Evan Osnos of the New Yorker writes that Chinese government-backed media outlets have promoted a new “official portrait” of Liu Xiaobo. An excerpt of this new portrait, from China Daily:
Liu has always proclaimed himself to be a righteous man who participates in “civil rights movement” out of a Chinese citizen’s sense of urgency, responsibility and mission. But do his acts match his words?
Doesn’t Liu chase after fame? “Even if they do not receive material rewards, those who dare to speak the truth on major public events will receive praise for justice, especially that from grassroots of the Chinese mainland and mainstream international society, and they will gradually rise to fame and public influence,” Liu said when receiving the so called “Outstanding Contributor to Democracy Award” in 2003. Liu has been bad-mouthing his own country and his own nation for payment from the West, such as “human rights prize”, “democracy contributor prize”, and so on.
Doesn’t Liu chase after wealth? Let himself speak for this. “The reasons why I deliver speeches are: first, I feel good about myself; second, I need to make money. I won’t deliver a speech if I’m not paid fair enough for every hour I speak. Money is a kind of self-evaluation. Your life is opened up to the extent of the amount of money you make.
Some commentary from Evan Osnos:
* The very presence of this profile suggests that officials in the stratosphere of the media-apparatus have concluded that the default strategy—what we might call the Avoidance Strategy—is not doing so hot against the creeping effects of the Web. That is a remarkable fact. If a Chinese dissident had won this prize twenty—or even five—years ago, the state media system could have been comfortable knowing that simply blacking out the news from state papers and television would be sufficient to prevent most Chinese citizens from hearing such politically objectionable news. That is no longer true, and, despite the scale and effectiveness of China’s controls over the Internet, even its official stewards evidently recognize that they are in a new fight for public opinion.
