China’s jailed Nobel laureate dies in hospital
CHINA’S Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo died yesterday while still in custody following a battle with cancer, authorities said, after officials ignored international pleas to let him spend his final days free and abroad.
The prominent democracy advocate died aged 61, more than a month after he was transferred from prison to a heavily guarded hospital to be treated for late-stage liver cancer.
The legal bureau in the northeastern city of Shenyang said on its website Liu died three days after going into intensive care at the First Hospital of China Medical University.
The writer’s death silenced a government critic who had been a thorn in the side of the authorities for decades and became a symbol of Beijing’s growing crackdown on dissenting voices.
Liu’s death puts China in dubious company as he became the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who passed away in a hospital while held by the Nazis in 1938.
International human rights groups, Western governments and Chinese activists had urged authorities to free Liu and grant his final wish to be treated abroad.
Germany and the US had offered to treat Liu, but officials insisted he was receiving treatment from top Chinese doctors since being granted medical parole following his diagnosis in late May.
The foreign ministry repeatedly said other countries should not interfere in China’s internal affairs.
Early this month, Liu’s Chinese doctors said he was not healthy enough to be sent abroad for treatment, a position that was contradicted by US and German medical experts invited by the hospital to examine Liu’s condition.
The physicians offered to treat the laureate at hospitals in their home countries. Human rights groups decried the way the government treated Liu, accusing authorities of manipulating information about his health and refusing to let him leave because they were afraid he would denounce China’s one-party Communist regime.
Liu was arrested in 2008 after co-writing Charter 08, a bold petition for protection of basic human rights and reform of China’s political system.
He was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December 2009 for subversion. At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 2010, he was represented by an empty chair.
His wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest in 2010, but was allowed to see him at the hospital.