is this all
we know?

I also like to share with GV readers a paragraph that appeared in the New Statesman piece by Sholto Byrnes, on the Nobel Prize debate and KM’s intervention, which quotes Philip Bowring. Does the (unfair) depiction of Prof Mahbubani sound familiar?

“Mahbubani conveniently omits to mention the matter of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. If it were possible to leave that aside, then a strong case for Deng’s period of office could be made. But it isn’t, which makes the suggestion grotesque and gratuitously offensive. Also on Asia Sentinel, the International Herald Tribune columnist and former Far Eastern Economic Review editor, Philip Bowring, puts Mahbubani smartly right, calling his comments about dissidents “just the sort of half-truth that one expects from Singapore apologists for authoritarian regimes similar to their own. It also reflects Singapore’s attempts to appear ultra-Asian while aligning its economic and strategic interests with the west.”

Dilkusha implies that I have spun the Kishore quote, and suggests that it be seen in context, so here is the full article ..:))

[Link for the article below: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/opinion/12iht-edmahbubani.html?_r=1 ]

NEW YORK TIMES

November 11th, 2010

Counterpoint: An Ignoble Nobel

By KISHORE MAHBUBANI

SINGAPORE — Max Weber once wisely stated, “It is not true that good can only follow from good

and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who says this is, indeed, a

political infant.” His remarks apply equally well to good intentions. And one such Western good

intention may actually end up doing more harm than good.

In the Western mind, the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident, Liu

Xiaobo, was an unmitigated good. Several Western commentaries said the prize should be given

to “individuals struggling against the overwhelming force of an oppressive state or an unjust

social order.” In these pages, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn

Jagland, compared Liu to Andrei Sakharov, another Nobel Peace Prize winner, who struggled

against “human rights abuses in the Soviet Union.”

Many Chinese, however, believe that the award of the Peace Prize to Liu could well do more harm

than good. Few Chinese intellectuals, inside or outside China, have celebrated the award, publicly

or privately. They do not believe that a candle has been lit for freedom. Instead, this award may

set back the steady progress toward more personal freedom in China. This inability of the West to

understand that there may be an alternative point of view could well create a major problem for

the world.

Over the past 30 years, the Chinese government has done far more good than harm both for China

and the world. The largest poverty-reduction exercise in human history was achieved by the

Chinese government. When Deng Xiaoping launched his famous reforms in 1978, over 800

million people lived in absolute poverty. Today, fewer than 200 million do. Over 600 million

were lifted out of absolute poverty.

For this achievement alone, Deng should have earned the Nobel Peace Prize. But he did far more.

He took great political risks in opening up China. He allowed foreign investment and opened up

China to Western influence. He sent hundreds of thousands of young Chinese to study in Western

universities. He did all this aware that they could come back with ideas that could undermine the

Chinese system. It is hard to think of any other recent leader who has been as courageous as Deng.

Before him, the Chinese had no freedom to leave their villages, let alone leave China. Today, over

40 million Chinese leave China freely each year. And they return to China freely each year. China

today is at least one thousand times less oppressive than it used to be.

So why was Deng not considered for the Nobel Prize? One word: Tiananmen. Tiananmen was a

mistake. But the West has double-standards when it comes to judging human-rights violations. It

does not condemn American society because it violated every canon of human rights by being the

first modern Western society to reintroduce torture. Instead, it sees Guantánamo as a blemish

that should not take away from all the good that American society has done. The same judgment

should apply to Deng: Tiananmen was a blemish that should not take away from all the good that

Deng had done.

Equally importantly, the West needs to understand that for Deng to achieve all the good he did

for China, he had to maintain social and political order even as Chinese society opened up

dramatically to the world. In the Western political imagination, the march to progress is made by

steadily weakening the state and enlarging individual freedom. In the Chinese political

experience, the weakening of the Chinese state has inevitably led to chaos and enormous personal

suffering. There can be no doubt that the past 30 years since Deng’s reforms began have been the

best 30 years that the Chinese have experienced since the Opium War of 1842.

One reason for this is that the Chinese government managed to find the right balance between

opening up society and maintaining order — and that in a country of 1.3 billion people.

The Nobel award to Liu could upset the delicate political balance in China by stirring up a “color

revolution,” reintroducing chaos to China and setting it back 150 years. That, in turn, could lead to

an overreaction by the Chinese government and a clampdown on the many personal freedoms the

Chinese people have gained in recent decades. In short, the Liu award could generate less, not

more, personal freedom.

Over time, China will become a democracy, especially when it develops the world’s largest middle

class. However, it is likely to get there faster if the present balance of rapid economic

transformation and gradual political transformation is maintained. Few Chinese believe that the

West is trying to do China any good by trying to accelerate the political transformation. Indeed,

most Chinese believe that the Western agenda is to unleash the same chaos in China as it did with

instant democracy in Russia. When Jagland compared Liu to Sakharov, he confirmed the Chinese

conviction that the goal of this prize is to destabilize China. If the West persists in its refusal to

understand China’s fundamental concerns, it will do more harm than good with its good

intentions.

Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National

University of Singapore

Dear Ordinary Lankan,

Wonderfully said. I think there are fundamentally two views of democracy.

There are people who see democracy as a means to end – if it can put food on their table, provide them security, and safeguard their traditional beliefs and way of life, then well and good. Otherwise, there are other options to be tried.

Then there are those who see democracy as an end in itself. As the embodiment in law of individual liberty and freedom, which they conceive to be the ultimate goals of the human stuggle.

There are tensions between these views even in the most advanced western democracies. I would wager that a majority of Sri Lankans at this time belong in the means-to-an-end camp. This is surely understandable.

But like you, I fear that this mindset may be facilitating a horrible mistake – that we might be dreaming of a China or Singapore or Malaysia, but may wake up with a Burma or Zimbabwe.

Maybe we will come to realize the true value of democracy only if we have to someday fight for it.

I was surprised to find the name of Liu xia Obo,the Chinese dissident who has won the Nobel Prize for Peace this year was also in the same list as the 16th name among the top 100 Global Thinkers for bearing the flame of 1989 into new generation.

He may lead the reformers like what our own Sajith Premadasa has recently done to UNP and reform China with Democracy and Human Rights as Kisore hopes!

I was thrilled and searched further, but was disappointed not to find the name of Dr Dayan Jayathilake among the distinguished personalities.

But I have no doubt the Cuban authorities if and when they compile such a list will definitely honour DJ

Dear Ordinary Lankan,

Very well put and I whole-heartedly agree. This whole “eastern-values” vs “western-values” rubbish is a false dichotomy which will set us back by a few centuries. What matters is not where the values come from, but whether they are meaningful and in line with a 21st century understanding of human values and morality.

At the end of the day, it should be about freedom and responsibility, and the best examples are displayed only in (western) democracies, whatever shortcomings they may have. Who can deny this? Just because something is not perfect (what in the world is? We humans always have, and always will, have to battle our primitive demons), it doesn’t mean any other dumb alternative is equally praiseworthy.

Some may argue that a one-family dictatorship is a stepping stone towards a democracy. Maybe so, I’d love to be convinced. But sooner or later, democracy is what we must head towards, unless we desire to remain vassals in a 21st century monarchy.

This is more so because India itself is championing it.

a good part of our post 1815 inheritance is western values – and our immediate ancestors worked faithfully to build the systems under which we were born and educated. This is now a part of our culture. There is something criminal about the way that this culture of tolerance and freedom is being taken away – overtly by the Dr Mervyn types and covertly by a lot more people. MR really does not seem to believe in anything other than the advancement of his family and the enthronement of his son. all the rest is bullshit. and then there are a lot of useful and educated idiots who believe or choose to believe in this patriotic crap and are unwittingly destroying the culture of democratic governance. This is not ingratitude for the achievment of MR and his team – we want that victory to have a broader meaning than the giant sized image of MR and his giant shadow under which a lot people are taking cover – and mind you that is far worse than taking cover behind a pseudonym. It is rank cowardice – the failure of objectivity in speaking out against the absolutist dictatorship we are now confronted with.

we can side with China – I see no issues with that – but we would be stupid to burn our boats with the west – because we share some common democratic values – something we dont share with china – and because they cannot be written off yet.

this is how I see our ideological mistake – we have taken the burma road – the zimbabwe road and north korea road – forgetting who we are and forgetting the enormous faith and sacrfices made by generations to build whatever we had before the war and whatever that helped us see the war through.

The armed forces are not the only people who built this country – there were and are others – lets recover our perspective because all this hallucination and juvenile thinking and self indulgence has become way too costly for our future generations to pay.

sometimes loyalty to my country demands that I dissent.

Thank you for your enouraging words. As you can be seeing I am not just the pretty face.

They would hopefully not invade countries like the way the west colonialized in the last 300 or 400 years.

Have you forgotten about Tibet? The Chinese are way worse than the West; their way of dealing with dissent is to line the person up before a firing squad or send in the tanks/troops, as at Tiananmen. Then again, the Chinese don’t pretend to care about democracy, so this is a relative judgment.

By the way, did you know that the Dalai Lama has denied been a visa to SL, on several occasions? Unfortunately, patriots like Wimal and Mervyn – Wimal actually went to China – have probably never even heard of Tibet or the Dalai Lama.

P.S: Also, China was never happy with the independence of Taiwan.