WeeklyWorker

13.10.2010

For services rendered

The Nobel peace prize is awarded to those deemed to be an asset to imperialism, argues Eddie Ford

Still in prison, Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel peace prize. In the words of the Nobel committee, the 54-year-old Chinese dissident and former literature professor has been recognised for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights” in China - as the committee has “long believed that there is a close connection between human rights and peace”. Further explaining their decision, the committee chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, stated that China should expect to be placed under “greater scrutiny” as it is “rising” in world status. Xiaobo won the prize, he went on, because the Nobel committee seeks to “advance those forces in China that want it to become more democratic”.

Liu Xiaobo is currently serving 11 years for “incitement” to “subvert state power”. He was detained at his Beijing home in December 2008 after co-authoring Charter 08, which adopted its name and style from the Czech Charter 77 - whose founding members included Václav Havel, Jan Patočka, Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek, and Pavel Kohout - and called for democratic reforms within China. He was first jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and in the 1990s served three years in a labour camp - most certainly no holiday camp. According to Jean-Philippe Béja of the Paris-based Centre for International Studies and Research, Xiaobo is a person who “wants to live in truth”. As par of the course for Stalinist dictatorships, he is not permitted to talk about current affairs or politics with visitors to his prison in Jinzhou, a prefecture-level city in the north-east Liaoning province.[1]

Obviously, Xiaobo’s friends and colleagues were delighted with the announcement from Norway. Xu Youyu, a signatory of Charter 08, said the prize was compensation for the “enormous sacrifice” Liu had made in “pursuit of democracy and human rights” in China - adding that “behind” him there are “many people who are devoting their efforts” to the “struggle for democracy”. Therefore it is “not a prize for himself” but also for them. Liao Yiwu, a fellow writer who has know Xiaobo for more than 20 years, also declared that this was a “big moment” in Chinese history - which will “greatly promote democratic developments” in the country. Naturally, the Dalai Lama - a previous recipient of the prize in 1989 of course - also congratulated Xiaobo, saying the award represented “international recognition” for the efforts of the democracy activists, writing on his website: “I believe in the years ahead, future generations of Chinese will be able to enjoy the fruits of the efforts that the current Chinese citizens are making towards responsible governance”. Desmond Tutu, Barack Obama, Vaclav Havel, etc expressed the similar sentiments.

Needless to say, the Chinese authorities were not so happy with the Nobel committee’s decision - they cried blue murder, deploying the usual Stalinist argot, albeit honed to near dreary perfection by the Chinese regime, Xiaobo is not a dissident, nor political, but rather a “criminal” - who has been duly and properly sentenced for “violating Chinese law”. No doubt. The official government statement raged that awarding the prize to Xiaobo “runs completely counter to the principle of the prize” - indeed, we discover, it represents a “blasphemy to the peace prize”. As for the Global Times - the English language version of the daily Chinese newspaper produced under the “auspices” of the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily - giving Xiaobo such an award was “nothing more than another expression” of the international community’s “prejudice” against China, and behind it “lies an extraordinary terror of China’s rise” and “the Chinese model”[2]. Then we had the English-language China Daily - print run over 300,000 per issue - which sternly declared that the Nobel committee was “part of the plot to contain China” and signified a “gross interference in the country’s internal affairs”, a form of words which has totemic significance for Stalinists everywhere. Not without truth, China Daily thought that handing the peace prize to Xiaobo exposed “the deep and wide ideological rift between this country and the west”.

In fact, upping the ante, the mere rewarding of the prize to the “criminal” Xiaobo actually endangers Sino-Norwegian relations. In a petulant display of anger, China cancelled a meeting with the Norwegian fisheries and coastal affairs minister, Lisbeth Berg-Hansen, who had just arrived in China for a week-long visit to the World Expo in Shanghai. And showing how jittery the Chinese administration felt about the whole Xiaobo affair, television screens showing the BBC and CNN went blank in Beijing as news of the announcement broke. Such a crude but typical exercise in censorship amply demonstrates how worried the regime is about the Chinese people finding out too much - and asking too many awkward questions - about Xiaobo, Charter 08, etc. Ignorance is supposed to be bliss.

More seriously still, at least for genuine democrats and socialists, the Chinese authorities initiated a wave of repression as part of an attempt to stifle any celebration, or show of resistance, following the Nobel committee’s adjudication. Around a dozen friends and supporters of Liu were taken away by police after holding a small demonstration outside a Beijing park, holding up signs congratulating him and shouting: “Long live freedom of speech, long live democracy!”. More than 30 Chinese intellectuals have been detained, warned or placed under various forms of house arrest. Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia was also placed under temporary house arrest and then whisked off by the authorities to see Xiaobo in prison - not out of any sense of compassion or basic humanitarianism, of course, but in order to prevent her talking to the foreign media. However, modern technology partially thwarted the government’s designs and Liu Xia tweeted from Jinzhou that she had informed her husband that he had won the Nobel peace prize. She also reported that Xiaobo had cried and immediately dedicated his prize to the “dead spirits of Tiananmen”.

Charter 08

So, what do communists think of Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08? The answer is quite simple on one level. As revolutionary democrats, who believe that the struggle for democracy and socialism are inseparable, we have nothing but sympathy for his platform of democratic demands and individual plight: you cannot help but admire his personal bravery. After all, he has spent a total of nine years in hellish Chinese jails or labour camps. In the shape of Liu Xiaobo we have the politics of sincere conviction and deep commitment. To belittle or denigrate such a person or activity would be cynicism, pure and simple.

But having said that, we are obliged to tell the truth. Liu Xiaobo and his comrades, for all their courage, have no real democratic answers for China - no idea of what is to be done to free the Chinese masses from oppression and exploitation. Rather, when it comes down to it, Xiaobo and the other Charter 08 signatories and activists essentially look to western ‘bourgeois democracy’, especially the United States, for their model or inspiration.

We can easily glean this from the first paragraph of Charter 08, written in 2008, which states that “this year marks 100 years since China’s [first] constitution, the 60th anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Democracy Wall, and the 10th year since the Chinese government signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights”. Therefore, it goes on, the “awakening Chinese citizens are becoming increasingly aware that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values shared by all humankind” - and that “democracy, republicanism, and constitutional government make up the basic institutional framework of modern politics”. For the authors of the charter, a “modernization bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives people of their rights, rots away their humanity, and destroys their dignity”. Then they pose the question: “Where is China headed in the 21st century? Will it continue with this ‘modernisation’ under authoritarian rule, or will it endorse universal values, join the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic form of government?”[3]

From there, Charter 08 ruefully notes that the “ruling party monopolizes all the political, economic, and social resources” of the country but is encouraged by the “reform and opening up” of the late 20th century which “extricated China from the pervasive poverty and absolute totalitarianism of the Mao Zedong era” - a new era that “substantially increased private wealth and the standard of living of the common people”. So “those in power”, we read, “while implementing economic reforms aimed at marketisation and privatisation also began to shift from a position of rejecting human rights to one of gradually recognizing them”. But for all the signs of improvement, argue the charter writers, “political progress has largely remained on paper” - as “there are laws but there is no rule of law”, “there is a constitution but no constitutional government”. The consequence of all this, they conclude, is that the “ruling elite continues to insist on its authoritarian grip on power” - the result being the “destruction of both the natural and cultural environment” or “no institutionalised protection of citizens’ rights to freedom, property, and the pursuit of happiness”. To be even clearer still, Charter 08 looks forward to the day when China can enjoy a “system based on a free and open market economy; guarantee entrepreneurial freedom, and eliminate administrative monopolies” - wanting to “launch a new land movement, advance land privatisation, and guarantee in earnest the land property rights of citizens, particularly the farmers” (section III - ‘Basic position’, point 14).

In other words, Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08 would like to see capitalist rule-of-law constitutionalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, a ‘professional’ army, private property protection, etc, introduced to China - which of course requires that the Chinese Communist Party gradually relinquishes its monopoly of power and accepts the existence of other (pro-capitalist) parties, like in ‘normal’ advanced capitalist countries.

 Furthermore, though fairly inevitably given the political-economic philosophy underpinning Charter 08, it does appear to be the case that Liu Xiabo himself sees a positive role for imperialism - viewing it as a blunt instrument for social and democratic progress almost in the manner of the Alliance for Workers Liberty. In a 1988 interview with Hong Kong’s Liberation Monthly (now known as Open Magazine), Liu was asked what it would take for China to realize a “true historical transformation”. Significantly, he replied: “It would take 300 years of colonialism. In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would take 300 years of colonialism for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough”[4].

Still, whatever Xiabo may or may not think about the exact nature and role of imperialism, we should not expect anything else. Democracy, like anything else, does not exist in abstract but as a concrete form or expression of the class struggle - a struggle conducted on a world scale. In the absence of a workers’ or communist party acting as the champion of democracy, then other class forces and agents will - no matter how falsely - lay claim to its mantle. In that sense, the broadly pro-capitalist politics of the Charter 08 activists are an ideological punishment - or symptom - of the failure of any real proletarian communist movement to take roots in modern-day Chinese society. A failure, it has to be immediately pointed out, which is the product of decades of the most horrible Stalinist repression - which has ruthlessly smothered all and any manifestation of independent working class politics.

Apologists

Whether to the surprise of Charter 08 or not, genuine communists have absolutely no truck with the Chinese bureaucracy. We too want to see democratic advance in China - now, not in 100 or 300 years time. Leaving aside the origins of the Chinese bureaucracy, or the exact nature of the 1949 revolution, what confronts us now is a bizarre and monstrous system of billionaire or sweat-shop Stalinism - or whatever you deign to call it. Even more to the point, it is a gross libel to associate the corrupt Chinese regime with communism or universal human liberation in any way whatsoever. The Chinese Communist Party state-party bureaucracy exists to exploit the masses and enrich itself as part of its tortuous, zigzag, passage to capitalism. Therefore the CPGB wants to see its revolutionary overthrow from below by the Chinese working class.

Of course, having said that, not everyone who regards themselves as part of the communist movement takes such a view - not one bit. There are those who crawl and grovel before the regime in Beijing, whether out of ideological desperation or the hope that some Beijing gold might make its way to them - hence the disgusting practice of ‘diplomatic’ internationalism, as opposed to proletarian internationalism. Which naturally brings us to the Morning Star, the paper of the Communist Party of Britain. Like the Chinese bureaucracy, it seems less than impressed by the Nobel committee’s decision.

Not that we should be surprised in the slightest by the reaction of the Star. For instance, in the CPB’s latest revised or ‘updated’ programme, Britain’s road to socialism, we are glowingly told that in China “state power is being used to combine economic planning and public ownership with private capital and market mechanisms” - all apparently with the “aim of building a socialist society in its primary stage”. Indeed, and this may be quite startling news to Liu Xiaobo, “advances have also been made in extending democratic rights, but without the Communist Party weakening its leading role in political life”. Even more distastefully, if that is possible, the CPB/Morning Star has acted as an overt apologist for Chinese state repression in Tibet. So a fairly recent pamphlet innocently informs us that Tibet “became part of China seven centuries ago” (how?), and that, in the 1950s, Mao Zedong - a “master strategist at his best”, it seems - brilliantly sought to win over “traditional Tibetan leaders”: hence the “idea that China is or could be a colonial or imperialist power is nonsense”[5] (winning over traditional leaders is, of course, a perfectly classical bit of colonialism). Truly wretched stuff.

Anyway, the Morning Star’s very short comment on Xiaobao is pure lickspittle. Underneath the headline, “China angry at Nobel win for jailed ‘dissident’”, we get this comment: “The award drew a furious response from China, which accused the Nobel committee of violating its own principles by honouring a criminal”, reminding us that “Mr Liu is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion”. We then read that the Nobel committee is guilty of “ignoring warnings from Chinese diplomats that such a decision would damage ties with Norway” and learn of how China’s foreign ministry “lashed out at the decision, saying the award should have been used to promote international friendship and disarmament” - given that Barack Obama “won the Nobel peace prize last year when, as US president, he was prosecuting wars on several fronts” (October 8).[6] Correct observation about Obama aside, the Morning Star is content to act as an effective mouth-piece for the Chinese government. Nothing new there.

But fawning prostration before the Chinese regime is not restricted to ‘official communism’. If anything, the former Trotskyist, Andy Newman - who runs the Socialist Unity blog - outdoes the Morning Star when it comes to concocting apologias for the Beijing bureaucracy. Not for nothing have some suggested, given Socialist Unity’s current political trajectory under comrade Newman’s helmsmanship, that it should be renamed Stalinist Unity.

Of course, comrade Newman does “disapprove of Liu’s imprisonment”. However, the comrade remarks, “that is an internal matter for China” and “interfering with China’s sovereignty” - which is a “very sensitive issue” for Beijing - is “hardly demonstrating peaceful intent”. Alfred Nobel “established the Peace Prize for those people who made war less likely”, ventures comrade Newman, “not for internal dissidents trying to undermine governments”. Then in full statesman-like mode, comrade Newman offers the following idea: “If you look at people who have actually made a significant step towards resolving a long term international conflict and making war less likely then president Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan and president Hu Wintao of China this year made a huge break through with the long-awaited Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement sealing peace between the two states. Perhaps they should have been given the Peace Prize?”[7]

However, excuses for the Chinese government come from other quarters too - in this case, Nick Young. This “writer and consultant on international development” founded the on-line journal China Development Brief in 1996 and seems to enjoy good relations with the Chinese authorities. Writing in The Guardian’s ‘Comment is free’ on-line facility, his article, entitled ‘Liu Xiaobo wins Nobel, reform loses’, Young makes the liberalistic case that democracy can only come to China from slow, step-by-step, almost invisible, piecemeal reforms from above: not from rash ‘hotheads’ like Liu Xiaobo. For Young, Communist Party rule has “become much more consultative over the last 20 years” - which has seen “non-party intellectuals” and “special-interest groups” being “allowed a voice in policy debate”. In turn, he opines, there has been a “gradual recognition of the need for ‘civil society’ organisations” - like “the Chinese NGOs currently participating in the Tianjin climate change talks”[8].

Getting to his main theme, Young argues that actually there are “many unsung heroes” - especially “within the Communist Party and ‘official’ media, as well as among NGOs and the academy”. These forces are all “working for incremental political reform”, “increased public participation” and for “greater economic and social equality and negotiated compromise between [the] competing interests in the complex and stratified society that is developing” inside China. These are the “real peacemakers”, believes Young, that “typically eschew the adversarial approach of activists like Liu” and “whose Charter 08 movement threw a gauntlet down to the authorities” - quite irresponsibly. They, the “real peacemakers”, seek to work and cooperate with the authorities “not out of fear” - absolutely not - but “because they feel there are more constructive ways to achieve peaceful change in the Chinese social, cultural and political context”.

Unfortunately, Young writes, the awarding of the Nobel prize to Xiaobo will “embolden those in China who are most inclined to confrontational tactics” and “strengthen the argument within China that the west is determined to derail China’s progress by promoting internal strife” - a viewpoint that is not restricted to “old, die-hard Marxists, militarists and proto-fascist nationalists”. That is, as Young puts it, “many educated young Chinese people who are “perfectly capable of thinking for themselves” are “highly sceptical of western prescriptions for China” and “want to find a distinctively Chinese, perhaps ‘Confucian’, form of democratisation”.

Communists take a radically different approach to that ‘sensibly’ peddled by the Morning Star, Andy Newman and Nick Young - courtly advisers to the grotesque Stalinist plutocrats in Beijing. Instead of looking to those above as our potential saviours, or at least to soften the pain, we call for the sweeping away of the entire rotten edifice of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” - ie, state-party bureaucratic exploitation. Without equivocation, we in the CPGB call for the immediate release of Liu Xiaobo and all the other political prisoners in China, regardless of their political stripe or colouration. We also demand that Tibet and other oppressed peoples, such as the Uyghurs, should have the right to self-determination - whether that involves China acceding real autonomy or outright independence. Unity must be voluntary, not the temporary product of force and might by the state.

Nobel

Then there is the question of the Nobel peace prize itself - what is it? The prize is something of an imperialist award system - a massive pat on the back for those who have either consistently served the core imperialist states or, maybe even more importantly, reneged on their former revolutionary principles, and ceased to be a nuisance to the imperialist system and become instead useful assets.

The examples are legion. Take one of the most obvious - Nelson Mandela. Strangely enough, he was not awarded a Nobel Peace Prize when he was incarcerated in Robben Island or leading the African National Congress’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation). In this capacity, Mandela coordinated sabotage campaigns against military and government targets and drew up detailed plans for guerrilla war if the sabotage campaign failed to end the apartheid regime. To this end, he also raised funds abroad for Umkhonto we Sizwe and arranged for the group to receive paramilitary training.

No, he only got the prize much later when he did a deal with his fellow recipient, Frederik Willem De Klerk - the leader of the racist National Party - to peacefully dismantle the old apartheid regime, all carefully orchestrated from above under the watchful and approving eye of the United States (which of course no longer had to worry about the Soviet Union and its allies). Such a deal was clearly in the wider interests of imperialism, as it helped to defuse a dangerous ‘hot spot’ which had the potential to destabilise the entire system. And you could go on and on. Betty Williams of the so-called Northern Ireland ‘Peace Women’. Or in the Middle East - Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin. Then you have people like Mikhail Gorbachev, Kofi Anan, Aung San Suu Kyi, Jimmy Carter, etc - all individuals who clearly acted, with this or that degree of self-awareness, to shore-up, stabilise and preserve the imperialist system. Even Karl Kautsky was nominated for a prize in the 1930s - when he had long ceased to be the “pope of Marxism” and instead had become a renegade, an ardent opponent of the Bolshevik revolution.

Indeed, at times the list of recipients reads more like a rogues gallery - Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Anwar Al-Sadat, etc. Barack Obama was actually conducting two protracted and bloody wars when awarded the prize, reducing the whole Nobel ritual to quixotic self-parody. And Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin were also nominees for the prize at one stage. One cannot but wonder what Alfred Nobel himself - a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite and ballistite - would have thought of such individuals, given that in his will he stipulated that the peace prize should be awarded to those persons who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

The Nobel peace prize committee itself is a strangely secretive, bureaucratic, body. The statutes of the Nobel Foundation do not allow for information about the nominations, considerations or various investigations into the potential nominees or winners to be made public for at least 50 years after a prize has been awarded - so effectively the committee members have to sign-up to a version of the official secrets act. However, the nominations - and the reasonings - from 1901 to 1956 have now been released in a database[9].

Now, self-evidently, Liu Xiaobo does not fit the profile of a rogue - but he does slot into the category of useful asset for imperialism - most notably for his strong emphasis on peaceful and gradualistic change in China. Not that communists regard violence as a litmus test of revolutionary purity or integrity. But the whole thrust and logic of the Nobel peace prize, its version of ‘peace’, boils down to the notion - endlessly hammered home by the ruling class and its agents, of course - that the violence of the state, the standing army, is ultimately legitimate but the violence of non-state bodies and organisations (eg, the ANC, IRA, PLO) is illegitimate. Therefore, in the last analysis, the Nobel peace prize and its pious shenanigans is profoundly reactionary.

It should be pointed out that Liu Xiaobo is potentially useful for the Chinese state - no matter how loudly they may be vilifying him now. Further down the line they could use him, and his Charter 08 comrades, to their benefit. Both Xiaobo and the Chinese Stalinist party, albeit in their own different ways, are committed to the full introduction and implementation of capitalism in China. When the time comes for the CCP to relinquish its absolutist grip on political power, which will inevitably happen, then the moral credibility that someone like Xiaobo - and people like him - can present both internally and externally could become a valuable asset to the newly reconfigured regime.

Notes

  1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinzhou
  2. www.globaltimes.cn
  3. www.hrichina.org/public/contents/article?revision_id=174002&item_id=173687
  4. www.open.com.hk/0701p26.html (Google Translation Service).
  5. Weekly Worker June 26 2008.
  6. Morning Star October 8 (www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/96223).
  7. www.socialistunity.com/?p=6884
  8. The Guardian October 8 (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/08/liu-xiaobo-china).
  9. nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/nomination/database.html