What China’s treatment of its most famous dissident says about its claim to global leadership
By Isaac Stone Fish June 26 at 6:06 PM
Jailed Chinese Nobel Peace laureate, dissident and civil rights activist Liu Xiaobo in Beijing. (Liu Xia/European Pressphoto Agency)
Isaac Stone Fish is a journalist and senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, on sabbatical from Foreign Policy Magazine.
When the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Beijing found itself subject to an uncomfortable historical comparison. The last Nobel Peace Prize recipient whose government barred them or their family from attending the ceremony was 1935’s winner Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist languishing in a concentration camp. One Nazi newspaper at the time warned the Nobel Committee “not to provoke the German people by rewarding this traitor to our nation.” After Liu, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence on trumped-up charges of subversion, won the prize, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the decision a “desecration” that awarded a “criminal,” and warned it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. China’s economic achievements have been “extraordinary,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement at the time. True. But politically, it lags far behind.
Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/06/26/what-chinas-treatment-of-its-most-famous-dissident-says-about-its-claim-to-global-leadership/?utm_term=.20c2015bc813
The Nobel prize winner was given a medical parole.
