Nobel Peace Prize 2010

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EOGQdYWl_zQ With Nobel prize winner detained, hopes for China’s human rights dim By Andy Liang October 22, 2010 Remember George Orwell’s 1984? He envisioned a world where Big Brother presided over everything. Thoughts are crimes. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. And ignorance is strength. Today, that world is on the other side of the earth: China. Meet the protagonist: Liu Xiaobo, an internationally famed human rights activist, who has been detained countless times for having committed various thoughtcrimes against the Chinese government. His most recent sentence of 11 years is from co-authoring the pro-democracy manifesto, Charter 08, in 2008, in which called for “universal values shared by all humankind.†It garnered over 10,000 signatures but was censored by the Chinese government. Jump back to 1989, when Liu staged the hunger strike in the Tiananmen Square protest. His dissent is known world-wide. On October 8th, Liu became the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. But the Nobel Committee’s decision infuriated Chinese officials because it opened an international debate on China’s human rights record. Moreover, the award potentially galvanizes the dissident community which China has worked so hard to keep oppressed. In response, the Party put Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, on house arrest. Cue the start of the Orwellian disappearances. October 13: Al Jazeera, an Arabic-news network, attempts to reach Liu Xia, but their news team is stopped at the doors. The People’s Armed Police, China’s police force, guards Liu Xia’s stay all day and night. They tell Al Jazeera that only if they contact Liu can they be let in. But when they call, they find that the authorities have cut the phone-lines. The reporter calls it a “catch-22.†The news team recited their journalistic rights, endorsed by Premier Wen Jiabao, to the authorities, but they couldn’t care less. In China, police rule through fear. On television, they are portrayed as CSI: Beijing. But in reality, they are more akin to the “Thought Police.†Local officials get penalized by the government for having political instability in their town. Consequently, these officials task police forces with detaining dissenters illegally and without due process. Dissenters are put into black jails — the Orwellian equivalent of “Room 101,†where psychological and physical torment are punishment for political disobedience. The government denies their existence, but protestors making their way to Beijing are often captured, stripped of identification, detained without outside contact, and beaten. Human Rights Watch reports that the black jails use psychological-torture practices that date back to imperial times. For the marginalized, such as Uighurs and Tibetans, their opposition yields even worse consequences. Uighurs, a mainly Muslim group, are being oppressed in their homeland, the Xinjiang province. In January, racial tension sparked a riot in the capital, Urumqi, killing 97 people. There were at least 25 people sentenced to death. Human Rights Watch advocated for fair trials, but there is no justice in Big Brother’s eyes. Today, Tibetans live in the shadows of the drive-by police in Litang, a city that in 1956 held had an anti-Chinese rebellion against Beijing, but was ultimately taken out by the People’s Liberation Army when they obliterated an ancient monastery. Now any Dalai Lama supporters run the risk of getting arrested, and demonstrators shot. Liu Xiaobo’s petitions and hunger strikes may not seem like much, but they can do so much for the country. The Nobel Committee made the right decision in giving him the Nobel Prize. But we must exonerate him from his charges. On October 20, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder met with China’s police minister, but his trip was more focused on talking with Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu about the crackdown on the counterfeiting of copyright goods. Holder mentioned that bringing Liu’s case to the table with the Chinese is “not at all certain†— clearly, he is more concerned about assuaging the “great concern,†that is, protecting American goods. China has a desperate need for change, and America needs to vocally decry the Chinese government’s lag in human rights. We can start by strongly pressuring the government to release Liu Xiaobo. I was born as the second child in “One-Child Policy†China. The government fined us heavily, but we paid them. My mother just wanted a boy that badly. When she tried to have a third child, the government was quick to abort it. The authorities caught on that we were relatively rich, so they raided our house. That was the China I lived in. The China then is no different than the one today. It’s one nation, under the eyes of big brother. Andy Liang is a member of the Class of 2014. http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N47/liang.html

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Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident, won a Nobel Peace Prize last week. He is serving an 11-year jail sentence for signing a document called Charter 08 demanding greater political rights and democracy. This might not ordinarily be a business issue. But Beijing has threatened to make it one by raising speculation over possible retaliation against Norwegian economic interests. In the process, new questions emerge about policy risk in China. That might seem like an odd idea given the private sector's successes. From McDonald's to Wal-Mart to General Electric, foreign companies are making a mint. Most CEOs "manage" policy risk simply by developing closer ties with the government and Communist Party. That includes a lot of patient kowtowing, and not grumbling too publicly about bad policies when they pop up. Yet lurking within the Norway story are some challenges to that strategy. In a fit of pique over the peace prize, Beijing this week canceled a meeting with the visiting Norwegian fisheries minister. The snub comes as Norway is trying to increase its exports of salmon to China and Hong Kong by more than 60% by 2012. China is Norway's eighth-largest salmon market, accounting for 4% of exports. Exporters are optimistic that political disagreements won't dent trade in the end. But it's worth asking how they can possibly know. Conspicuously, the only basis for this conclusion is surmise. Norway is a big oil exporter, and China is a big oil consumer. Ergo, Beijing will understand that its self-interest lies in not antagonizing Norway. No senior officials in Beijing have made any clear statements about whether they will retaliate against Norway. Beijing hasn't formally said why it canceled that meeting with the minister. There has been no public debate on the matter, so there is no way of knowing how divided the leadership is on whether to pursue a more vigorous response or to let the whole thing blow over. Everyone simply assumes Beijing will act "in its own best interest." But absent democratic institutions like a parliament and a free media, there's no way to know what Beijing thinks its self-interest is. At heart this is a question of risk versus uncertainty. Policy risk is the ability to estimate with some degree of precision (the risk) the probability that government will do something stupid (the policy). Uncertainty is far more capricious, involving the completely unknown or unknowable. China may be more uncertain in this sense than some have realized. The question is not whether China's government will do foolish things. All governments do, as American businesses staring down the barrel of ObamaCare will attest. In the democratic world, however, businesses can see bad policies rolling in their direction like thunder clouds on the horizon. As a result, they enjoy ample time to estimate how bad the hit to the bottom line would be. Policy making in a democracy follows a certain logic of poll numbers, votes, media spin and the like. Because so much of it happens in the open, it is possible to make educated guesses about the outcome. As a corollary, understanding the logic—how congressmen think, say, or where the campaign money comes from—makes it easier to lobby effectively. Not so in China. This comes up repeatedly as China increasingly asserts its political and economic might. Japanese companies have found themselves deprived of Chinese rare-earth minerals owing to a political spat over maritime sovereignty. Foreign executives like Rio Tinto's Stern Hu have found themselves arrested, tried and convicted on corruption charges seemingly as a result of commercial disputes. While the trend is clear, each event has come as a surprise or, worse, a mystery. For instance, while the Japanese government says the export ban on rare-earth minerals persists, the Chinese have yet to come clean on what they're doing. Officials have alternately said there is no export ban, or that companies are voluntarily blocking the mineral exports to Japan. So how could a Japanese executive relying on rare-earth minerals from China have estimated his risk from a politically motivated cut-off in supply? How could a Norwegian handicap the odds that a Nobel Peace Prize might adversely affect his business? Already there are signs companies are realizing they've made mistakes. Google withdrew when it concluded it had wrongly estimated the upside policy risk of censoring search results in exchange for doing business in China. The company discovered Beijing's internal logic evidently rules out allowing a foreign Internet search company to succeed no matter how accommodative it is. Beijing is trying to fix such risk problems. Witness its new program to circulate proposed regulations for limited public comment. But this simulacrum of democratic regulatory procedure may be too little, too late. Only the real thing can convert policy uncertainty into manageable risk. In this sense Charter 08 is a more deeply pro-business document than even its specific mentions of property rights and tax reform would suggest. Mr. Sternberg edits the Business Asia column.