On October 8, 2010, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo. It was the year of the Internet’s candidacy, that is of Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Tim Berners Lee, and at one point they seemed to be favorites, but the Oslo committee made the best choice.
Liu Xiaobo was a writer, a professor, a civil rights activist who, after the riots in Tiananmen Square, was persecuted by the Chinese regime to death. When the announcement came from Oslo he was in prison; and there he also remained on December 10 of the same year when the Nobel Prize was symbolically delivered to an empty chair. That day, actress Liv Ullmann read a poignant statement from her, dating back to a year earlier. I have no enemies, was the title. But if we talk about it here, in an Innovation Almanac, it’s not just because Liu Xiaobo was a human rights giant (he died in 2017).
But for a discovery I made by chance, on the morning of October 8, 2010, when I was trying to figure out who was the Chinese activist who had beaten the Internet in the race for the Nobel Peace Prize. That morning I found one of his writings, one of the last. It was dated April 28, 2009, when it was published in The Times Online. In that text there was an expression that struck me: the Internet is a gift from God to China. Internet a gift from God. Nobody had ever said this before. And a few years later, on January 23, 2014, it was Pope Francis who reused it: it was World Communication Day and the pontiff clearly said that the Internet was not a network of wires but of people and concluded: “The Internet can offer greater opportunities for encounter and solidarity among all, and this is a good thing, it is a gift from God”.
Other years have passed and this idea of the gift of God seems to have been disavowed by all the negative debate in the West on the wrong uses of the Internet; and in China, by the fact that the Internet has become a tool of mass surveillance and oppression. But it is worth rereading what Liu Xiaobo wrote in 2009 when he used that powerful expression.
“In October 1999 I returned home after three years in prison. There was a computer waiting for me and friends urged me to use it. At first I could not abandon my fountain pen, Then I became familiar with it and today I cannot do without it. My gratitude to the Internet is immense: I say this as a person who writes for a living and as a citizen who participated in the 1989 movement for democracy. Internert has made it easier to get information, connect with the world and send articles overseas. It is a channel that Chinese dictators cannot completely censor, it allows people to communicate and offers a platform for spontaneous organization. The accessibility, ease of use and freedom of the Internet have pushed public opinion to become very lively in recent years. The government can control the press and television but it cannot control the Internet. The scandals censored by the traditional media come to the attention of citizens thanks to the Internet. And the government is forced for the first time to explain, officials to apologize publicly. The Internet has the extraordinary ability to create stars. It can make actors and singers famous, but also heroes who fight for the truth to be affirmed. Chinese Christians say that even if their compatriots do not have a strong religious sense, God will not abandon them while they suffer. The Internet is God’s gift to China. It is the best tool to allow the Chinese people to defeat slavery and fight for freedom ”.
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