From Liu Xiabo: A Seed of Strength for Chinese Political Protesters

By Elzbieta Matynia, October 11th, 2010
Poland, "A Man is Born and Lives Free" © Unknown | unesco.org

Elzbieta Matynia is an expert on democratic movements, and here, reflects on the recent Nobel Laureate, Liu Xiabo and the chance for Chinese democracy. -Jeff

The air in Johannesburg (Joburg to the locals) is full of discussions on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. When I heard about Liu Xiaobo, I thought about events that took place in Poland 30 years ago, and about a message written by workers on strike in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980.

One of their most prominent graffiti, written in huge, uneven letters on cardboard and mounted high up on a shipyard crane, was the statement, uncontroversial elsewhere, “A Man is Born and Lives Free.” This year’s Nobel Peace Prize given to a Chinese political prisoner brings the spirit of this graffiti to China, re-inserting it in a landscape “freely” filled with billboards advertising Western luxury brands like Lancôme or Mercedes Benz. Will the Chinese notice the message?

There are those moments in history when the Nobel Prizes turn out to be truly performative.

When Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry was forbidden in communist Poland, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980, it seemed to lend further legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of the workers as articulated in the Gdansk shipyard. The poems of Milosz had only been published underground and the workers had come to know them through their strike bulletins. And now the workers, who had demanded a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, press, and publication, won their strike, and the poems — arrested till then in the Office of Censorship — became widely available. I have no doubt that the award given to the poet who wrote about freedom and captivity further encouraged the human rights agenda of the Solidarity movement, and contributed – even if only for the 16 months of Solidarity’s legal existence — to the unprecedented sense of emancipation in the country.

Those 16 months of Solidarity were a time when Poles experienced the dignity of personal freedom. They were months of intensive learning that paid off in 1989 when the society launched a . . .

Read more: From Liu Xiabo: A Seed of Strength for Chinese Political Protesters

October 11th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In China: Opposition to a Hero

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 7th, 2010

The way you oppose a wrong determines whether you will succeed in doing a right. I know this not only through my readings, particularly of my favorite political thinker, Hannah Arendt, but also from my experiences around the old Soviet bloc. The political landscape in the post Communist countries has been shaped by the way the old regimes were or were not opposed. The existence of pluralism in the opposition, the nature of the pluralism, the quality of political life, the degree of respect for opponents, the authoritarian nature of political elites and the citizenry, and much more, has been shaped by the political culture of the recent past, for better and for worse.

I am thinking about this today because of an article I read in The New York Times this morning on the opposition to the possible awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a heroic advocate of the a democratic reforms in China. Predictably the Chinese government has warned the Nobel committee that the awarding of the prize to Liu would damage governmental relations between China and Norway.

Surprisingly, there is a petition of exiled dissidents opposing the award.

According to a group of strong anti- regime exiles, Liu maligned fellow dissidents, abandoned members of the Falun Gong and was soft on Chinese leaders. “His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading and influential.”

The vehemence of their opposition to Liu despite the fact that at this moment he is serving an eleven year sentence for advocating democratic reforms, reveals that they view him not as an opponent, who has a more moderate pragmatic approach to democratic reforms than they, but as an enemy.

It suggests that if they were in power, they might not be that different from the regime which they so passionately oppose. In politics, as Arendt observes in one of her most beautiful books, Between Past and Future, the means are ends.

October 7th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , ,