Dharamsala, November 10 – In a move that could further strain ties between China and Japan, China has asked Japan not to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honouring Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo next month, Japan’s foreign minister said, according to media reports.
“It is true that there were requests through diplomatic routes in Tokyo and Norway that no one related to the Japanese government attend the Nobel Peace Prize Award ceremony,” Japanese Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara told parliament on Tuesday.
Beijing has already sent official letters to a number of European embassies in the Norwegian capital asking them not to attend the December 10 ceremony, two Western diplomats said last week.
China on Tuesday stopped Mo Shaoping, lawyer of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner, as he was trying to board a plane for London to attend a conference.
“What reason did they give? It was that our leaving the country would harm national security,” Reuters quoted Mo as saying.
The lawyer insisted he had no intention of traveling to the Norwegian capital.
“The International Bar Association invited me to speak at their conference three months ago and it had absolutely no connection with the peace prize,” he said.
Relations between Asia’s two largest economies soured in September after Japanese coast guards detained the captain of a boat carrying Chinese fishermen in the East China Sea that both sides claim as theirs.
“We aim to reach a sound decision regarding the attendance of our ambassador to Norway.”
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has seen support for his government tumble due in part to voter dissatisfaction with its handling of the territorial dispute, said he had asked his Foregn Minister to examine the issue of attending the ceremony.
Kan reiterated, however, that Liu should be released.
Exiled Tibetan leader His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who is currently touring Japan in a visit that will likely coincide with Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s attendance at a regional summit in Japan this week, reiterated his support for Liu on Saturday. “In his movement, (Liu is) not toppling the government, but trying to bring more openness, more accountability,” the Dalai Lama told reporters in Narita, near Tokyo.
“China remaining a secretive society is very very harmful for making significant contributions regarding world affairs … China, sooner or later, you have to open, it’s the only way,” he said.
Liu is serving 11 years imprisonment for “incitement to subvert state power,” and in connection with six essays he wrote and also his role in initiating Charter 08, a widely circulated petition calling for more civil rights in China and an end to the Communist Party’s political dominance.
The Charter 08 was launched online on December 9, 2008, the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and draws its inspiration from the “Charter 77” document demanding political reform in Czechoslovakia in January 1977.
