Peace Prize

Peace and Patriotism and at what price or Prize? Discuss

The Nobel Peace Price is one of the five Nobel Prizes given by the industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. According to Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize should be awarded to the person who have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for holding and promotion of peace congresses.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2010 Liu Xiao Bo is a democracy activist who has been jailed for 11 years on subversion charges. I think that it is a pity that the Chinese government has to resort to such an action to show their prowess or to silence the messenger. According to the article, there are members of Beijing’s intellectual community who disapproves the Nobel Peace Prize committee’s decision, as they believe that Mr. Liu does not deserve the award and they also see it as an unwanted lecturing by western countries. Getting the Nobel Award should be considered a great honour as the notable awardees are Nelson Mandela, Jean Paul Dunant, Aung San Suu Kyi and Barack Obama. Liu Xiao Bo was not able to collect his award by himself but what made the matter worst was the fact that he was not allowed to send any representative to collect the award as well. His close friends and wife have also been put under house arrest, police surveillance or even barred from leaving the country. It is sad to see China reacting like this as the Nobel Peace Prize serves to advocate peace around the world and by doing such extreme measures, they are showing the world how unappreciative they are and is causing more tension and criticism from the others.

I think that China should open up more towards other countries, allow more interaction and loosen up a little. They blocked YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to protect China’s local social networking industry and to effectively control information flow from the outside world. An example taken from Penn-Olson.com, “On Oct 8, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee granted Nobel Peace Prize 2010 to Chinese citizen Liu Xiao Bo for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. As soon as this announcement was made, thousands of Renren users began to share their thoughts. In fact, many paid honor to this Nobel Prize Laureate, which weren’t well received by the administrator. Within a few hours, all these information were removed.” This really shows how much the government does not tolerate any form of criticism and it is a waste to see that people are not given a freedom of speech. They are not unable to speak freely as there is a fear that if they show any form of criticism, they will be in some kind of danger.

China comes out with alternatives toward the Western such as the Confucius Peace Prize to counteract the Nobel Peace Prize; they have Youku instead of YouTube, Renren instead of Facebook and Weibo instead of Twitter. Are these actions good for their countrymen? Or are they just afraid of the Western culture being spread into their country and the criticism they face from their own people?