Peace Prize committee got it right

Opinion: October 13, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

The Chinese government has denounced the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo as “blasphemy.”

Liu unnerved China’s ruling elite in 2008 by drafting a document called Charter 08, which calls on the Communist Party to relinquish its exclusive hold on power and permit democratic reforms. Ten thousand Chinese have signed this manifesto. (I interviewed Wan Yanhai, one of the original signers, in June in Philadelphia, after he was forced to flee his country. More on this later).

Beijing officials argued perversely that the award violated the spirit of the prize; they tried to pressure the Norwegian Nobel Committee and warned that China’s relations with Norway would suffer.

Sorry, the Norwegian Nobel Committee got it exactly right this year. And bullying little Norway reflects badly on an economic superpower that aspires to become a global leader. The Chinese government should be thinking about the meaning of the committee’s decision rather than giving itself a black eye.

China’s rise

The award reflects widespread concerns about what China’s rise will mean to the global community. As Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland noted, a country that has risen to great power status has to grasp that its actions are open to criticism — a lesson America has long since learned. “We should have the right to criticize and ask what kind of China do we want to have,” Jagland said.

The choice of Liu Xiaobo — a longtime fighter for peaceful change and freedom of expression — symbolizes the hope that China will evolve into a stable democratic power that doesn’t threaten its neighbors or the world.

China’s leaders have a visceral fear that the freedoms envisioned in Charter 08 would lead to “instability” and a loss of party control. Yet — as I heard on a recent trip to China, organized by the International Reporting Project — top officials also recognize they need to give more voice to, and get more input from, the grass roots.

In a society beset by widespread labor unrest and massive corruption, especially at the provincial and local levels, leaders in Beijing don’t know what’s going on at the bottom. National laws and regulations are ignored by local officials far from the capital. That’s how diseases such as SARS and HIV-AIDS spread.

Senior Chinese leaders want to hear from nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and from bloggers in order to get information that local bureaucrats never provide them. Yet these same bloggers or NGO organizers often face persecution. And the failure to advance local elections — a process China started two decades ago, but has virtually abandoned — permits corruption to fester. So do government restrictions on media.

A case in point: Wan Yanhai, China’s most prominent AIDS advocate and head of the Beijing Aizhixing Institute for Health Education, who signed Charter 08. A pioneer in HIV-AIDS education, especially with at-risk groups such as ethnic Uighur migrant workers, sex workers, and gays, Wan faced unremitting harassment by government officials. When I visited the institute in May, he had just fled.

I met him in Philadelphia, where he hoped to regroup and work on finding funding for Chinese human rights NGOs. He spoke of decades of persecution. In the mid-1990s, he helped expose a blood-for-cash scheme in which thousands of peasants died of AIDS after blood was donated with unhygienic equipment. The scheme eventually caused a national scandal, but key officials who devised it were promoted, while those who exposed it were hounded.

Sex education

Wan then worked on expanding sex education in schools in order to lower the rate of HIV-AIDS infection. Officials first opposed sex education, then passed laws that required it but did not enforce them. With Aizhixing, Wan tried to help the most marginalized groups who were the most likely to contract HIV-AIDS.

Wan’s work is essential for a healthy China. Like Liu, and other signers of Charter 08, he seeks freedom of expression so the grass roots can expose health threats, and corruption. “My organization supported 150 grassroots organizations across China,” he says.

Yet Wan had to leave for fear of arrest.

Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.