A Noble Nobel?

We know what he is against. But what is he for? After all, one certainly does not need to be an advocate of liberal democracy to be an opponent of the regime in China. And various other types of such opponent are decidedly more numerous and long-established in China even today, never mind in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square demonstrators sang The Internationale.

There are the Koumintang, and those to the right even of that. There are the Xinjiang Islamists, there are the people who want to restore life expectancy in Tibet to half its current level by bringing back theocratic feudalism (and expelling more than half of Tibet's population on ethnic grounds), and there a number of equally unpleasant separatist tendencies elsewhere, likewise historically illiterate, it being impossible to invade or annex oneself, China having been almost exactly where China is now for five thousand years.

Then there are the Trotskyists, and those Stalinists who are not Maoists. There are now, and up to a point there were even then, those who hold to the old, old Maoist faith against China’s transformation into the giant standing contradiction of the theory that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand. And many more besides.

All manner of people lauded and cultivated as anti-Soviet dissidents were also racist separatists, or Islamist separatists, or both, while others were advocates of precisely the gangster capitalism that they have gone on to act out, while yet others inhabited the sort of anti-industrial, anti-urban, anti-scientific dreamworld that easily tips over into anti-Semitism and other unpleasantries. Every one of these chickens has come home to roost.

We still lionise and indulge the people who prolonged apartheid by clinging uncritically to their Soviet paymaster right up to the bitter end, and we ignore the truly effective opposition to apartheid that came from the non-violent, non-Marxist, non-racial, pro-Commonwealth tradition of Alan Paton and Helen Suzman, figures who suffered far more than those who were no doubt painfully, but nevertheless comfortably, exiled in London, or Moscow, or wherever.

So, while we know what he is against, what is he for? I only ask.