By giving
international recognition to a man who has risked his life calling for the
Beijing Authorities to observe the human rights guaranteed by their own constitution,
has the Nobel Committee had a negative impact on China's legal system?
According to this article by Shan Renping of China's state-run Global Times,
the West and specifically the people on the Nobel Committee simply don’t understand
how difficult it is to run China.
Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced
in China to an 11 year prison term, recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. This
led to a flurry of media comment in the U.S. and some European nations about
the Chinese judicial system. The incident insults China's legal system.
China has 1.3 billion people.
It's impossible for a small country like Norway to imagine how different China
is - and how difficult it is to maintain balance amid such unprecedented progress.
Norway only has 4 million
people who live extravagant lives and are educated according to Western systems.
The five members of the Nobel Committee have no conception of the concerns of Chinese
society.
What Chinese are most
concerned about is whether the decades of progress in living standards can be
maintained, and whether China's economic development will be interrupted by domestic
or external unrest. With such rapid economic development and social change, more
problems will arise. The only way to deal with these problems is by
strengthening the rule of law.
Implementing law in China is
far less efficient than in developed countries. But China is firm in its
determination to build society through the rule of law. To improve the system, China
is improving the legal process. Meanwhile, Chinese media is keen to expose and
criticize the privileged who bypass the law for personal gain.
But now the Nobel Committee
has taken it upon itself to discredit China's legal system. A small group of
committee members and those who manipulate them awarded the globally
influential Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese prisoner.
No matter what values they
hold or how much sympathy they share for this person, the signal they have sent
wasn't simple a matter of showing sympathy, but of encouraging resistance to
China's existing laws.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
This isn't a debate about
democracy, but an indictment of our legal system to encourage dissidents to
violate Chinese law. The overall impact of the Nobel Prize is to empower the winner with a certain public authority around the world. It is this empowerment that was abused by the Nobel Committee in order to to damage the authority of the Chinese legal system.
And it isn't only mainland
Chinese, but also millions of foreigners living in China who enjoy the benefits
of the Chinese legal system. China's existing legal structure guarantees that
the "factory of the world" continues to function - and the world's
largest foreign trader is maintained.
It is the moral duty of the
Nobel Committee to help China make progress administering the law, instead of
trying to hamper it by supporting a prisoner with millions of dollars and
lavish publicity.
