China clamps down on news of peace prize

October 9, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

More than 12 hours after the announcement that an imprisoned dissident in China had won the Nobel Peace Prize, China’s domestic news media today remained silent on the subject, underscoring the Communist Party’s rage at so public a challenge to its authoritarian rule.

Chinese authorities blocked Chinese-language Internet searches and cell- phone text messages about the award to Liu Xiaobo, who is the first resident Chinese citizen honored with what is arguably the world’s most-prestigious prize.

How far China will go in the days ahead to ensure that most of its citizens never learn about Liu’s award remained an open question. There were reports on Twitter, accessible from China only with special software, that several Chinese who’d tried to celebrate the award in Beijing and Shanghai were carted off by police.

The award strikes at the heart of the way Beijing’s rulers usually handle the country’s small numbers of dissidents — monitoring, harassing, detaining and censoring them until the vast majority of Chinese don’t realize they even exist.

The Nobel committee said that by conferring the honor upon Liu, it intended to call attention to China’s human-rights problems. Liu, a 54-year-old former university professor, has spent years in and out of Chinese jails for his dissident activities, beginning with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989.

His current 11-year prison sentence stems from his arrest in December 2008, shortly before the public release of a political manifesto he helped draft. The document, known as Charter 08, called for open elections, an independent judiciary and human-rights guarantees. It was modeled on Charter 77, a Czech pro-democracy essay during Soviet rule that formed the foundation for the later Velvet Revolution.