“The [Chinese] people’s wishes for and needs for democracy and freedom are irresistible.” Fighting words, indeed. They could quite easily have come from Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese activist serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of his long record of calling for gradual political change. Instead, they were spoken by Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, in an interview he gave last week to CNN before the Nobel announcement.
China’s economic success has been so dramatic and sustained that it can feel as if the big political questions about how the country should be governed, which came to a head in Tiananmen Square two decades ago, have simply faded into irrelevance. Yet Mr Wen’s remarks show that debates about Chinese political reform do not take place only in Oslo – even some of the country’s senior leaders admit there is unfinished business.
Certainly, many will question whether it is the Nobel committee’s job to promote political change by embarrassing Beijing. For the Chinese authorities, the immediate instinct is to make this a straight conflict between China and the west, which wants to slow its rise. “The Nobel Peace Prize has been reduced to a political tool of western interests,” the Global Times, a tabloid with close connections to the Communist party, thundered over the weekend. “What they’re doing now is using the Peace Prize to tear a hole in Chinese society.”