The decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was obviously not going to go down well with Beijing. It is intriguing to note, however, the reaction in China itself and that in the neighbouring region.
Clifford Coonan reports in today’s Independent that “many Chinese see it as yet another attack on China, embodying what they see as sour grapes in the West about China’s startling economic rise and a lack of understanding of how the country works.” He also points to criticism from Wei Jingsheng, a pro-democracy activist imprisoned for two decades and now in exile in the US. “In my observation, the Nobel Peace Prize is going to Liu because he is different from the majority of people in opposition. He made more gestures of cooperation with the government and made more criticism of other resisters who suffered,” Wei told the AFP news agency.
About the strongest local criticism of the award so far has come from Singapore, from one of the city-state’s most prominent former diplomats, currently Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, Kishore Mahbubani. I’m indebted to Asia Sentinel for picking up the following remarks he made at a dinner last Friday:
“We all respect the Nobel Peace Prize. Most winners deserve the prizes they get. Nobel Prizes by and large reflect the western world view. The winners in Asia are never leaders who brought great change. The man that did more good than anyone was Deng Xiaoping. When he came to power 800 million people were living on less than one dollar a day. Thirty years later on after the results of his reforms, 200 million lived on less than one dollar a day. Six hundred million people were lifted out of poverty.
Will he ever get a Nobel Peace Prize? Never. Because of the western world view that the prize must be given to dissidents in Asia. Aung San Suu Kyii (although she deserves it). The former leader of Korea. What has Obama brought? Where is the peace in Iraq? In Afghanistan? How can you give him a Nobel Peace Prize? He is a wonderful guy but he has achieved nothing. Deng Xiaoping saved 600 million people and he will never get a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s why it is important to step outside the western world view.”
Mahbubani conveniently omits to mention the matter of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. If it were possible to leave that aside, then a strong case for Deng’s period of office could be made. But it isn’t, which makes the suggestion grotesque and gratuitously offensive. Also on Asia Sentinel, the International Herald Tribune columnist and former Far Eastern Economic Review editor, Philip Bowring, puts Mahbubani smartly right, calling his comments about dissidents “just the sort of half-truth that one expects from Singapore apologists for authoritarian regimes similar to their own. It also reflects Singapore’s attempts to appear ultra-Asian while aligning its economic and strategic interests with the west.”
However, even if he represents an extreme end of the spectrum, Mahbubani will not be alone in his view of how this year’s Nobel Peace Laureate was chosen. President Obama and representatives of EU countries, including Britain and France, have welcomed the award, as have the governments of New Zealand and Australia – which as Asia-Pacific countries have a much more direct interest in good relations with China.
But from the leaders of the ten nation ASEAN bloc bordering China, I can find no evidence of congratulations to Liu – nor even any statement in which he is named. Just silence.
An example of a rather ignoble pragmatism? Tacit sympathy with those “Asian Values” of which Mahbubani is just one exponent (Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir or Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee being two others)? Perhaps. Or maybe with their own less-than-perfect human rights records, they prefer not to laud those who might well have ended up in jail in their countries too.
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