Nobel puts spotlight on China

Opinion: October 22, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Kansas City Star: On the surface, China presents the very picture of a rapidly modernizing nation. Its development story is the envy of much of the world.

But beneath the surface, the picture is different, and this difference was highlighted by the recent awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Some 20 years ago, Columbia professor Andrew Nathan published a collection of pieces under the title, “China’s Crisis.” The crisis still exists today: It is the country’s failure to evolve a system of government appropriate to the modern world. China remains what it was on the eve of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 — a one-party authoritarian state.

Liu’s arrest for his leadership in the Charter 08 movement — formed to promote a human-rights manifesto — is somber testimony to China’s failure to make progress politically. What’s more, last week brought word that his wife, Liu Xia, is now under house arrest.

Nathan suggested that a kind of template for China’s political future exists offshore, on Taiwan. This is a notion that’s no doubt infuriating to Chinese nationalists, who see Taiwan not as a model, but a breakaway province.

While the regime on Taiwan also had authoritarian roots, effective political opposition was allowed to develop.

Sadly, that kind of scenario for China seems less likely today. In recent years, Beijing has instead promoted a belligerent brand of nationalism, a shift that has alarmed many of China’s neighbors. What the Chinese leadership fails to appreciate is that democracy is a path not only to greater prosperity, as on Taiwan, but to resolution of long-festering tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan would be far more likely to agree to peaceful unification with a democratic China, than with the bullying China of today.

Unfortunately, for suggesting that China could more fully develop its potential by allowing more freedom, Liu Xiaobo was put behind bars for 11 years. His Nobel Prize is a reminder to the world that to appreciate the real nature of China, one must look beneath the shiny facade.