Reading Round-Up, December 17

Authors

Date of this Version

12-17-2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

December 17, 2010 in The China Beat http://www.thechinabeat.org/

Comments

Copyright December 17, 2010. Used by permission.

Abstract

It seems there’s been an outpouring of writing about China lately—so much that we actually haven’t been able to keep up with it all (especially since for the China Beat editors, December brings with it the madness and mayhem that mark the end of an academic term). So, before we settle in for the holiday break, we thought we’d bring you a pair of reading round-ups that point to all the pieces we wish we’d been able to write during the past few weeks. We’ll post part I (focusing on Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace prize win) today and part II early next week, then take a break until after the new year.

• At his Forbes blog, Gady Epstein looks at “Life After the Nobel,” concluding with this thought-provoking observation:

Liu Xiaobo will not be forgotten, in no small measure because China’s leaders will keep pressuring the world and their own citizens to forget him.

• Perry Link attended the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10 and discusses the event at the New York Review of Books. It was also announced earlier this month that Harvard University Press will be publishing an anthology of Liu’s writings in 2012, and that Professor Link will be supervising the translation team for the project.

• Jeff Wasserstrom shares his thoughts on Liu and the peace prize, pointing to a few historical analogies to keep in mind, at Dissent magazine’s website. At The Economist’s website, James Miles also takes a look back in time:

Chinese leaders probably failed to anticipate the battering that China’s image abroad would suffer as a result of the awarding of the Nobel peace prize to an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo. They would have expected that their boycott of the award ceremony in Oslo on December 10th would invite comparisons in the West between China and the Soviet Union, which responded with similar fury to the award of the prize to Andrei Sakharov in 1975. It is unlikely they fully realised that their behaviour would be equated even more prominently with that of Nazi Germany.