CHINESE NOBEL LAUREATE’S WIDOW LIU XIA ‘READY TO DIE’

BEIJING : The widow of Chinese Noble Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has said that she was willing to die in protest against authorities holding her in house arrest.

Liu Xia has been kept under house arrest since 2010 when her husband, Liu, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Though Liu has never been charged with any crime, her movements have been severely restricted, rights activists say.

Activists say the 57-year-old Liu, a poet and artist, suffers from deep depression following years of living under surveillance and needs urgent treatment and counselling. The government says she has the freedom to go anywhere she chooses but has remained home to cope with her husband’s death.

Liu Xiaobo, China’s most wellknown political dissident, died last July days after he was abruptly released from detention following revelation that he was suffering from terminal liver cancer. Liu, a key leader of the prodemocracy Tiananmen movement, which left an unknown number of Chinese, mostly students, dead was repeatedly jailed through his life. He wasn’t allowed to receive the prize and Beijing has harshly cricticised the granting of the prize to him, calling it interference in the country’s internal affairs.

Furious that Liu had been given the prize, China all but downgraded diplomatic ties with Norway. Earlier this week, Liu’s longtime friend, Liao Yiwu, a Chinese author based in Berlin, managed to speak to her over phone from Berlin. “Now, I’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home. Xiaobo is gone, and there’s nothing in the world for me now. It’s easier to die than live. Using death to defy could not be any simpler for me,” Liu told Liao.