Communists as Manchus?
Jeremiah Jenne is a grad student in history who is teaching in Beijing while working on his PhD thesis. His historical perspective on Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Peace Prize is a reminder of the politics and the history of modern China. It's not an introduction, but it could be a great summary or review reading.The Nobel Prize and the CCP’s Ignoble Response
Change, when it comes to China, will not be sparked by the Nobel committee or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Nor will it be due to the heroic (or Quixotic, depending on your perspective) activism of Liu Xiaobo and his associates. It will only come when grievances and demands breach the walls of class interest and regional difference to create the kinds of linkages seen in 1919 or 1949 or 1989.
What Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize does do is expose as hollow a false premise relating to China’s government: that of gradual evolution…
We’ve seen this before. In the waning decades of the Qing Empire, the Manchu court under Empress Dowager Cixi and an increasingly conservative inner circle of Manchu notables faced a number of devastating internal problems as well as the constant threats of rapacious and violent imperialist powers. Those officials — or writers — who sought change, who proposed the kind of systemic and institutional reforms needed to stem the tide of decline, found their voices lost in the cacophony of an insecure and frightened court who saw such systemic changes to be the vanguard of Manchu irrelevance.
The CCP today is in a far stronger position than the Manchus of old. By an order of magnitude. Yet the way they look at the world as they take turns peeking out through the walls of Zhongnanhai is so very similar to Cixi and her flunkies. As a result, the CCP response last night was as predictable as it was banal: “The decision disgraced the Nobel Prize.”…
The fact is that the CCP doesn’t need to do this anymore. More than one commentator in the past 24 hours has referred to the debacle as a “PRC own goal.” If government hadn’t been so freaked out by Charter 08 and sentenced Liu Xiaobo to prison (on December 25, 2009 figuring that the Western world would be too deep in egg nog to care…how’s that plan working out right about now?) then the Nobel committee wouldn’t have given this guy the time of day…
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Labels: China, history, political culture, politics
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:02 AM
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