Last week, the United States Senate unanimously passed a bill to rename the street that the Chinese embassy sits on in Washington from International Place to Liu Xiaobo Plaza. Liu, of course, is the dissident Chinese intellectual who has been imprisoned since 2008 for signing the pro-democracy Charter 08 manifesto. This week, President Obama signaled his intention to veto the bill should it reach his desk.
“We view this kind of legislative action as something that only complicates our efforts [to improve human rights in China],” explained State Department spokesman Mark Toner. “It’s our desire to work more productively and cooperatively with Congress on ways to address our shared goal of improving human rights.” A symbolic gesture such as renaming a street, the State Department seemed to suggest, would actually set back the cause of advancing human rights.
Of course, the Nobel committee doesn’t see things quite that way: Despite a furious response from Beijing, it awarded Liu its peace prize in 2010, even as he languished in a jail cell. Indeed, the Nobel Committee apparently judged it important to simply call attention to Liu’s (and the Chinese people’s, more generally) plight rather than to kowtow to Beijing’s demands.
One wonders whether fellow Nobel laureate Barack Obama feels that awarding the Nobel to Mr. Liu also “complicated” efforts to improve human rights in the People’s Republic.
