By Jerome A. Cohen
Last week, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Norway to resume talks on a bilateral free-trade agreement, and also to warn against giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Hong Kong protesters. Ironically, Wang said that the PRC does not “want to see anyone politicize the Nobel Peace Prize.” Wang is an intelligent, sophisticated and handsome representative for China in the world, but increasingly nationalistic and prone to losing his temper at press conferences in a way that makes him look like the chief of the PRC’s diplomatic “wolf warriors”, which indeed he nominally is.
The argument that award of the Prize to China’s international human rights warriors is “interference in China’s internal affairs” is no more persuasive today than in the past. International human rights, which the PRC selectively endorses and invokes in its dealings with other states, is by definition not an exclusively internal matter for any state. The PRC’s continued repetition of this hollow nonsense is another example of its increasing attempts to interfere with the internal and external affairs of other countries. Nothing would be more appropriate this year than for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to one or more Hong Kong organizations that have been striving to protect human rights in Hong Kong and the Mainland. In addition to the obvious candidates, the Hong Kong Bar Association should be considered. Its barristers are the last line of legal defense for the city’s human rights.
However, award of the NPP has often seemed a puzzle, if not a disappointment. I thought Kissinger’s sharing it with his North Vietnamese counterpart was odd, and Obama got it before he had a chance to do anything to earn it. Taiwan’s former President Ma Ying-jeou deserved to be considered after he started his second term as president because of the extraordinary accomplishment of concluding some 20 cross-strait agreements with a PRC that had always maintained it would never conclude agreements on an equal footing with a mere province. I said so when in 2012 Taiwan media asked how I evaluated his first-term achievements. That didn’t get Ma the Prize, but it did anger some other former students who have long advocated Taiwan independence!
Sadly, the PRC has reneged on implementation of some of these agreements with Taiwan since the 2016 election of current President Tsai Ing-wen because of her refusal to endorse the so-called “1992 Consensus,” according to which Taiwan is part of China, although the two sides never agreed which of the contending governments should be deemed the representative of that “China.”