Chinese ardour over Liu Xiaobo's Nobel peace prize continues, with the China Daily website today airing the view that the award is 'politically distorted' (to read the full editorial, click here). Almost as soon as the Nobel committee had made its decision, China claimed that it had not acted in the spirit of Alfred Nobel's original reason for creating the prize.
Effectively, today's China Daily piece is a reiteration of these points, though they are written with more of a sense of a rational case rather than simply appearing as a knee-jerk reaction to the recent international praise for Liu's achievements. According to the state newspaper, Nobel conceived the peace prize to mark the effort of those working for world peace, through the convening of conferences and a constant striving for international and domestic friendship. As the article goes on to allege, today's Nobel committee (composed of members of Norway's parliament) has replaced this criteria with its own politicised agenda, making the award merely a “tool of some Western politicians” to further their own agenda.
Showing posts with label Zhang Weiwei. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zhang Weiwei. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 October 2010
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
An Alternative Take
Today's edition of People's Daily Online features an interesting piece entitled 'West risks its own downfall with arrogance.' Rather than being an editorial, the article is a comment by Professor Zhang Weiwei, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Asian Studies, Geneva (linked to the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations). According to Zhang, the recent decision to award dissident Liu Xiaobo the Noble peace prize is another example of “western prejudice against China”. This is based on a fear of the rise of China- a phenomena which the author sees as an inevitability.
Certainly, Liu Xiaobo's has drawn strong criticism from various quarters in China, but Zhang Weiwei's strongly-worded condemnation of the award particularly stands out as representative of the differing opinions surrounding the actions of democratic reform campaigners like Liu. Here, in this People's Daily piece, we have a notable academic defending his government's policy and simultaneously attacking Western attitudes, with arguments that some his international colleagues would dispute. Clearly, it would be foolish to ever assume that intellectual support for the Chinese government is only found within the People's Republic itself.
Zhang also urges the West to question “its own assumptions about economic and political modernity”. This is an interesting point. Democratic government is naturally enough set up by the liberal democracies as the ideal political system, yet many forget that the Western value judgement on this form of government is not universally shared across the world. This is not to argue that the Chinese political system is superior to those of Great Britain or America, but the fact that Liu Xiaobo and others have their opponents as well as their supporters in China means that Chinese progress with political reform will have a different dynamic to past developments in other countries.
Certainly, Liu Xiaobo's has drawn strong criticism from various quarters in China, but Zhang Weiwei's strongly-worded condemnation of the award particularly stands out as representative of the differing opinions surrounding the actions of democratic reform campaigners like Liu. Here, in this People's Daily piece, we have a notable academic defending his government's policy and simultaneously attacking Western attitudes, with arguments that some his international colleagues would dispute. Clearly, it would be foolish to ever assume that intellectual support for the Chinese government is only found within the People's Republic itself.
Zhang also urges the West to question “its own assumptions about economic and political modernity”. This is an interesting point. Democratic government is naturally enough set up by the liberal democracies as the ideal political system, yet many forget that the Western value judgement on this form of government is not universally shared across the world. This is not to argue that the Chinese political system is superior to those of Great Britain or America, but the fact that Liu Xiaobo and others have their opponents as well as their supporters in China means that Chinese progress with political reform will have a different dynamic to past developments in other countries.
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