communist rule], now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values."

Mr. Liu is a fearless advocate for these ideas. He dresses plainly, avoids pretense, and seems to enjoy demonstrating his belief that truth is more important than tact. He is drawn to dangerous situations as if he did not know they were dangerous. When Chinese student protests began in the spring of 1989—protests that would come to a head at Tiananmen Square—Mr. Liu, then a visiting scholar at Columbia University, flew back to Beijing to join the students and counsel them in nonviolent protest.

For this the government called him a "black hand" and imprisoned him for 18 months. In 1995, after writing essays that criticized the Chinese government, he was sentenced to three years of "re-education through labor." Mr. Liu was not involved in the original conception or drafting of Charter 08, but when friends invited him to join the effort he again chose to do what he thought was right, despite the obvious dangers.

Few people expected that his 11-year sentence for "subversion," which was announced on Christmas Day last year, would be so harsh. Four days later Mr. Liu's lawyers relayed to the world his reaction:

"The sentence violates the Chinese constitution and international human rights covenants. It cannot bear moral scrutiny and will not pass the test of history. I believe that my work has been just, and that someday China will be a free and democratic country. . . . I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison. Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer."

The other organizers of Charter 08 had their homes raided, computers and notes confiscated and bank accounts emptied. Many of the original 303 signatories have been watched, cajoled, threatened and harassed. But Mr. Liu was the only one sent to prison, and this raises the question of why the government chose to focus so intensely on him. It is an old tactic in Chinese Communist politics to hold up the example of one person to frighten others, but in this case there seems to have been another factor at work.

In 2005, China's President Hu Jintao issued a classified report called "Fight a Smokeless Battle: Keep 'Color Revolutions' Out of China." The report warned against allowing figures like Boris Yeltsin, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa or Aung San Suu Kyi to appear in China. It borrowed the Chinese idiom "blast the head off the bird that sticks its neck out" to recommend that, when troublemakers appear, "the big ones" should be arrested and "the little ones" left alone.

This formula appears to have been put into practice in November 2008. Shortly after Chinese police discovered that people were signing Charter 08 online, the Communist Party Politburo held a meeting at which Charter 08 was officially declared to be an attempt at "color revolution." Accordingly, Mr. Liu became "the big one" to target.

There is irony here. The other "color revolution" leaders named in the Hu report had strong political organizations behind them: Mr. Yeltsin was a high-ranking Soviet official, Mr. Mandela led the African National Congress, Mr. Walesa led Solidarity, and Ms. Suu Kyi led a political party that had already won a national election.

Mr. Liu, by comparison, was a free-floating intellectual. If he turns out to be a "big one" of the kind Mr. Hu fears, then Mr. Hu can only blame himself for having made him so. By awarding him the Peace Prize, the Nobel Committee and Communist Party have become unwitting partners in producing what China's democrats and political dissenters have most needed: a leader of transcendent moral stature to rally around.

For two decades China's rulers have sought to position themselves as the embodiment of "China" and to channel all nationalist sentiment through them. The Olympics, the World's Fair now underway in Shanghai, and the periodic stimulation of anger toward Japan, Tibet and elsewhere all reveal this pattern.

What Charter 08 and Mr. Liu are saying is, "No, 'China' can be something different, something better than a worn-out, old-style authoritarian government." Giving the Peace Prize to Mr. Liu provides a huge boost to that new vision of what China can be.
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Mr. Link teaches at the University of California, Riverside. He worked with the drafters of Charter 08 to translate the document into English.