Criminal Nation

Liu Xiaobo’s Fate Reflects Fading Pressure on China Over Human Rights
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer while in state custody, was mourned in Hong Kong on Thursday.

BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, catapulted to fame in 1989, when the Communist Party’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square created an international uproar.
Now, nearly three decades later, Mr. Liu has died of cancer while in state custody, a bedridden and silenced example of Western governments’ reluctanc to push back against China’s resurgent authoritarians.
Mr. Liu’s fate reflects how human rights issues have receded in Western diplomacy with China. 

And it shows how Chinese Communist Party leaders, running a strong state bristling with security powers, can disdain foreign pleas, even for a man near death.
“It’s certainly become more difficult,” said John Kamm, an American businessman and founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, who for decades has quietly lobbied China to free or improve the treatment of political prisoners. 

He said his attempts to win approval for Mr. Liu to leave China for treatment, as Mr. Liu and his wife requested, got nowhere.

“I tried my best. I did everything I could,” he said before Mr. Liu died. 

“Things are pretty difficult right now. It’s hard for me to get the kinds of responses I need.”
These days, major Western governments struggle to get responses from China about prisoners and conditions in Tibet and Xinjiang. 

Western politicians have become less willing to dwell on human rights problems when other issues fill their meetings with Chinese officials.
The United States, Germany and other Western governments did politely prod China to release Mr. Liu from prison and let him go abroad for treatment of his liver cancer, accompanied by his wife, Liu Xia.
A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, issued a statement that “she "would like" a signal of humanity for Liu Xiaobo and his family,” while Trump said nothing publicly about his case, leaving any comment to lower-ranking officials.
Merkel’s statement was a reflection of how the world order has shifted, with the United States under Trump departing from its traditional role as the most vocal advocate of human rights.
Still, Mr. Kamm and others said the shift came many years before Trump entered the White House in January.
“I do not think that the world prior to Jan. 20, 2017, was one rife with robust, consistent diplomatic intervention on behalf of peaceful, independent civil society in China,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. 

“Taken together, particularly over the 2000s and into the 2010s, you have got progressively less interest on foreign governments in really fighting as hard as they ought to have for systemic change in China.”
In Mr. Liu’s case, Chinese officials have dismissed calls by Western governments as meddling.
Beijing issued video and still images of Mr. Liu in a hospital in northeast China, as if to say: We don’t need lectures about how to take care of our prisoners. 

Beijing ignored advice from a German and an American cancer specialist who visited Mr. Liu, at its invitation, and who said he was well enough to travel for treatment.

A torch parade in honor of Mr. Liu in Oslo on Dec. 10, 2010, the day of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. He was imprisoned by then, and his absence at the event was signified by an empty chair.

“If Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was able to win some freedom for half a month — or two weeks or four days or half a day — and could speak out after eight years of silence, that would be intolerable for the government,” said Wu Yangwei, a writer who uses the pen name Ye Du and is a friend of Mr. Liu’s. 

“Ten years ago, it might have been different, there might have been a little hope. But the political atmosphere has shifted.”
Lobbying China over its harsh prison sentences for dissent and its other shackles on citizens’ rights has never been an amicable conversation; progress has long been spotty. 

But Mr. Liu’s case reflects how Western pressure on China’s human rights problems has decreased, while Chinese leaders have become adept at using economic and diplomatic lures and threats to thwart it.
The shifting geopolitics around China and the human rights issue also appeared to be reflected in the disjointed reaction to Mr. Liu’s death from top officials of the United Nations, where China has moved to raise its prominence by increasing financial support and furnishing peacekeeping troops.
The organization’s high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, implicitly criticized China in a condolence statement by describing Mr. Liu as a champion who had been “jailed for standing up for his beliefs.”
But António Guterres, the secretary-general, was more circumspect. 

Asked for a comment, his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said Mr. Guterres was “deeply saddened,” but he did not address the circumstances of Mr. Liu’s death or the restrictions on Mr. Liu’s wife. 

“I don’t have anything further to say at this point,” Mr. Dujarric told reporters on Thursday.
In 1989, Mr. Liu was detained for nearly two years after the Chinese government called him a “black hand” who supported the student demonstrators who crowded Tiananmen Square before an armed crackdown. 

Back then, Communist Party leaders railed against Western-inspired subversion and imprisoned leading participants in the protests who hadn’t fled.
Yet China was more vulnerable to pressure, and sometimes made concessions.
It was the world’s ninth-biggest economy in 1989, and needed expertise, investment and technology from advanced countries to begin growing again. 

It did not have a wide circle of countries that would help it thwart Western sanctions and isolation. 

And the party general secretary and later president, Jiang Zemin, appeared eager for affirmation and even friendship from Bill Clinton and other Western leaders.
But since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its economy took off, leaders in Beijing have become increasingly set against making concessions on human rights cases. 

That posture has reflected China’s economic and diplomatic strength. 

But it has also reflected leaders’ longstanding fears that, even with robust growth, broad public support and a powerful police apparatus, they are vulnerable to political foes.
From 1989 to 2008, when Mr. Liu helped start Charter 08, a petition for democratic change, he and other dissenters still hoped that the Communist Party could be coaxed to give citizens greater freedoms, pushed by civic mobilization in China and encouraged by Western governments and groups. 

Even if there were occasional setbacks, many believed expanding market forces and a growing middle class would shape history in their direction and would make the government ultimately accept political liberalization.
“China’s economy is growing quickly, and this economic development is supportive of a political transformation,” Mr. Liu said in an interview in 2004. 

“China’s international environment has seen big changes, and there’d be very strong international support for its political reforms.”
But Mr. Liu was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009. 

China’s leader since 2012, Xi Jinping, has overseen an even more comprehensive crackdown on dissent, rights lawyers and independent civil groups. 

Mr. Liu’s supporters have not abandoned their hopes, but they see that the government has gained confidence against critics.
Mr. Kamm of the Dui Hua Foundation said he would continue to present lists of political prisoners to Chinese officials. 

Now he also plans to point out how the government’s treatment of Mr. Liu hurt China’s image, he said.
“I think they have taken an incredible hit on this,” Mr. Kamm said. 

“There are five prisoners on my list tonight that I will use this to try to get out of prison into their loved ones’ arms.”