Struck by liver cancer, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo dies
BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was being treated for late-stage liver cancer, died on Thursday of multiple organ failure, the government said, having not been allowed to leave the country for treatment as he wished.
Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for “inciting subversion of state power” after he helped write a petition known as “Charter 08” calling for sweeping political reforms.
He was recently moved from jail to a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang to be treated.
The Shenyang Bureau of Justice said in a brief statement on its website that Liu had suffered multiple organ failure and efforts to save him had failed.
Despite being given multiple forms of treatment, his illness had continued to worsen, it added.
Rights groups and Western governments had urged China to allow Liu and his wife, Liu Xia, to leave the country to be treated abroad, as Liu had said he wanted.
But the government had warned repeatedly against interference and said Liu was being treated by renowned Chinese cancer experts.
Beijing did allow two foreign doctors, from the United States and Germany, to visit Liu on Saturday and they later said they considered it was safe for him to be moved overseas.
The doctors said Liu and his family had requested that the remainder of his care be provided in Germany or the United States.
The Chinese government bears a heavy responsibility for Liu’s death, the leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize, said on Thursday.
“We find it deeply disturbing that Liu Xiaobo was not transferred to a facility where he could receive adequate medical treatment before he became terminally ill,” said Berit Reiss-Anderssen.
“The Chinese government bears a heavy responsibility for his premature death,” she told Reuters in an emailed statement.
Liu had been a thorn in Beijing’s side since 1989, when he helped negotiate a deal to allow protesters to leave Tiananmen Square before troops and tanks rolled in.
“Using the law to promote rights can only have a limited impact when the judiciary is not independent,” Liu told Reuters in 2006, when he was under house arrest, in comments typical of those that have angered the government.
Charter 08 alarmed the Communist Party more for the 350 signatures – dignitaries from all walks of life – he collected than its content, political analysts said.
The manifesto was modeled on the Charter 77 petition that became a rallying call for the human rights movement in communist Czechoslovakia in 1977.
Liu had ceaselessly campaigned for the rights of the Tiananmen Mothers of victims of the crackdown.
He was much better known abroad than at home due to a government ban on Internet and state media discussion of the Tiananmen protests, and of him, aside from the odd editorial condemning him.
Liu was considered a moderate by fellow dissidents and international rights groups. But they say the Communist Party is insecure and paranoid, fearing anyone or anything that it perceives as a threat to stability.
In 2003, Liu wrote an essay, calling for the embalmed corpse of chairman Mao Zedong to be removed from a mausoleum on Tiananmen Square. Mao is still a demigod to many in China.
Over the years, Liu won numerous human rights and free speech awards from organizations including Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Hong Kong’s Human Rights Press Awards.
His books have been published in Germany, Japan, the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
A hero to many in the West, Liu was branded a traitor by Chinese nationalists.
He had come under fire from nationalists for his comments in a 2006 interview with Hong Kong’s now-defunct Open magazine in which he said China would “need 300 years of colonization for it to become like what Hong Kong is today.”