Nobel-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo dies in state custody
Democracy activist, 61, had cancer, was political prisoner.
Liu Xiaobo, the renegade Chinese intellectual who kept vigil at Tiananmen Square in 1989 to protect protesters from encroaching soldiers, promoted a pro-democracy charter that brought him a lengthy prison sentence and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while locked away, died under guard in a hospital Thursday. He was 61.
The Bureau of Justice in Shenyang, the city in northeastern China where Liu was being treated for liver cancer, announced his death on its website.
The Chinese government revealed he had cancer in late June, only after the illness was virtually beyond treatment. Officially, Liu gained medical parole. But even as he faced death, he was kept silenced in the First Hospital of China Medical University, still a captive of the authoritarian controls he had fought for decades.
He was the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist and foe of Nazism who won the prize in 1935 and died under guard in 1938.
“After multiple treatments, Liu Xiaobo’s condition continued to deteriorate,” the Shenyang Bureau of Justice said in a statement. “On July 10, he entered a state of rescue and intensive care, and on July 13, he died due to multiple organ failure after attempts to save him failed.”
The police in China have kept Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest and smothering surveillance.
Liu’s illness elicited a deluge of sympathy from officials, friends, Chinese rights activists and international groups, who saw him as a fearless advocate of peaceful democratic change.
Liu was arrested most recently in 2008, after he helped initiate Charter 08, a bold petition calling for democracy, the rule of law and an end to censorship. A year later, a court in Beijing tried and convicted Liu on a charge of inciting subversion. Liu responded to his trial with a warning about China’s future.
“Hatred can rot a person’s wisdom and conscience,” Liu said. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation and inflame brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”