Nobel Peace Prize for Liu Xiaobo

Chinese dissident and Tiananmen Square alumni Liu Xiaobo is serving an eleven year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.”

He also just won the Nobel Prize for Peace.

In and out of prison for 20 years now he has been a champion of political reform and Human Rights in Mainland China and is one of the chief architects of the “08 Charter” which calls for such subversive demands as:

•  Freedom of expression & assembly
•  An independent judiciary
•  Freedom of religion
•  Civic Education

and other normal stuff that makes the Communist Party squirm.

The Chinese Government has denounced the award to Liu and has threatened that trade between China and Norway could be threatened as the body that grants the Nobel Prize is based in Norway.  The Norwegian government of course, being a free country, has answered that the Nobel committee is a private group over which the government has no say.

You see, that is a concept the Communist Party just doesn’t get…

…and when the Chinese Government finds something going on in private that they just don’t get, they:

1.  arrest it,
2.  charge it
3.  sentence it
4.  “re-educate” it.

I joke a little but I have great interest in China.  I live here, have close Chinese friends here, and have met a number of people in China who have spent time in prison for conscious issues.  They love China and have the hope for a better China one day.

Here’s hoping Liu Xiaobo will be able to walk out of prison soon and claim the award he richly deserves.