Chinese Peace

On Friday, the most relevant Nobel Prize (at least to the public) was awarded---the Peace Prize.  Each year, the Peace Prize tends to overshadow the rest of the laureates, typically since the scientific and literature prizes are carved from highly specialized niches while the Peace Prize winners tend to be in the public eye.   The scientific prizes are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and tend to be well-vetted and rigorously selected.  On the other hand, the Peace Prize is awarded by a separate group, the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  Interestingly, this group is made up of only five people.  Moreover, since "Peace" is such a nebulous concept, with such a small group the selection tends to have specific political statements.  As a result, controversy over the Peace Prize selection tends to overshadow the other, more rigorously awarded Prizes---I've sadly heard many comments on how people don't trust any of the Nobel Prizes after last year's award to Barack Obama (arguably more of an anti-Bush rather than a pro-Obama award)

In any case, the Peace Prize this year was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident jailed for his activism for human rights in China.  It's a pretty safe and uncontroversial selection, although not surprisingly China has called the award an obscenity.  In fact, in many of the state-run Chinese newspapers there was virtually no mention of the news.  However, even more interestingly, when my wife asked her mainland Chinese coworkers about the news, Chinese people who had immigrated to the US for work, surprisingly they either had no comment or called the award "ridiculous".  Ridiculous.  Earlier this year when Google had their standoff against China over censorship, those same coworkers railed against Google for not obeying the law.

My wife and I both have family in Hong Kong and over the years it has become clear that there is a enormous cultural difference between Chinese people from mainland China and those from Hong Kong (or Taiwan).  There are obvious language differences---people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese rather than the official Mandarin dialect and they are essentially different languages.  Moreover, Hong Kong was controlled by the United Kingdom and was allowed to develop a freewheeling capitalist economy closer to the United States than to China.  Even since China reacquired Hong Kong in 1997, under global pressure it was kept as a "Special Administrative Region" and effectively allowed autonomy (one wonders why Tibet was not given this treatment).  In any case, Hong Kong Chinese tend to be more free spirited and entrepreneurial---chances are, most of the Chinese restaurants you've eaten at in the US were started by immigrants from Hong Kong.

Mainland Chinese, in my experience, generally tend to be more focused on hierarchy and status stretching from millenna under imperial rule.  Don't rock the boat.  Do what you're told.  The sad thing is, I think the reason that human rights and freedom won't come soon in China is because most people in China just don't care.  Don't question the government.  Put the State before you---what's good for the State is good for you.  Criticizing the government over human rights only criticizes the people of China.  Even mainland Chinese immigrants in the United States, taking advantage of a free capitalist economy and arguably vastly more successful then the majority of Chinese back home, don't care.  In fact, my wife's department is headed by a hierarchy of mainland Chinese women (dubbed the Purse Gang) who run the shop as a tightly as a politburo.

Of course, this is a slightly exaggerated viewpoint and there are exceptions like Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama, but I fear that change will be slow.  Is China ready for freedom?  Beyond that, sadly I think that the motivation for the Western world to encourage change is stuck in a symbiotic addiction to cheap goods provided by cheap labor in China, cheap labor predicated upon the same human rights abuse that we're protesting...