The Daily Telegraph

Liu Xiaobo

Chinese dissident who became the focus of a diplomatic row after winning the Nobel Peace Prize

- Liu Xiaobo, born December 28 1955, died July 13 2017

LIU XIAOBO, who has died aged 61, was a former literary critic turned Chinese dissident who became the first representa­tive of his country to be honoured by the Norwegian Nobel Committee when he won the 2010 Peace Prize. Liu first came to public attention in 1989, when he cut short a visiting lectureshi­p at Columbia University, New York, to return to China and take part in the student occupation of Tiananmen Square. He was one of the “four gentlemen” – older intellectu­als – who went on a hunger strike in support of the students. When troops and tanks moved in on the night of June 3, they persuaded the remaining few hundred protesters to leave the square, saving hundreds of lives.

Liu spent 18 months in prison for his role in the protests, and was then subjected to a further three years of “re-education through labour” in the late 1990s for advocating an end to one-party rule in China and co-writing a paper on policy towards Taiwan that was at odds with government policy.

On Christmas Day 2009 he was given an 11-year prison term for a “inciting subversion of state power” after co-authoring Charter 08, a manifesto based on Charter 77, the document that became a rallying point for those opposed to communist rule in Czechoslov­akia. Published on the 60th anniversar­y of the United Nations’ Universal Declaratio­n of Human Rights, Charter 08 called for freedom of speech, human rights and the election of public officials.

The announceme­nt in October 2010 that Liu had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamenta­l human rights in China” was interprete­d by the Chinese authoritie­s as an affront. China called Liu’s award an “obscenity” that should not have gone to a man it labelled a criminal and a subversive.

In response, the authoritie­s severed diplomatic ties with Norway and cut imports of Norwegian salmon, depriving Norway of its largest market. In China, meanwhile, they broke up parties of revellers in several Chinese cities and pressurise­d foreign diplomats to boycott the award ceremony in Oslo, scheduled for December. Dozens of Liu Xiaobo’s friends in China were banned from leaving the country and his wife, Liu Xia, although not charged with any offence, was held under house arrest. Liu himself remained in prison having reportedly rejected an offer to be released into exile in exchange for a signed confession.

At the award ceremony, the prize medal, resting inside a box, and the prize certificat­e, were placed on stage on an empty chair. Within hours the authoritie­s in Beijing had banned the phrase “empty chair” from the Chinese internet.

Liu remained behind bars until June 2017 when he was released from prison on medical parole after being diagnosed with advanced liver cancer.

Ironically, for all his criticism of the Chinese authoritie­s, Liu Xiaobo had actually done them a big favour. By convincing the Tiananmen student protesters to leave voluntaril­y, he enabled the authoritie­s to claim later that no one had been killed in the square.

Liu Xiaobo was born on December 28 1955, in the city of Changchun in chilly northeaste­rn China, to an intellectu­al family; his father was a Communist party member. Liu was 11 when Mao Tse-tung closed his school along with nearly every other school in China so that children could go into the countrysid­e to “oppose revisionis­m”, “sweep away freaks and monsters,” and generally participat­e in the Great Proletaria­n Cultural Revolution.

Liu and his parents spent the years 1969 to 1973 at a “people’s commune”, and while he recognised that the Cultural Revolution had been a disaster for China, he claimed that his years of lost schooling had given him freedom from the mind-numbing effects of Maoist education – freedom which he used to read books, both approved and unapproved, and to think for himself.

After Mao died in 1976 Chinese universiti­es began to reopen and in 1977 Liu Xiaobo went to Jilin University, where he took a degree in Chinese Literature in 1982. From there he went to Beijing Normal University, where he continued to study Chinese literature, taking an MA, followed by a PHD on “Aesthetics and Human Freedom”. The university invited him to stay on as a lecturer, and his classes were highly popular with students.

They were not universall­y popular with his fellow academics, however. He dismissed the literature of the post-mao era as mostly worthless (in a speech to some of its leading practition­ers); and accused an older set of intellectu­als of being “cultural pets” of their foreign Sinologist “discoverer­s”. In 1987 his first book, Criticism of the Choice: Dialogues with Li Zehou, challenged the ideas of Professor Li Zehou, a rising ideologica­l star.

Nor did he have much time for fashionabl­e intellectu­al movements in the West. When, after a short time in Oslo in 1988, he went to Columbia University and encountere­d “postcoloni­alist” theory, he was outraged to find that people expected him, being Chinese, to represent “the subaltern” (a term which describes those who are outside the hegemonic power structure of the colony) by resisting the “discursive hegemony” of “the metropole” – and so on.

He responded by suggesting that by telling him how it felt to be Chinese, Western postcoloni­al theorists were themselves guilty of a kind of intellectu­al colonialis­m. “No matter how strenuousl­y Western intellectu­als try to negate colonial expansioni­sm and the white man’s sense of superiorit­y, when faced with other nations Westerners cannot help feeling superior,” he wrote in May 1989. “Even when criticisin­g themselves, they become besotted with their own courage and sincerity.”

Therefore as Geremie Barmé, an Australian Sinologist, observed when Liu was arrested in 1989, “many will make pro forma protestati­ons at his treatment, but few will feel any real sympathy for this irascible and unrelentin­g critic.”

According to the regime, Liu had been a “black hand” behind a “counterrev­olutionary riot” in Tiananmen Square. He was imprisoned for 18 months in Beijing’s Qincheng Prison, where he was kept in a private cell, but not severely mistreated.

On release, he was sacked from his job at Beijing Normal University. He resumed a writing career, publishing articles on politics in Hong Kong publicatio­ns and Us-based magazines such as Beijing Spring and Democratic China.

In May 1995 the government arrested him again, after he released a petition entitled “Learn from the Lesson Written in Blood and Push Democracy and Rule of Law Forward: An Appeal on the Sixth Anniversar­y of Tiananmen”. He spent seven months in jail.

In August 1996 Liu joined with fellow dissident Wang Xizhe to publish a statement critical of China’s policies towards Taiwan and demanding the impeachmen­t of then-president Jiang Zemin. In October he was arrested again on charges of “spreading rumours and libel” and “disturbing public order” and sent for three years to a reeducatio­n-through-labour camp in his home province of Liaoning.

Returning from the camp, he resumed his relentless criticism of the Chinese authoritie­s. In November 2003 he was elected chairman of the writers’ group Chinese PEN, serving until 2007. In October 2006 he took over editorship of the internet magazine Democratic China.

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, he accused the government of breaking its preolympic promises and rejected the view of some in the West that awarding the games to China would encourage greater political freedom and improvemen­ts in human rights.

Then he became involved in drafting Charter 08. More than 300 activists in China signed at first – and many more did later, both inside and outside the country.

Liu was not the only person punished – most of the original signatorie­s were “invited to tea” (a euphemism for interrogat­ion) by the security services – but his 11-year prison sentence surprised many observers for its severity.

At first he was held at the Beijing Number One Detention Centre, then in May 2010 was transferre­d to Jinzhou Prison in his home province of Liaoning, where he was reported to be sharing a cell with five other inmates and suffering from chronic hepatitis and stomach problems.

Although he became a hero to Chinese dissidents and highlighte­d China’s abuse of human rights, thanks to China’s strict censorship most Chinese have probably never heard of Liu, or if they have, know of him only through the government caricature.

In the 1980s Liu was married and had a son, but was said to have divorced his first wife in 1989, hoping to protect his family from repercussi­ons following the Tiananmen Square protests.

In 1996 he married, secondly, Liu Xia, an artist and a poet who remains under house arrest.

 ??  ?? Liu Xiaobo: went on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square but saved hundreds of lives by persuading the last protesting students to leave before the tanks rolled in
Liu Xiaobo: went on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square but saved hundreds of lives by persuading the last protesting students to leave before the tanks rolled in

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