Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo dies in custody
Liver cancer claims life of Chinese laureate
BEIJING: China’s first Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was being treated for late-stage liver cancer, died yesterday of multiple organ failure, the government said, having not been allowed to leave the country for treatment as he wished.
Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for “inciting subversion” after he helped pen the “Charter 08” petition calling for political reform.
BEIJING: Nobel Peace Prize l aureate Liu Xiaobo, China’s most prominent political prisoner, died last night at a hospital in the country’s northeast, officials said. He was 61.
Liu was diagnosed in prison in May with advanced liver cancer. Liu’s supporters and foreign governments had urged China to allow him to receive treatment abroad, but Chinese authorities insisted he was receiving the best care possible for a disease that had spread throughout his body.
Liu was imprisoned for the first time in connection with the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while serving his fourth and final prison sentence, for inciting subversion by advocating sweeping political reforms and greater human rights in China.
“What I demanded of myself was this: whether as a person or as a writer, I would lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity,” Liu wrote in “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement,” which he had hoped to read out in court when being sentenced in 2009. He was not permitted to do so and received an 11-year prison sentence.
He came to prominence following the 1989 pro-democracy Tiananmen Square protests, which he called the “major turning point” in his life. Liu had been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York but returned early to China in May 1989 to join the movement that was sweeping the country and which the Communist Party regarded as a grave challenge to its authority.
When the Chinese government sent troops and tanks into Beijing to quash the protests on the night of June 3-4, Liu persuaded some students to leave the square rather than face down the army. The military crackdown killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people and heralded a more repressive era.
Liu became one of hundreds of Chinese imprisoned for crimes linked to the protests. It was the first of four jail terms.
His final sentence was for co-authoring “Charter 08,” a document circulated in 2008 that called for more freedom of expression, human rights and an independent judiciary in China. Although Liu wasn’t the initiator, he was a prominent force behind it and already well known to the authorities.
In 2010, while Liu was serving his sentence in a prison in a small city in China’s northeast, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, with the Norwegian-based committee citing Liu’s “long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”.
The award enraged China’s government, which also punished Norway, even though its government has no say over the independent Nobel panel’s decisions. China suspended a bilateral trade deal and restricted imports of Norwegian salmon. Relations only resumed this year.
Liu was born on Dec 28, 1955, in the northeastern city of Changchun, the son of a language and literature professor who was a committed party member. Liu studied Chinese literature there and later moved to the capital.
After spending nearly two years in detention following the Tiananmen crackdown, Liu was detained for the second time in 1995 after drafting a plea for political reform. Later that year, he was detained a third time after co-drafting “Opinion on Some Major Issues Concerning our Country Today”. That resulted in a threeyear sentence.
He is survived by his wife and his son from his first marriage.