With the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, Beijing is at its angriest. This article by writer Dai Yan for China’s state-run Global Times lays bare China’s never-ending consternation over centuries of abuse at the hands of the Western powers, and the indignance many Chinese now feel toward the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.
For the state-run Global Times, Dai Yan writes in small part:
Anyone with a little political common sense knows that human rights mean, first and foremost, the human right of survival and development. Our ancestors once said, “those who are well fed, are well bred.” When people have no guarantee of survival, how can one talk about human rights! Why not take a look at what “good things” Westerners have done to the livelihoods and development of Chinese people over the past two centuries!
One hundred seventy years ago, just as China’s Qing Dynasty was in decline and the people were destitute, the Western powers didn’t offer charity, but boatloads of opium, poisoning countless Chinese and making their country the “sick man of Asia.” One hundred fifty years ago, based in the accounts of French writer Victor Hugo, two bandits named “France” and “England” broke into Yuan Ming Yuan [Summer Palace], one looting it and the other setting it alight, destroying many of China’s greatest cultural treasures and scattering them across the world. One hundred years ago, the Eight-Nation Alliance led by Europe and the United States attacked Beijing. They killed, pillaged and burned, and even the watchtower of Qianmen was half blown up. Seventy years ago, the cruel Japanese army was rampant in China, marking a new extreme in China’s history of invasion. This was China’s most tragic century – the darkest hundred years in the long history of China’s people. The influence the superpowers had on China during this period was unprecedented. They have had plenty of opportunities to improve China’s human rights situation. But what did they do? Whether from Western literature or Japanese, how many stories can they cite that show how they have helped achieve human rights in China?
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