According to the Chinese government, Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, is a criminal.
This 54-year-old Chinese citizen has been in and out of prison several times during his life and is currently serving an 11-year sentence. You might be asking yourself, “How is it that a criminal could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?” Under normal circumstances, this is a fair question, but these are not normal circumstances.
Xiaobo is a human rights activist. He is most known for his involvement with the Tiananmen Square protests, when he successfully encouraged students to leave the square before a military assault. For this act, he has been attributed as saving hundreds of student lives.
More recently, he is known for helping draft a document called Charter 08. This manifesto was written in order to help increase China’s human and civil rights. Charter 08 attempts to attain these goals not through a total reform of the current government, but rather a gradual reform, replacing outdated pieces of the government structure with more human rights and democracy-oriented ideas.
Xiaobo’s imprisonment is just another example of the typical, heavy-handed, Chinese censorship. The Chinese government jailed him in order to keep him from speaking his mind — one of the basic human rights for which he fights.
According to the Associated Press, in the hours before Xiabo was named this year’s winner, the Chinese government had already started to censor information about him.
They were able to block web searches for his name as well as scrub text messages that contained his name. The power China has over access to information is unconscionable. Xiaobo’s award will spotlight his positive actions in China and draw attention to the basic human rights China violates.
Already, President Obama called for his immediate release. In recent years, China has increased its visibility by creating a powerful economy and increasing its military size.
If China wants the world to think of it as a truly developed country, then it needs to focus on its exterior perception of military and economic strength, but also on its interior workings on basic human rights.
