Chris Eberhardt was an India China Institute Fellow at the New School in 2008.  He is now conducting his dissertation research in China

A fellow of the India China Institute (ICI) has been arrested. He was privately eating dinner with others in Beijing, celebrating that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After hearing that the ICI Fellow had been arrested, I decided to read an article by Liu Xiaobo that was published in 2006 in the journal Social Research titled “Reform in China: The Role of Civil Society.”

The work reminded me of Neither Gods Nor Emperors by sociologist Craig Calhoun, who analyses the student protests of 1989 that culminated in demonstrations on Tiananmen Square and the military response. What I see in both works is an effort by the Chinese people to challenge China to be better at what it claims to be, linking back to movements that emerged when the dynasty system collapsed in the early 1900’s.

While Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, China was celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic. During the celebrations I went multiple times to Tiananmen Square. One night I saw a couple posing in front of flashing lights (pictured), behind which was Tiananmen Gate and Chairman Mao’s picture. I imagine that this man was probably wearing similar clothing when Mao was still alive. Every time I see a man wearing the blue hat and suit, it gives me pause. In Beijing, I am most likely to see people dressed like this fresh off the train or lined up by the thousands at 6am (2hrs early) on Tiananmen Square to view Mao’s remains.

I always wonder to myself how these people who line up for hours to view Mao, sleepy-eyed and just off a bus, understand a China where students pay almost as much or more than my rent to buy name brand clothing. It is these people who come from the heartland of China who are still thought of as the backbone of the country, still composing the majority of the population.

Perhaps it is not as well known, but every day the common people struggle to address problems in their life, with annual figures for protests greater than 80,000.  (Against the Law by Ching Kwan Lee and Popular Protest by Kevin O’Brien are two accounts of protests in China.)

I particularly enjoyed Ching’s work, documenting the balance between those in China’s rustbelt that expect China to live up to a social contract that drove the founding of the People’s Republic of China and those in the South, home to the world’s factories, that expect China to live up to a legal contract that links with China’s efforts to create a market economy.

The People’s Republic of China that is celebrated every October 1st had its roots in a small group including Mao who met in a small room in the French Quarter of Shanghai in the early 1900’s who founded the Chinese Communist Party. What Mao and the Chinese Communist Party was able to do in a way that the ruling Kuomintang could not or did not want to do was connect their vanguard struggle with the struggle of the proletariat during the Chinese Revolution. It was Mao and the Chinese Communist Party who victoriously declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, having made a bridge with the common people.

Although China does not have elections in the same manner as the United States, changes still take place in response to citizens concerns. While individuals like Liu are awarded prizes by outsiders, I will continue to humbly observe how it is that the common people of China respond to their rapidly changing China, and if bridges are made between the common people and the intellectuals.

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 deliberately peaceful process of dismantling the authoritarian system.

But 1989 brought not only the joyous image of the Berlin Wall being taken down, but also horrifying images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, where tanks charged defenseless students demanding democratic reforms.

Would the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of the students at Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo, bring new strength to those who sat there with him, those who looked on, and those who are  younger and know little about the students trying to stop tanks?

While I was finishing this note, trying to return to my reflection on performativity, I received an email with a piece on the Nobel Peace Prize written just a moment ago in Warsaw by Adam Michnik, one of the Solidarity movement’s leaders, for today’s Gazeta Wyborcza, the second-biggest newspaper in Poland.  I opened it quickly, as I know that he traveled to China this July, and I’d like to end with a brief excerpt by this seasoned political thinker, lifelong dissident, and former political prisoner:

“I was struck in China by a vast change that is rarely reported on by the world’s media — the newly independent public opinion, and the embryonic civil society emerging there.  Liu Xiaobo, the Laureate of the Peace prize and a political prisoner, was one of the creators of this public opinion and civil society. He paid a high price for this – the price of discrimination, loneliness, and imprisonment. Liu deserves admiration and respect, as he is one of those people who restore a belief in the existence of elementary values.”