A Nobel soul takes on the dictators of a fast-rising superpower

THE awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to a brave Chinese human rights campaigner will hopefully aid the process of ridding China of the cruel and bloody dictatorship that has ruled the country for decades.

Liu Xiaobo is serving a lengthy jail term for drawing up a manifesto calling for much-need political reform in his homeland. Such democratic sentiment is deemed ‘subversion’ in China.

The reaction of the regime to the award offers a further insight into how it seeks to suppress not only any hint of resistance to its oppressive rule, but also any objective reporting of such opposition or dissent.

Liu Xiaobo’s stance is one that deserves the admiration and support of all democratically-minded people. It is easy for us in the west to speak out against injustice elsewhere. Doing it from within the ‘People’s Republic’ takes real courage.

Liu reminds me of the small band of would-be reformers in Germany who formed the White Rose movement during World War II and distributed leaflets in Munich University. The Nazis immediately crushed the group and made an example of its members, killing or imprisoning them. But their protest stood as a proud contrast to the silence of so many other Germans in the face of enormous injustice and state repression. The Chinese dictatorship, apart from keeping down its own people via draconian laws and mind-control techniques, continues to occupy neighbouring Tibet, brutally suppressing its culture and imprisoning countless thousands of Tibetans who dare to question the legitimacy of the occupation or who take part in protests demanding independence or the withdrawal of the occupying forces.

Thousands more Tibetans have been tortured or killed by the occupiers for their political or religious views.

The regime presents Tibet to the rest of the world as a mere province of China, just as Germany once incorporated Czechoslovakia into the Greater German Reich.

Yet western governments, mindful of China’s economic importance, maintain a shameful silence about the regime’s horrendous human rights record. It takes a person of Liu Xiaobo’s stature and valour to rouse the indignation of people in this part of the world at what is happening behind the ‘Bamboo Curtain’.

I like to think others will be inspired by his example and maybe some day we can witness the collapse of the Chinese autocracy. That great event would dwarf even the fall of the Berlin Wall and the downfall of communism in eastern Europe because it would set free more than a billion human beings from the chains of a manipulative and murderous tyranny.

John Fitzgerald

Lr Coyne Street

Callan

Co Kilkenny