With just a day until the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, the usual whirl of speculation over the winner is in full force, with many human rights advocates contending that an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, has emerged as the favourite.
If selected, Liu, a former literature professor who has spent the last 20 years cycling in and out of Chinese jails for championing democratic reform, would be the first Chinese citizen to win the prize. The prospect has clearly alarmed Beijing, so much so that the Nobel Institute’s director said last week that a senior Chinese official had warned him such a decision would “pull the wrong strings in relations between Norway and China.”
But the idea of selecting Liu has also stirred objections from a somewhat more surprising contingent: a group of fellow activists.
In recent days, a group of 14 overseas Chinese dissidents, many of them hard-boiled exiles dedicated to overthrowing the Communist Party, have been calling on the Nobel committee to deny the prize to Liu, whom they say would make an “unsuitable” laureate.
In a letter, the signatories accused Liu, below, of maligning fellow activists, abandoning persecuted members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and going soft on China’s leaders. “His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading,” they wrote.
