China, the Nobel and Soft Power

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony is scheduled for Friday in Oslo, Norway. An empty chair will highlight the recipient’s absence. Human rights activist Liu Xiaobo is in China, serving an 11-year prison sentence for helping to write and circulate a petition. The Chinese government is furious about Liu’s award and has gone to great lengths to hush up news of the award back home. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.

An empty chair at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony will mark the absence of the honoree, human rights activist Liu Xiaobo. Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence, on the charge of trying to subvert state power.

He had helped write and circulate a petition two years ago, called �Charter ’08,� calling for human rights and a multiparty democracy in China. Liu also served a previous prison term for participating in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations.

The Chinese government is furious with the award. Officials say giving such an award to a convicted criminal is a political act, aimed at embarrassing China. And China has expended considerable capital to hush up the news at home.

This year is the first time a Chinese citizen living within China has ever received any kind of Nobel Prize, which has long been coveted in China. Not that all that many people in China even know it’s happened.

�Sorry, I don’t pay a lot of attention to these kinds of things,� said one businessman in Beijing.

A young nurse named Zhang said she’d heard of Liu Xiaobo and the Nobel Peace Prize. �But it’s not for sure yet, right? Anyway, I think he’s some kind of medical doctor.�

And a young man asked whether Liu Xiaobo wasn’t an American.

All of which suggests that the Chinese government has been pretty successful in its campaign to keep the news of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize from the Chinese public.

Phelim Kyne, a China researcher for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, said China has purged the Internet of any mention of Liu’s award, and banned state media from mentioning it.

Kyne also said China has tried to use similar tactics internationally, first warning the Nobel Committee that awarding Liu Xiaobo the peace prize would hurt Norway’s relations with China.

�And since then,� said Kyne, �the Chinese government has launched this furious campaign to try to dissuade governments from sending any representatives to Oslo or from offering congratulations on December 10th to Liu Xiaobo.�

The Chinese government has persuaded representatives of 18 governments to boycott tomorrow’s ceremony. It has also detained dozens of human rights activists in China, and prevented several of them from traveling abroad, lest any show up at Friday’s Nobel ceremony. Meanwhile, the tone at the regular Foreign Ministry news briefings has become strident.

�We will not change our path because of the interference of a few clowns,� said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. She added that China will continue ruling the country by law, in a way suitable to China’s conditions.

This, in a year when the Chinese government has spent billions of dollars expanding its global media footprint and trying to increase its soft power � the power of getting others to like you and even want to emulate you. That term was coined by Joseph Nye, an international relations professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

On a visit to Beijing last week, he said the Chinese government’s response to the Nobel Peace Prize award is undoing its own best efforts to win soft power.

�I think there’s an awareness by some people that this is very costly to them, that when you’re in a hole, you stop digging,� Nye said. �And they have kept digging. And I think they’re now locked into the position. And it’s hurting them.�

The heavy-handed reaction suggests a government that is at once confident in using its growing international clout, and still deeply insecure about criticism, both at home and abroad. Criticism is what landed Liu Xiaobo in prison. He’s also called for a multi-party democracy, and the civil rights already enshrined in the Chinese constitution.

When I interviewed him in 2005, he said he thought he’d see both in China within his lifetime � although, he predicted, they will and should come gradually.

�The government has tried to buy off the elites with a comfortable lifestyle, and that’s much more effective than ideological propaganda or crackdowns,� Xiaobo said.

On the other hand, he added, there’s the Internet. �The regime is stiff, but society has already changed.�

This week, within China, the Chinese government seems to have succeeded in shutting out news of Liu Xiaobo’s peace prize. But in the longer game, it’s the man in prison, the one for whom a chair stands empty in Oslo, who may have the last laugh.