The Nobel committee today has awarded its peace prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Professor Timothy Cheek, an expert on Chinese intellectuals and the history of the communist party, is available to comment. He is Louis Cha Chair of Chinese Research and Associate Director, Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia Institute for Asian Research.
Prof. Timothy Cheek
Cell: (604) 323-4302
E-mail: tcheek@interchange.ubc.ca
Asia Pacific Memo with video clip of Prof. Cheek on implications of award:
http://www.asiapacificmemo.ca/nobel-peace-prize
www.iar.ubc.ca/aboutus/iarfacultystaff/faculty/timothycheek.aspx
Comments from Prof. Cheek:
“The awarding of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese public intellectual Liu Xiaobo is big news. It has garnered considerable attention around the world, with endorsements and calls for Liu’s release from his Beijing jail from the European Parliament and US President Obama. Liu Xiaobo is a long-time advocate of democratization and human rights. He has chosen to continue his advocacy in the PRC since he returned from overseas study in 1989 to participate in the Tiananmen demonstrations. He has endured prison in the 1990s. He has been something of an in-house-dissident to the Communist Party. Remaining in China has limited the range of his criticisms, but has made his voice more authoritative inside China. Thus, it was significant that Liu signed Charter 08 in December 2008. People took notice; so, too did the CCP: they tried him and sentenced him to 11 years in jail in December 2009.
“It is not surprising that the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Liu Xiaobo the Peace Prize. They have honoured imprisoned intellectuals or those unable to leave their home country to receive the prize in the past (Ansang Sun Chi, Andrei Sakharov, for example). For China, this is not only a foreign relations setback, but even more significantly a new stage in the ongoing negotiations between China’s public intellectuals and their state that shapes China’s directed public sphere.
“The public realm in China is rich and varied, loud and commercialized, colorful and fascinating, but it is firmly under the direction of the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP. The CCP can and does crack down on unwanted communication—in print, on the air, and especially on the Internet. However, the Party cannot control every e-mail and webpage, and more significantly, the Party is not monolithic: this is an authoritarian state, but it is not a totalitarian one. There are policy groups inside the Party that disagree. Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment for signing Charter 08 was a victory for conservative Communist voices in the Party; that it now turns out that the CCP has contributed to Liu Xiaobo’s getting the Nobel Peace and embarrassing China put a card in the hands of Party liberals.”
