And the Winner Is...

Liu Xiaobo will get the Nobel Peace Prize is absentia Friday. Meanwhile, China gets the award for best transparent propaganda, and a National Post writer wins the prize for unintentional irony.

In the Montreal Gazette, Jonathan Manthorpe writes that China’s vocal campaign against the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo Friday is evidence that “Beijing is no longer interested in hiding its capabilities or its desires.” Until recently the Communist Party went out of its way to assure the world of China’s peaceful intentions, but as the country grows more economically and militarily powerful it has started to assert its interests. Manthorpe says that this rhetoric is aimed as much at China’s own people as the Western world. “The leaders have created high expectations, both for continued economic growth and for the country's emergence as an authoritative world player that will never again suffer the ‘humiliation’ of … quasi-colonialism.” This is a good point because while the legacy of colonialism in China remains strong, it’s often overlooked by Westerners trying to interpret Beijing’s actions.

The National Post’s Kelly McParland rightly lampoons Beijing for taking the ludicrous step of inventing its own peace prize in an attempt to distract from the ceremony honouring Liu. This is all well and good, but from there McParland goes on to say that if Canada ever decided to create a prize to give Canadians, it would be ruined because “Quebec would demand its equivalent share of peace prizes … No white males would be allowed to win … Women would have to get 50 per cent of the awards, with their chances improving if they were also ethnically diverse and identified with any sexual group other than the one they were born into,” and Liberals would want to name it after Pierre Trudeau. So in other words, McParland's saying Canada is a better country than authoritarian China, but would be improved if only all those pesky people with different political views would disappear. Brilliant.

A Globe and Mail editorial says that because Liu remains under arrest for his campaign for democratic rights, the Nobel committee will leave his chair symbolically empty at the ceremony, and his absence is in itself a “devastating accuracy of his critique” of the Communist regime. Well said.