China's Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel Peace Prize

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 8, 2010; 5:20 PM

 

The first citizen of the People's Republic of China to win a Nobel prize was awarded the honor Friday for advocating greater freedom in his country.

 

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement that Liu Xiaobo - a prickly, chain-smoking dissident of moderate views - deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because of "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." Liu, 54, who is nearing the end of the first year of an 11-year prison sentence for subversion, becomes only the second person to win the peace prize while incarcerated, following German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who won it in 1935 while jailed by the Nazis.

 

President Obama, last year's Nobel peace laureate, called on China to release Liu and said the award reminded the world that while "China has made dramatic progress in economic reform and improving the lives of its people, . . . political reform has not kept pace."

 

Analysts said the honor appeared aimed at pressuring China to ease the crackdown on religious and political activists that has been a hallmark of President Hu Jintao's tenure. China's government denounced the award as "a desecration" and said the honor should have gone to someone focused on promoting international friendship and disarmament.

 

"Liu Xiaobo is a sentenced criminal who has violated Chinese law," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said, adding that honoring Liu "runs counter to the principles of the Nobel Peace Prize."

 

Liu's win underscored the limits of China's influence even as the country emerges as a global power. In the run-up to the decision, China warned Norway that selecting Liu would affect mutual ties and dispatched a Foreign Ministry official to Oslo to press its case. The two countries are in the process of negotiating a free-trade deal, and Norway's oil industry - a crucial sector of its economy - wants to boost its business dealings in China. In a sign that it was unwilling to be cowed, however, Norway's government chose to publicize the Beijing official's ostensibly private visit.

 

The award also highlights another issue facing China as it makes the transition from developed country to superpower. As it has risen, China has lived by a dictum of Deng Xiaoping, the man who opened Communist China to the West: "Hide in the shadows, and focus on building ourselves." But China can no longer "hide in the shadows." It boasts the world's second-largest economy. Its appetites - for iron ore, natural gas and oil - roil markets around the world. Yet with size comes discomfiting scrutiny.

 

"China has become a big power in economic terms, as well as political terms," observed Thorbjoern Jagland, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman, "and it is normal that big powers should be under criticism." China, however, does not view such criticism as normal.

 

Liu is serving his 11-year sentence at Jinzhou prison in Liaoning, hundreds of miles from his home and from his wife, Liu Xia, in Beijing. In an interview shortly before the announcement, Liu Xia said she was thankful that her husband's physical condition seems to have improved in jail and grateful that he has been allowed to read and exchange regular letters with her.

"We have no regrets," she said. "All of this has been of our choosing. It will always be so. We'll bear the consequences together."

 

A prize with resonance

 

Analysts predicted that in the short term, China's one-party state would react to the award by intensifying an already stringent campaign against dissidents, religious activists and nongovernmental organizations. Although China outwardly appears strong, with a world-beating economic growth rate, prosecutions for "state security" offenses are approaching numbers not seen since the bloody crackdown on student-led protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

 

But in the long term, a wide spectrum of Chinese and foreigners said, Liu's award could resonate more deeply within China than any similar act in years - significantly more than the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Dalai Lama in 1989, say, or the Nobel Prize in Literature given to dissident writer Gao Xingjian in 2000.

 

In the first place, Liu's status as the first mainland Chinese citizen to win a Nobel prize matters deeply in a nation that craves recognition by the West. (The Dalai Lama - who on Friday urged China to free Liu - has refugee status. Gao is a French citizen. And several Chinese-born physics prize winners, including Daniel Tsui in 1998 and Charles Kao last year, have also taken on other citizenships.)

 

Second, Liu is profoundly moderate. Unlike the exiled dissident Wei Jingsheng, who criticized Liu on Friday for being too understanding of the Chinese Communist Party, Liu has never advocated revolution. As such, he has escaped the sentence of irrelevance meted out to so many of his dissident contemporaries.

 

"You can say whatever you want in China today," he said in an interview with The Washington Post in 2002, acknowledging the huge strides made toward personal freedom since economic reforms began in the late 1970s. Then he added: "As long as you do it alone."

 

'A moth to the flame'

 

The crime that brought Liu his current, and longest, sentence was volunteering to have his name lead a list of signatories to a manifesto known as Charter 08. Modeled on the Charter 77 movement in Cold War-era Czechoslovakia, Charter 08 called for greater freedom of expression, association, assembly and religion, meaningful elections and a judiciary not

controlled by the Communist Party.

 

To date, more than 8,000 people have signed it.

Published on Dec. 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the charter was intended "to put a stake in the ground and say here's an alternate vision of China," said Perry Link, a renowned China scholar who helped the group translate its manifesto into English. "It was definitely a long-term program."

 

Link, who spent a month with Liu and others as the manifesto went from one draft to another, recalled that Liu did not start out as a leader of the group. "But once he saw it was going somewhere, he naturally volunteered to be out front," Link said.

 

Liu didn't hog publicity, Link added. "He just doesn't shrink from putting his head on the line. He was like a moth to the flame."

 

Liu had taken such risks before. In 1989, he left a comfortable post as a visiting scholar at Columbia University to return to China to participate in demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, after which he was jailed.

 

After Liu's sentencing last year, his attorney released a simple statement by his client: "I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison," it said. "Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer."

 

Correspondent William Wan in Beijing contributed to this report.

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Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

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Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

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