The Ministry of Truth Will See You Now

I've written before about how China seems to view 1984 as some sort of instructional manual but the recent propaganda around Liu Xiaobo the Chinese dissident and scholar winning the Nobel Peace Prize really takes the cake. Besides portraying him as some sort of an evil figure in the Chinese press, not a new tactic they call the Dalai Lama a terrorist, they also have cajoled and threatened every country they could to ignore the award. Liu Xiaobo is the first Chinese winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, unless you count the Dalai Lama as Chinese, and I don't, most famous for a letter calling for more democracy in China. For that horrible crime he'll probably spend most of the rest of his life in jail.

But not content to merely arrest and smear Liu Xiaobo the Chinese have really gone off the rocker. First there was the World Harmony Award given to general Chi Haotian who is most famous for shooting students in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Give a peace prize to a man most famous for murdering student protestors shows both that they communist party has no idea what irony is and also no idea how their actions play to an international audience. I think they are really surprised by how people respond to all this. We often make the mistake of assuming that other people think like us, or at least understand how we think, but that is often not the case. The communist party really views the world through its own prism and is surprised by what is going down.

Finally there was the Confucius Peace Prize awarded to a Taiwanese guy Lien Chan who favors closer integration with China. This is not only funny because they clearly just cooked up this award in some pack room at the Propaganda Department, that's its real name, remember no irony, but because it was so clearly a sham. Lien Chan the guy who supposedly won the award didn't know until a newspaper contacted him and wasn't there when the award was presented. Well at least Liu Xiaobo can take comfort from the fact that he wasn't the only one not there to receive an award, and also from the fact that the people in charge of the Propaganda Department seem to be stupid.