The Nobel Prize-winner who terrified China’s leaders

China has earned a grim place in history with its mistreatment of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, said The Globe and Mail (Toronto). The 61-year-old Chinese thinker and dissident died of liver cancer earlier this month while under guard in hospital: officials had refused to let him go abroad for treatment. The only other Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in custody was the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who was imprisoned by the Nazis. Liu had spent much of the previous 30 years in jail. He was first detained in 1989, for his part in the Tiananmen Square protests. His final stretch began in 2009, when he was locked up for co-authoring the pro-democracy manifesto Charter 08, which called for “such dangerous innovations” as free speech, freedom of religion, and an independent judiciary. The regime remains so afraid of Liu’s ideas that it had his body cremated and the ashes scattered at sea, depriving his supporters of a memorial site.

Enough with the deification of this convicted criminal, said the Global Times (Beijing). The Western media has heaped laurels on Liu, likening him to Nelson Mandela. In fact, he was a “paranoid, naive and arrogant” political agitator. During the decades that he was attempting to stir up trouble here, China was making great strides economically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. “Western forces and dissidents like Liu are disrupters of China’s steady progress.” No surprise that China’s state-controlled press should seek to denigrate Liu, said the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong). Beijing saw him as a direct threat to one-party rule. The kind of open debate Liu advocated has been the “persistent fear of Chinese leaders through the centuries”: in Beijing’s eyes, it could only “lead to disputes and then chaos”. But for China and the world, Liu’s death is actually “a tragedy”.

China’s Communist Party cadres are “not uniformly heartless”, said Jamil Anderlini in the FT. “I know several who think Liu’s treatment was disgraceful.” But they also see it as a necessary evil to avoid the civil strife that would result if his ideas were allowed to spread unchecked. Yet the party is storing up trouble for itself. “By rejecting gradual top-down democratisation, it is increasing the likelihood of an eventual bottom-up rejection of authoritarian rule.” No doubt when that time comes, demonstrators will carry banners featuring Liu’s image and the words he wrote, but was forbidden to read, at his 2009 trial: “There is no force that can put an end to the human quest for freedom.”