Death of a dissident
China takes its place on the global stage easily, as it did recently at the G-20 summit in Hamburg, and as it did a few months back when President Xi Jinping was a guest of President Trump at his glamorous Florida country club — discussing markets and trade and global security and, well, sometimes we
almost forget. . . We almost forget that in China there are people whose only crime is a hunger for democracy, left to rot in prison because they dared to promote ... ideas. People like Liu Xiaobo, China’s most prominent dissident, who died Thursday in China of liver cancer. Of course the real cause of death was a regime deathly afraid of losing its grip on power — deathly afraid of Liu’s words.
After imprisoning him for nearly a decade the government in its benevolence granted Liu a medical parole. It lasted 17 days. He was released to a hospital only after it was too late — after he had been refused permission to seek treatment abroad for terminal liver cancer.
A literary academic who had lectured abroad, Liu returned to China in 1989 from a stay in the United States to support the uprising in Tianenmen Square. It was there that he earned the mark on his back; he was imprisoned for nearly two years for his actions during the protest. But over the next three decades he was relentless in his advocacy for freedom for the Chinese people, for an end to single-party rule, and it landed him in prison repeatedly.
It was in prison that Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, an acknowledgment that, for Chinese democracy activists, a charge by the government of “inciting subversion of state power” is a hard-earned badge of honor.
Those are Liu’s words, written in a “final statement” before he was imprisoned in 2009. We ought to be grateful that similar expressions are memorialized in our Constitution. Liu’s death is a reminder that in some places — fewer today than before but still, too many places — a willingness to speak out can be tantamount to a death sentence.
“Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth.”