The Nobel committee did have one foreign critic, self-styled Asian Values guru Kishore Mahbubani, Dean of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Former diplomat Mahbubani complained that the prize reflected western views and that the Nobel committee awarded the prize to Asians who were dissidents. This was 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.Mahbubani claims that the prize should have gone to Asians like Deng Xiaoping for bringing so many out of poverty. He apparently prefers to forget the Tiananmen massacre and the fact that Deng is dead. Surely a better choice would have been Zhao Ziyang, the man who initiated China's economic reform when he was in charge of Sichuan, opposed the Tiananmen violence – and paid the price of spending his remaining years under house arrest. Full story
