Does the West, through the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, unfairly single out China for criticism? According to this editorial from China’s strictly state-run Global Times, awarding Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo with the Peace Prize was a ‘display of arrogance and prejudice against a country that has made the most remarkable economic and social progress.’ Once again, the current Chinese government seems to regard economic prowess as a pass for not providing the political freedoms enshrined in its own constitution.
The somewhat restrained government-approved editorial starts out this way:
Friday the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, an incarcerated Chinese criminal.
The Nobel committee once again displayed its arrogance and prejudice against a country that has made the most remarkable economic and social progress in the past three decades.
The Nobel Prize has been generally perceived as a prestigious award in China, but many Chinese feel the Peace Prize is loaded with Western ideology.
Last century, the prize was awarded several times to pro-Western advocates in the former Soviet Union, including Mikhail Gorbachev, whose efforts directly led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Western preference of the Nobel committee didn’t disappear with the end of the Cold War.
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