Even before Liu Xiaobo became the first Chinese national to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Communist Party’s censors were already hard at work trying to keep the news from this country’s 1.3 billion citizens.
As skilled as Beijing’s propagandists are at controlling information, some news is too big to squelch. Within minutes of the announcement that Mr. Liu had been chosen by the Norwegian Nobel committee in recognition of “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China,” people on the streets outside his Beijing home were whispering that it was a “big problem for the government.”
Within hours, terms like “Liu Xiaobo” and “Nobel Prize” were among the most searched-for terms by China’s 420 million Internet users.
Inevitably, many will go on and try to read Charter 08, the pro-democracy manifesto that Mr. Liu drafted two years ago, just before the 54-year-old was jailed for “inciting subversion of state power.” If they can get around China’s Internet restrictions, they will read Mr. Liu’s demands for change and perhaps wonder why their rulers found his words so threatening when the rest of the world sees them as so admirable. China’s democracy movement, in retreat since the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed in 1989, has been emboldened for perhaps the first time since.
The awarding of the prize to Mr. Liu, who has been a thorn in the side of China’s rulers since he joined hunger strikers on Tiananmen 21 years ago, cannot help but be interpreted as a slap at the Communist Party and the way it rules this country.
That he was honoured while serving an 11-year prison sentence could be seen as nothing short of an insult tossed from Oslo at those who have built China into an economic powerhouse without reforming the country’s Leninist political system or its desultory human-rights record.
An insult is certainly how Beijing saw it, dubbing Mr. Liu’s award “an obscenity” and warning darkly that it would hurt relations between China and Norway. The Nobel committee had earlier complained that a Chinese diplomat had clumsily tried to warn them against choosing Mr. Liu.
“We have to speak when others cannot speak,” Norwegian Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said in explaining the choice of Mr. Liu. “As China is rising, we should have the right to criticize.”
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: “I would hope the fact that he’s now a Nobel Peace Prize winner would cause our friends in the Chinese government to look seriously at that issue of his release from prison. But I would say, more than anything, we’re delighted for him and send him our congratulations.”
More important than relations with foreign governments, though, will be how China’s rulers deal with the news domestically. In the early hours, all the predictable defences were deployed: Police were stationed outside the home of Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who was later forced to leave Beijing.
International television channels such as BBC World and CNN went black inside China whenever they mentioned the new Nobel laureate. His very name became a forbidden word, as text messages between Chinese mobile phones containing the term “Liu Xiaobo,” in either Chinese or Latin characters, were blocked.
The only mention of the award on the official Xinhua news wire was a short item attacking Mr. Liu and saying that his win had “desecrated the prize.” At the direction of the Central Propaganda Bureau, other media outlets ignored the news completely.
The Internet – the freest political forum in China – quickly became the main battleground. “Websites are not to create news items or exclusive stories on the Nobel prize. Exclusive stories that do exist must all be deleted,” read an order from the propaganda office, according to the Berkeley University-based China Digital Times, which regularly posts directives from authorities that are circulated to the media in China.
Mr. Liu’s Wikipedia page, as well as the main website where Charter 08 was originally posted, both have long been blocked by China’s so-called “Great Firewall.”
But, in an era when so many of China’s citizens are online, and an increasing number of them know how to get around the Great Firewall using virtual private networks and other tricks, news of Mr. Liu’s win quickly burst through the dam.
