RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: China's malevolent security apparatus is as Orwellian as ever  Mon Oct 11, 2010 3:40 am | |
| When news broke on Friday that the political reformer Liu Xiaobo had won the Nobel peace prize while serving the first year of an 11-year jail sentence, I was listening to a member of China's communist aristocracy tell me how he had recently been lured out of his home by a caller pretending to be a deliveryman.
''I don't have any money,'' he had protested, mistaking the motivations of the goons who had grabbed him, before they shoved him into a van and pulled a hood over his head.
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His long interrogations at an unknown location revolved around a short cryptic joke that some recipients had misinterpreted as serious intelligence, and which had fed a worldwide rumour that a senior party figure was about to die.
Others linked to that rumour had their houses ransacked and at least one privileged figure was treated to the full black-hood ritual.
My host was eventually returned to the same bustling Beijing pavement, opposite a bright pink luxury cosmetics shop. What does he remember most vividly about his ordeal? ''That hood really stank,'' he said.
If China's resurgent security apparatus can seem Kafkaesque, it can also be Orwellian. While talking incessantly of a ''harmonious society'', the Chinese state's kidnapping of its own citizens is becoming more common, not less. Just ask the lawyer Gao Zhisheng - if anyone can find him - or dozens and perhaps hundreds of nameless Tibetans and Uighurs whose disappearance is known only to close associates.
Or ask the leading Taiwanese scholar who had all his documents searched on arrival in China a fortnight ago, or other ethnic Chinese scholars who had no great interest in contemporary politics until they started being followed by black Audi cars.
As I sat in the privileged family's courtyard on Friday afternoon, the Herald phoned Liu Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia. ''He won't get the prize,'' she had said, minutes before being proven wrong. She added: ''It's not convenient to accept an interview now, there are lots of police at my home.''
At 5pm, someone among the hordes of foreign journalists managed to stream the Nobel committee's decision to Liu Xia live. But she has not been seen or heard from since. As Liu Xia was listening to the news, the Herald rang Cui Weiping, a passionate and dignified film critic who had been involved in the same ''Charter 08'' manifesto for political reform that had landed Liu Xiaobo in jail.
''There is light,'' she said, before breaking into tears as the Nobel committee's statement was being read out in the background, apparently streaming from the committee's website, which had not been censored. Cui had compiled a large dossier of responses from leading Chinese intellectuals and found that many who had not believed in signing Liu Xiaobo's original Charter 08 were enraged by his incarceration.
''Hearing news of his sentence on the eve of 2010 I felt like we had returned to 1910,'' wrote the sociologist Li Yinhe, referring to the year before the revolution that ended imperial China.
I pedalled as fast as I could through the blanket smog back to the Herald office, where there was a message waiting from a contact in the Chinese security apparatus asking for my ''opinion on Liu Xiaobo''. I tried to watch CNN, which had been blacked out, as had the BBC.
China Central Television and Hong Kong's Phoenix TV - which claims to be independent - were broadcasting as if nothing had happened. The Chinese-language internet was already flooded with jubilant commentary before being quickly ''harmonised'', as Chinese netizens like to say.
After filing for Saturday's paper, I sent a text to the journalist Paul Mooney who had been following the story closely. ''I've been detained by the police for reporting on a celebration,'' came his text in reply.
''They've held me for two hours because I didn't have my passport with me.'' About 20 political activists had gathered for a happy banquet and about twice that number of policeman took them all away. One policeman saw a large photo of Liu Xiaobo, and asked: ''Who is this?''
Behind the Great Firewall of China, it is now almost impossible to find a direct public reference to words like ''Liu Xiaobo'' or ''Nobel'' - except in reports that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has excoriated the decision makers. I wondered what the Premier, Wen Jiabao, would make of it all after his comment on CNN last week that ''freedom of speech is indispensable'' was itself deleted from the Chinese internet.
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