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Blame me for having the brain of a beauty pageant contestant, but doesn’t everyone just want world peace? Surely, and without question, this is the ultimate end for all of humanity. Would you like to hold hands and dance to some Strauss? I would. I would also prefer living on Sesame Street to MLK Jr. Drive, and I'm gonna stick my neck out and conjecture that so would others. Even the evil folks, say, the Chinese Communist Party love peace, or at least this is what their diarrhea of “harmonious society” slogans would suggest. But then again they have the easy way out, with all their pruning, trimming, and locking up of political dissidents, while we have to suffer the ignominy of sitting with rustic firebrands with names like “Sarah Palin” on the adult table. Supposing that we don't have access to the dark arts in solving these problems, though many would love to cut and paste this "Palin" character back where she belongs, we are left with the serious questions of how to positively arrive at the desired ultimate point. What should one in the twentieth-first century do to bring about world peace?
As a start, we could fight fewer wars; quarrel less in general; identify a way to better mitigate economic cycles; design better technologies to feed, heal more people; improve efforts to eliminate Malaria; devise incentives to get people to use condoms; eat less; read more books; burn fewer ones; design useful technologies to reduce carbon emissions; use the sun to dry laundry; car pool; spend more time with our families, spend more time with our neighbors; learn more about them; learn more about other religions; learn more about tolerance; text less; blog less; watch less Fox ... and so on. I stop because my imagination is so limited.
Unlike me, there are wonderful imaginative people who spend their lives dedicated to making our world a better place. And among these, there are those who have, aside from their dedication, proceeded to actually affect the world in a way such that ours would be a significantly worse one independent of their existences. In this class, there are those scientists, policy makers, philanthropists, scholars, etc. who have made substantive contributions instrumental in bringing peace to our world. And in recognition of their accomplishments, fellow human beings clap their man/woman paws and/or give those wonderful people a prize, which is sometimes attached to a briefcase with cold hard cash. The most prestigious of these human awards is called the Nobel Peace Prize, which is somewhat ironically named after Alfred Nobel who invented dynamite, although the substance was probably intended for purposes other than converting humans into red mist. The Prize is very useful because winning the Nobel means winning a lot of cash. Thus the award is only slightly more prestigious than winning America's Got Talent, because Simon Cowell pays out the same amount but only over the course of 40 years. People like cash.
In years not so far away, the Nobel Peace Prize has become more known for eliciting butt-scratches (when you've scratched your head for long enough, you get bored and scratch your butt instead). When the greatest accomplishment of a recipient is, aside from creating offspring, is the Nobel Peace Prize, then something clearly has gone astray. Thanks to this, the recent history of the Prize raises some delightful conundrums. If, for example, Barack Obama's reign is one of peace and not terror, should Thorbjørn Jagland be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for contributing to world peace by motivating an American president in the right way? Perhaps Jagland can even make an exception and award a posthumous Nobel to his mother for making the accomplishment that is he, the one who contributed to world peace by gifting Obama a Nobel, who as a result did not extend our imperialistic-flavored tentacles, which in turn is conducive to world peace. But what should Jagland do if Obama fails to get re-elected and moves back into his mother's basement?
Furthermore, since most of the recent Peace prizes have been awarded for effort, struggle, or lion-taming with a toothpick, why should someone stop short of giving every member of the human world a Nobel? Even pageantry contestants know of the virtues of world peace, and with the sum of humanity's eyes aligned at the same target we could all do with some additional encouragement. This would be akin to being awarded a conciliatory prize on America's Got Talent and be paid a million dollars over the course of a couple hundred millennia. But hey it's the effort that counts. Right?
By "handing" this years Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, possibly the most ridiculous committee in the world has managed to outdo itself. The question is what exactly has Liu Xiaobo done to facilitate the democratization of China? Has there been a single step forward that can reasonably be ascribed to him, or any other Chinese political dissident for that matter? Aside from participating in Tiananmen and sitting still for the past twenty years, Liu has written a charter calling for democratization and greater freedoms, and more human rights. Wikipedia claims that as of now 8,600 people have signed the charter, which would be awesome if the PRC only had a population of ten thousand. So why the award? "For his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. Yet the last time anyone checked, the PRC still isn't a democracy and Liu is currently jailed there as what one might call a "political prisoner". If China's current status is testament to Liu's magical abilities of having reshaped the nation, then his skills are pretty pathetic, and yes, people aren't magical. So it goes back to this: could we have done without Mr. Liu, courageous and virtuous he may be? Sorry, but yes.
The argument that awarding the prize to a notable political dissident is likely to precipitate some sort of internal change to the PRC is quite misguided. Like the masses that arose in Beijing 1989 and those who hunger-striked on Tiananmen Square, the hard lesson is that the CCP does not spontaneously combust simply because there is too much heat. The only place where that seems to happen is Japan's crispy quarterly cycle of Prime Minister rotations. Even in the America we have to wait four years before popular pressure kicks in. And in the case of China the story is tells itself. Deng Xiaoping was not going to relinquish power because some kids whose balls had barely dropped took to the streets. For God's sake, he survived the Long March. As humanity has learned from its fair-share of historical examples, you topple fascism by beating it to death. And even if Fascism isn't the issue in this case, giving out a little prize (hoping that it isn't benign) isn't going to help especially if no one cared enough to begin with.
Nevertheless, the fact is, as of today, that Mr. Liu's most notable contribution to the democratization of China is his having won the Peace Prize, which despite being a fact says nothing about democracy in China being fulfilled. Quite simply there is no especial distinction to Mr. Liu's name other than that fact which alone gives him precedence over his then-contemporary Tiananmen dissidents, say, Wei Jingsheng. Unhappily even among dubious honors, this one could have equally and rightfully been awarded to any of the many Chinese political dissidents. Ask: What are the criteria to mark out any one as being particularly exemplary? The contest clearly isn't one of courage and virtue, jailhouse tats, or electric burn marks. If democracy in China is a serious issue or an achievement in the works, then no tussle-of-the-hair can seriously be dealt to an individual especially since the project/movement, aside from not having lifted off, has no single symbolic leader or entity.
Instead, and fuck-all, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee comes riding on its gleaming white horse guns-a-blazing to anoint a king to Chinese democracy (o, I lament, how undemocratic!). The irony, which is painful to my heart, is that now the solidarity of the movement has its origin not in the work of any of the men and women who have thrown themselves selflessly against a brick-wall cause, but in the hands of a couple of former Norwegian politicians. A five person Committee of all things, and we thought the CCP was abominable! Order yourself an orgy, give yourself a big congratulatory hug Super Friends, because the real agent of change is in you!
It should thus be made clear that the point of this gibberish is not to belittle the work of many who have tried to make the PRC a better place, though little they individually may be. Those who have done enough to belittle righteous causes in order to pawn cute little photo-ops are those various joke Committees. We know this: applauding the CCP for taking the PRC down a shit hole and then back up is a no-no, despite any genuine accomplishment made in the later years that have brought hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. Whenever it strikes the Committee's fancy, or whenever China bashing is at it's most sexy (it always is), they jump on the wagon (they never left). For instance, the Dalai Lama's cause wasn't good enough for them until it became necessary to capitalize on Tiananmen (30-years after his exile for heaven's sake). And clearly the Committee has run out of ideas since giving the award to Obama.
All this naturally begs the question, what exactly has the Dalai Lama been up to since 1959? Aside from storming the world with a massive PR campaign and accumulating the most dignified and reputable Hollywood disciples, his pseudo-compromise/unwillingness-to-compromise stances has only helped the CCP maintain the status quo over the disputed regions. Peace, sure, but its precisely the sort of peace that is so desired by the allegedly nefarious CCP. We're now in 2010 and the Dalai Lama is worth more dead than alive even on his own people as the younger Tibetan exiles are twitching to move off Sesame Street. If peace means making no practical ripples but only talking something to death, then the Dalai Lama is most deserving of his blue ribbon. At the very least what the Tibetan cause has accomplished, I pray to God, is that most Americans know where to place the Autonomous Region of Tibet on a map.
Back onto point. In this year's Peace Prize press release, an entire paragraph dedicated to China's astounding progress from Communism:
Blame the matter on Cold War-esque propaganda, but the radicalization of China's politics and populace built on suspicions of the so-called "West" has well-grounded historical precedents. The list of reasons to be cynical of foreign intentions runs deep. Simply consider the fact that after the Second World War, the glorious American nation funded and armed a self-titled "Generalissimo" dictator to rule over the "democratic" Republic of China. Too many times has China been burned by the pretense of a pseudo-democracy and the hypocrisy of weaponized "human rights", which in turn has lefts its people nauseated and tired of it. Sadly in today's China, "freedom" and "democracy" have become synonymous with "Western imperialism" and is seen as the only stick left to beat China on its inevitable ascension to ultimate superiority. Although the whole idea frightens and troubles me deeply, it is nevertheless far from an unforgivable offense. Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to an individual who has made insignificant contributions to the PRC only further compounds these suspicions.
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that one of the biggest misconceptions about China's single party rule (or any single party rule for that matter) is that it equates to an unified concentration of power. Whereas reality seems to point at a plurality of divisions along the lines of politics, economics, and other interests. The point is that there is no single man, in the form of a Mao or a Deng, in Chinese politics that can command the future of China according to largely his will. Eventually, the parties within the Party itself will undergo a form of mitosis, where the avenue for peace, the means to stability, wealth, and flourishing of China, will be through appealing to the factions of the CCP that stand opposite to the hardliners. At least in my opinion, the liberalization of the PRC will have a cause of motion from within the party itself and from its moderate and liberal members.
A sign of this, and one of the more invigorating moments in recent news, is Wen Jiaobao's interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria where he hints at eventual reforms :
Critically and naturally, we have to take this with a bit of salt. Yet even skeptically, the divulging of any information concerning political reform has been extremely rare for a government known more for its prickly ways with such issues. The message that is being conveyed by Wen is that the Party, or at least some elements in it, are open for change as well as open to discussing it. Both of which are quite unheard of.
But even independent of second guessing Wen's intentions or the impact of the statements given that he is on the downswing of his political career etc, what we can glean from the interview is the acknowledgment that China can no longer operate with its populace not invested in the country's political future. This stems from the simple idea that one cannot run proper free-market economy and at the same time deny a populace of economic agents access to the market that is a political one. The problem for the Party is to both subscribe to a certain model of economic development as well as its assumptions, and then to pretend that some of the assumptions are not in play. Choice and responsibility cannot be denied on one hand politically and on the other asked to buy, sell, consume, and so on, without running into a fundamental contradiction. The current monopoly system has its faults and they are clearly showing.
Arguably biggest problem in China today is still a persistent lack of transparency, which cutely plays into the stereotype that Chinese people are generally inscrutable. However, it is doubtful that the origin lies in Chinese culture or genetics as opposed to the various market inefficiencies of the current system. Lower level civil servants, cadres and provincial politicians are currently running amok because the system has become so bloated that the head can no longer see its toes. With large amounts of government money tied up in public spending with limited oversight, throw in the vices of a free-market mercenary system, then no wonder corruption is rife. The lack of transparency is one thing and the lack of a proper feedback system of governance is another. Both, taking social stability/harmony/world peace as an end requires a system in which people can be properly responsible for each other and what they do. There has to be justice, a free media, and elected officials all which are supposed to better reflect realities of the world and public opinion. Lacking such a system, collapse is inevitable. And to recognize and admit this impending doom is to understand the importance of reform.
If not Liu Xiaobo, then whom? Disregarding actual contributions to peace, here is a rhetorical question: is Liu Xiaobo or the Premier of the PRC a better candidate for initiating genuine restructuring of China's political system? If an award were given merely to galvanize a cause or to initiate forward progress, then ideally this years award would be an iteration of last year's: give it to the person who has the most damn power to change things. If instead having a cute sexy message or to lob a nasty little contraption at those blasted communists is the point, then I too would vote for Liu Xiaobo.
(Photograph: Zheng, Xuebao, Unknown. 2006, photograph. From China: 1949-2009, ed. Zhu, Ling, Beijing: China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing, 2009.)
In years not so far away, the Nobel Peace Prize has become more known for eliciting butt-scratches (when you've scratched your head for long enough, you get bored and scratch your butt instead). When the greatest accomplishment of a recipient is, aside from creating offspring, is the Nobel Peace Prize, then something clearly has gone astray. Thanks to this, the recent history of the Prize raises some delightful conundrums. If, for example, Barack Obama's reign is one of peace and not terror, should Thorbjørn Jagland be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for contributing to world peace by motivating an American president in the right way? Perhaps Jagland can even make an exception and award a posthumous Nobel to his mother for making the accomplishment that is he, the one who contributed to world peace by gifting Obama a Nobel, who as a result did not extend our imperialistic-flavored tentacles, which in turn is conducive to world peace. But what should Jagland do if Obama fails to get re-elected and moves back into his mother's basement?
Furthermore, since most of the recent Peace prizes have been awarded for effort, struggle, or lion-taming with a toothpick, why should someone stop short of giving every member of the human world a Nobel? Even pageantry contestants know of the virtues of world peace, and with the sum of humanity's eyes aligned at the same target we could all do with some additional encouragement. This would be akin to being awarded a conciliatory prize on America's Got Talent and be paid a million dollars over the course of a couple hundred millennia. But hey it's the effort that counts. Right?
By "handing" this years Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, possibly the most ridiculous committee in the world has managed to outdo itself. The question is what exactly has Liu Xiaobo done to facilitate the democratization of China? Has there been a single step forward that can reasonably be ascribed to him, or any other Chinese political dissident for that matter? Aside from participating in Tiananmen and sitting still for the past twenty years, Liu has written a charter calling for democratization and greater freedoms, and more human rights. Wikipedia claims that as of now 8,600 people have signed the charter, which would be awesome if the PRC only had a population of ten thousand. So why the award? "For his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. Yet the last time anyone checked, the PRC still isn't a democracy and Liu is currently jailed there as what one might call a "political prisoner". If China's current status is testament to Liu's magical abilities of having reshaped the nation, then his skills are pretty pathetic, and yes, people aren't magical. So it goes back to this: could we have done without Mr. Liu, courageous and virtuous he may be? Sorry, but yes.
The argument that awarding the prize to a notable political dissident is likely to precipitate some sort of internal change to the PRC is quite misguided. Like the masses that arose in Beijing 1989 and those who hunger-striked on Tiananmen Square, the hard lesson is that the CCP does not spontaneously combust simply because there is too much heat. The only place where that seems to happen is Japan's crispy quarterly cycle of Prime Minister rotations. Even in the America we have to wait four years before popular pressure kicks in. And in the case of China the story is tells itself. Deng Xiaoping was not going to relinquish power because some kids whose balls had barely dropped took to the streets. For God's sake, he survived the Long March. As humanity has learned from its fair-share of historical examples, you topple fascism by beating it to death. And even if Fascism isn't the issue in this case, giving out a little prize (hoping that it isn't benign) isn't going to help especially if no one cared enough to begin with.
Nevertheless, the fact is, as of today, that Mr. Liu's most notable contribution to the democratization of China is his having won the Peace Prize, which despite being a fact says nothing about democracy in China being fulfilled. Quite simply there is no especial distinction to Mr. Liu's name other than that fact which alone gives him precedence over his then-contemporary Tiananmen dissidents, say, Wei Jingsheng. Unhappily even among dubious honors, this one could have equally and rightfully been awarded to any of the many Chinese political dissidents. Ask: What are the criteria to mark out any one as being particularly exemplary? The contest clearly isn't one of courage and virtue, jailhouse tats, or electric burn marks. If democracy in China is a serious issue or an achievement in the works, then no tussle-of-the-hair can seriously be dealt to an individual especially since the project/movement, aside from not having lifted off, has no single symbolic leader or entity.
 |
| In preparation to broadcast the event, NBC found the most sexy picture of Mr. Liu they could find. The story was then announced by Brian Williams who didn't even have the decency to learn how to properly pronounce Mr. Liu's name. |
It should thus be made clear that the point of this gibberish is not to belittle the work of many who have tried to make the PRC a better place, though little they individually may be. Those who have done enough to belittle righteous causes in order to pawn cute little photo-ops are those various joke Committees. We know this: applauding the CCP for taking the PRC down a shit hole and then back up is a no-no, despite any genuine accomplishment made in the later years that have brought hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. Whenever it strikes the Committee's fancy, or whenever China bashing is at it's most sexy (it always is), they jump on the wagon (they never left). For instance, the Dalai Lama's cause wasn't good enough for them until it became necessary to capitalize on Tiananmen (30-years after his exile for heaven's sake). And clearly the Committee has run out of ideas since giving the award to Obama.
All this naturally begs the question, what exactly has the Dalai Lama been up to since 1959? Aside from storming the world with a massive PR campaign and accumulating the most dignified and reputable Hollywood disciples, his pseudo-compromise/unwillingness-to-compromise stances has only helped the CCP maintain the status quo over the disputed regions. Peace, sure, but its precisely the sort of peace that is so desired by the allegedly nefarious CCP. We're now in 2010 and the Dalai Lama is worth more dead than alive even on his own people as the younger Tibetan exiles are twitching to move off Sesame Street. If peace means making no practical ripples but only talking something to death, then the Dalai Lama is most deserving of his blue ribbon. At the very least what the Tibetan cause has accomplished, I pray to God, is that most Americans know where to place the Autonomous Region of Tibet on a map.
Back onto point. In this year's Peace Prize press release, an entire paragraph dedicated to China's astounding progress from Communism:
Over the past decades, China has achieved economic advances to which history can hardly show any equal. The country now has the world's second largest economy; hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Scope for political participation has also broadened.Then comes the slap to the face. Progress becomes a footnote to "human rights" and "freedoms" (thank you, you real commies!), despite the most basic human rights being economic ones: the ability to choose independent of the most primitive material constraints, i.e. to escape poverty. The backhanded manner in which the press-release is formed is precisely the type of ammunition that has been arming the growing hordes of Chinese "shitty-youth" who have nurtured sympathies towards their own brand of fascism, with the target being to challenge the "West" as the next superpower in Chinese style. Furthermore, the China System, untenable and silly it may be, is already being advertised as the next political-economic system substitute to a liberal democracy. And people are seriously buying into this, especially younger PRC nationals.
Blame the matter on Cold War-esque propaganda, but the radicalization of China's politics and populace built on suspicions of the so-called "West" has well-grounded historical precedents. The list of reasons to be cynical of foreign intentions runs deep. Simply consider the fact that after the Second World War, the glorious American nation funded and armed a self-titled "Generalissimo" dictator to rule over the "democratic" Republic of China. Too many times has China been burned by the pretense of a pseudo-democracy and the hypocrisy of weaponized "human rights", which in turn has lefts its people nauseated and tired of it. Sadly in today's China, "freedom" and "democracy" have become synonymous with "Western imperialism" and is seen as the only stick left to beat China on its inevitable ascension to ultimate superiority. Although the whole idea frightens and troubles me deeply, it is nevertheless far from an unforgivable offense. Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to an individual who has made insignificant contributions to the PRC only further compounds these suspicions.
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that one of the biggest misconceptions about China's single party rule (or any single party rule for that matter) is that it equates to an unified concentration of power. Whereas reality seems to point at a plurality of divisions along the lines of politics, economics, and other interests. The point is that there is no single man, in the form of a Mao or a Deng, in Chinese politics that can command the future of China according to largely his will. Eventually, the parties within the Party itself will undergo a form of mitosis, where the avenue for peace, the means to stability, wealth, and flourishing of China, will be through appealing to the factions of the CCP that stand opposite to the hardliners. At least in my opinion, the liberalization of the PRC will have a cause of motion from within the party itself and from its moderate and liberal members.
A sign of this, and one of the more invigorating moments in recent news, is Wen Jiaobao's interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria where he hints at eventual reforms :
I believe that while moving ahead with economic reforms, we also need to advance political reforms, as our development is comprehensive in nature, our reform should also be comprehensive.
I think the core of your question is about the development of democracy in China. I believe when it comes to the development of democracy in China, we talk about progress to be made in three areas:
No. 1: We need to gradually improve the democratic election system so that state power will truly belong to the people and state power will be used to serve the people
No. 2: We need to improve the legal system, run the country according to law, and establish the country under the rule of law and we need to view an independent and just judicial system.
No. 3: Government should be subject to oversight by the people and that will ask us, call on us to increase transparency in government affairs and particularly it is also necessary for government to accept oversight by the news media and other parties.
Critically and naturally, we have to take this with a bit of salt. Yet even skeptically, the divulging of any information concerning political reform has been extremely rare for a government known more for its prickly ways with such issues. The message that is being conveyed by Wen is that the Party, or at least some elements in it, are open for change as well as open to discussing it. Both of which are quite unheard of.
But even independent of second guessing Wen's intentions or the impact of the statements given that he is on the downswing of his political career etc, what we can glean from the interview is the acknowledgment that China can no longer operate with its populace not invested in the country's political future. This stems from the simple idea that one cannot run proper free-market economy and at the same time deny a populace of economic agents access to the market that is a political one. The problem for the Party is to both subscribe to a certain model of economic development as well as its assumptions, and then to pretend that some of the assumptions are not in play. Choice and responsibility cannot be denied on one hand politically and on the other asked to buy, sell, consume, and so on, without running into a fundamental contradiction. The current monopoly system has its faults and they are clearly showing.
Arguably biggest problem in China today is still a persistent lack of transparency, which cutely plays into the stereotype that Chinese people are generally inscrutable. However, it is doubtful that the origin lies in Chinese culture or genetics as opposed to the various market inefficiencies of the current system. Lower level civil servants, cadres and provincial politicians are currently running amok because the system has become so bloated that the head can no longer see its toes. With large amounts of government money tied up in public spending with limited oversight, throw in the vices of a free-market mercenary system, then no wonder corruption is rife. The lack of transparency is one thing and the lack of a proper feedback system of governance is another. Both, taking social stability/harmony/world peace as an end requires a system in which people can be properly responsible for each other and what they do. There has to be justice, a free media, and elected officials all which are supposed to better reflect realities of the world and public opinion. Lacking such a system, collapse is inevitable. And to recognize and admit this impending doom is to understand the importance of reform.
If not Liu Xiaobo, then whom? Disregarding actual contributions to peace, here is a rhetorical question: is Liu Xiaobo or the Premier of the PRC a better candidate for initiating genuine restructuring of China's political system? If an award were given merely to galvanize a cause or to initiate forward progress, then ideally this years award would be an iteration of last year's: give it to the person who has the most damn power to change things. If instead having a cute sexy message or to lob a nasty little contraption at those blasted communists is the point, then I too would vote for Liu Xiaobo.
(Photograph: Zheng, Xuebao, Unknown. 2006, photograph. From China: 1949-2009, ed. Zhu, Ling, Beijing: China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing, 2009.)
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