Beijing:
With just a day until the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, the usual whirl of speculation over the winner is in full force, with many human rights advocates contending that an imprisoned Chinese dissident, Liu Xiaobo, has emerged as the favourite.
If selected, Liu, a former literature professor who has spent the last 20 years cycling in and out of Chinese jails for championing democratic reform, would be the first Chinese citizen to win the prize. The prospect has clearly alarmed Beijing, so much so that the Nobel Institute's director said last week that a senior Chinese official had warned him such a decision would "pull the wrong strings in relations between Norway and China."
But the idea of selecting Liu has also stirred objections from a somewhat more surprising contingent: a group of fellow activists.
In recent days, a group of 14 overseas Chinese dissidents, many of them hard-boiled exiles dedicated to overthrowing the Communist Party, have been calling on the Nobel committee to deny the prize to Liu, whom they say would make an "unsuitable" laureate.
In a letter, the signatories accused Liu, below, of maligning fellow activists, abandoning persecuted members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and going soft on China's leaders.
"His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading and influential," they wrote.
The letter and calls from other detractors have infuriated many rights advocates, inside and outside of China, who say the attack distorts Liu's record as a longtime proponent of peaceful change.
Supporters, among them Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president and dissident, say that Liu has been a pragmatic advocate since 1989, when he helped persuade the students occupying Tiananmen Square to leave just as army tanks were preparing to move in.
More recently, Liu was given an 11-year prison sentence last Christmas for his role in shaping a manifesto, known as Charter '08, that called for popular elections and an end to the Communist Party's unchallenged grip on power.
"Liu Xiaobo has always worked to advance the peaceful democratic transformation of Chinese society, and to avoid the violence, rebellion and bloodshed of the past," said Zhang Zuhua, a former high-ranking official in the Communist Party Youth League and a chief force behind Charter '08.
Cui Weiping, a social critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, called some of Liu's more radical opponents "highly irresponsible."
"Just the fact that he was sentenced to 11 years in prison is enough to answer those who question how critical he is of the government," said Ms. Cui, one of 10,000 Chinese who signed Charter '08 before government censors effectively pulled it from the Internet.
Whatever the merits of the anti-Liu Xiaobo camp, their very public sentiments provide a window into the state of the overseas Chinese dissidents, a fractured group beset by squabbling and competing claims of anti-authoritarian righteousness.
Many of its prominent members fled to the United States and Europe after the failed democracy campaign of 1989 and have tried, with limited success, to build a broad-based movement against the Chinese government.
Even if they have differences over strategy, many intellectuals and activists inside China describe Liu as a dynamic thinker who appealed both to members of the party and many of its die-hard opponents.
Bao Pu, a Chinese book publisher whose father spent seven years in prison for supporting negotiations with protesters as a top associate to the Communist Party chief, Zhao Ziyang, said the lack of unity among dissidents living outside China was dispiriting.
"All exile movements are fractured, but the community has reduced themselves into oblivion," said Bao, who lives in Hong Kong. "We have a long way to go."
Liu's critics are unbowed by suggestions that their campaign against him may play into the Chinese government's efforts to discredit his qualifications as a Nobel laureate.
Yi Xu, a linguistics professor in London who translated the anti-Liu letter into English, said he had no reservations about the effort to deny Liu the award.
"I don't believe the Nobel Prize is so important that once we have one, China will be entirely changed," Yi said. "Look, the Dalai Lama won and China didn't change."