September 29, 2010: Kwame Anthony Appiah's Remarks on Liu Xiaobo
On September 29, 2010, at the 76th International PEN Congress in Tokyo, Japan PEN American Center President Kwame Anthony Appiah spoke about his nomination of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace Prize at an event marking 50 years of PEN advocacy on behalf of imprisoned writers.
Liu’s writings express the aspirations of a growing number of China’s citizens; the ideas he has articulated in his allegedly subversive writings, ideas that are commonplace in free societies around the world, are shared by a significant cross section of Chinese society. Charter 08, for example, is a testament to an expanding movement for peaceful political reform in China. This document, which Liu co-authored, is a remarkable attempt both to engage China's leadership and to speak to the Chinese public about where China is and needs to go. It is novel in its breadth and in its list of signers—not only dissidents and human rights lawyers, but also prominent political scientists, economists, writers, artists, grassroots activists, farmers, and even government officials. More than 10,000 Chinese citizens have endorsed the document despite the fact that almost all of the original 300 signers have since been detained or harassed. In doing so they, too, exhibited exceptional courage and conviction. To stand up for Liu Xiaobo is to stand with all those who advocate for peaceful change in the world’s most populous nation.
The numbers of those in prison in China for exercising the right to free expression guaranteed to them by international human rights law was once in the thousands, if not tens of thousands; today we can identify only a few score such prisoners in the name of free expression. There are voices within the regime, we know, urging greater respect for free expression. China wants – and needs – to be heard in the community of nations. I – and all of us in the PEN International family– believe in a cosmopolitan conversation in which we hear from every nation. But the world must let China’s rulers know that we can only listen respectfully if they offer to their own citizens the fundamental freedoms we all claim from our governments. This is the right moment for the world to show those in China who do not understand that history is on freedom’s side that all the world’s friends of peace and democracy are watching. No signal of this would be more powerful than the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Over the years, the Nobel Committee has had a distinguished record of recognizing and honoring just such voices at just such critical moments. Liu Xiaobo stands in the company of Andrei Sakharov, Shirin Ebadi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, brave proponents of civil and political rights who have stood up to systematic repression in their own countries and practiced principled, non-violent resistance to bad laws and policies. In fact, the year before my countryman Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, he wrote in his seminal letter from a Birmingham jail, “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.” Ten days after Liu Xiaobo was sentenced—in part for insisting that China respect her own constitution, her own basic law—he was able to release a statement through his lawyers. In it, he echoed Dr. King when he declared, “For an intellectual thirsty for freedom in a dictatorial country, prison is the very first threshold. Now I have stepped over the threshold, and freedom is near.”
We must continue now to press for his release. For if China can jail Liu Xiaobo without repercussions, it isn’t just dissident voices inside China that are vulnerable. To fail to challenge the Chinese government on Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment is to concede this argument internationally, at enormous peril to peaceful advocates of progress and change not just in China but all around the world. Awarding Liu Xiaobo the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, by contrast, would both honor Dr. Liu’s unique and indispensable contributions to the movement for greater civil, political, and human rights in China and serve as sustenance and inspiration to present and future rights activists in China and in every nation.
In explaining why he, like us at the PEN America Center, has urged the Nobel Committee to award Liu the Peace Prize, our colleague Vaclav Havel, one of the authors of the Czech Charter 77 on which Charter 08 was modeled, said recently:
We ask the Nobel Committee to honor Liu Xiaobo’s more than two decades of unflinching and peaceful advocacy for reform, and to make him the first Chinese recipient of that prestigious award. In doing so, the Nobel Committee would signal both to Liu and to the Chinese government that many inside China and around the world stand in solidarity with him, and his unwavering vision of freedom and human rights for the 1. 3 billion people of China.
On behalf of thousands of my fellow American writers, I join this great Czech writer, I join many of China’s own lovers of freedom, in urging the Nobel Committee to send this important message.
