Our International Editor, Lindsey Hilsum, reports from Oslo on the Chinese protesters outside the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.
About 60 Chinese gathered in the snowy square outside Oslo City Hall as the Nobel Peace Prize was presented to the empty chair where the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo should have sat.
They were not fans of the Laureate.
“He is against his own people, he is against China, he is against Chinese people,” said Yu Bai, a researcher. She and her friends see the prize as a western imposition, more proof that the west doesn’t understand China and resents its rise.
There are a lot of ironies rumbing around here. Liu is locked up because he said and wrote things which the Chinese government cannot stomach. Chinese people are less repressed now than they used to be, but there is no freedom of speech and Liu’s case proves it. So here were a group of Chinese in Norway freely expressing a view opposed to the Norwegian Committee and presumably its government.
I’m not sure they saw that irony, because they were focussing on another.
“Why don’t they give it to Wikileaks?” asked Siwei Guo, an engineer. “I know why – it’s because Wikileaks is against America, so they don’t give the prize.”
If China has an ideology these days, it’s nationalism not communism and these young Chinese have embraced it. To them, Liu is a traitor because he favours what they see as the imposition of western democracy. It’s said that the Chinese embassy pressured Chinese residents in Norway to attend the demonstration, but I think these people believed what they were saying because it’s a logical point of view which I have heard many times in China. They were very insulted when I asked if they’d been pressured into coming.
“Nobody tells me what to do,” said Xiu Hua, another researcher. “I make up my own mind.”
On the other side of the political divide I met Chai Ling, the famous “Commander” from Tiananmen Square. She was the most prominent woman in the student’s movement of 1989. She fled to the USA, as did many others of her generation. They squabbled, and lost their sense of purpose and meaning as exiles do. But Chai Ling has now found God. She has become a born-again Christian, and through this has settled the spiritual angst she experienced in exile.
“God is speaking through the Nobel Committee,” she said, her eyes glinting.
Back in China, the current generation of dissidents is having it hard. Since the prize was announced, dozens have been locked up, held under house arrest and generally harrassed.
“It’s very difficult now, the government probably felt embarrassed and upset and uptight and nervous and things are getting worse,” said Chai Ling. “But in the long term we feel extremely hopeful about a brighter future of China.”