Liu Xia: widow of Nobel laureate arrives in Berlin after eight years under house arrest

By Lily Kuo in Beijing Philip Oltermann in Berlin

Liu Xia smiles as she arrives at Helsinki airport on her way to Berlin.

Liu Xia, the widow of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, has arrived in Berlin, having left Beijing after almost eight years of living under house arrest and days before the anniversary of her husband’s death.
At 4.49pm (1539 BST) on Tuesday a Finnair flight carrying the poet and visual artist touched down at Tegel airport in the German capital, where Liu is reported to be seeking medical aid.
Human rights activists and friends of Liu had confirmed her departure from Beijing earlier on Tuesday. 

According to Human Rights Watch, the German government negotiated Liu’s release.
“Ever since her late husband received the Nobel peace prize while in a Chinese prison, Liu Xia was also unjustly detained. The German government deserves credit for its sustained pressure and hard work to gain Liu Xia’s release,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch.
Chinese authorities have insisted that Liu, who was not formally charged with any crime, has been free to move as she wishes, but her supporters say she has been under de facto house arrest.
Liu’s husband, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel prize in 2010 for his activism in China. 

He was jailed in 2009 for subversion, for his involvement in Charter 08, a manifesto calling for reforms. 

He died last year from liver cancer while serving an 11-year prison sentence.

People wait at Berlin airport to welcome Liu Xia. 

Patrick Poon, a China researcher for Amnesty International, said Liu had been allowed to leave China but her brother, Liu Hui, has had to remain in Beijing. 

He was convicted on fraud charges over a real-estate dispute in 2013, a case activists believed to be retribution against the family.
“It’s really wonderful that Liu Xia is finally able to leave China after suffering so much all these years,” Poon said. 

“However, it’s worrying that her brother, Liu Hui, is still kept in China. Liu Xia might not be able to speak much for fear of her brother’s safety.”

Liu Xiaobo, Nobel laureate and political prisoner, dies at 61 in Chinese custody.

Liu Hui posted on WeChat that his sister had flown to Europe to “start her new life”. 

He wrote: “I am grateful for people’s concern and assistance these past years.”
News of Liu’s release came one day after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, met with Li Keqiang, in Bremerhaven, inviting speculation about whether the development was part of a broader diplomatic deal. 

China and Germany have in recent months become the two main targets of a US president threatening trade tariffs on industrial imports.
“Is Liu Xia’s release all about softening up the German chancellor, as one of the most important representatives of the liberal industrial nations, in order to form a joint front against Trump?”, wrote the German weekly Die Zeit. 

“It’s an ugly suspicion, but one that can’t be dismissed out of hand.”

“Of course I am very happy that finally she’s gained her freedom and could leave China, but this does not mean China has made any improvements on human rights,” said Hu Ping, a US-based editor and friend of Liu’s.
Since last year, activists, diplomats and friends of Liu have been lobbying especially hard for her release. 

Hu said Liu was told in May she may be able to leave in July. 

Li’s visit to Germany and the signing of $23.6bn (£1.98bn) in trade deals do not seem to him to be a coincidence. 

“This might be why she was able to leave now,” he said.
Another friend of Liu’s told the German news agency Dpa that Germany had been consistently lobbying for the artist’s release over the last four years and kept contact with her via its Beijing embassy. 

“Merkel’s visit [to China] in May was apparently crucial for the release,” the anonymous friend is quoted as saying.
Friends and advocates had been calling for Liu’s release so she could seek medical help for severe depression. 

In May the Chinese writer Liao Yiwu released a recording of a phone call in which Liu described the mental torture of her situation. 

“If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home,” she said.
One of the last times she was seen in public was in July last year, when she scattered the ashes of her late husband at sea. 

While under house arrest, both of her parents died and she has been hospitalised at least twice for a heart condition.
Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said: “Hopefully she will be able to recuperate and receive much-needed medical care, but China is effectively holding her brother hostage so she may not speak out about her ordeal. The Chinese government has already shown its willingness to ruthlessly deploy collective punishment against their family.”

Liu Xia, Detained Widow of Nobel Peace Laureate, Leaves China

By Jane Perlez

Liu Xia, the widow of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo, at her home in Beijing in 2012.

BEIJING — The ailing widow of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died of cancer last year under police guard, left China for Europe on Tuesday after a high-level diplomatic campaign by the German government.
Diplomats said Liu Xia, Mr. Liu’s widow, flew to Helsinki, Finland, on Finnair. 

Her final destination is expected to be Germany.
Ms. Liu’s brother, Liu Hui, posted a message soon after the flight took off saying she had left for Europe “to start her new life.” 

He thanked all the supporters who had helped win her release from years of house arrest and strict police supervision.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany raised Ms. Liu’s case directly with China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Beijing earlier this year, a gesture that underscored her opposition to China’s treatment of Ms. Liu and her husband, European diplomats said.
Ms. Liu, 57, had consistently asked to leave China since the death of her husband last July, and had pleaded to be freed from detention.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry told reporters at a regular news briefing on Tuesday that Ms. Liu had been granted permission to leave for Germany for medical reasons.
Her release by the Chinese government came one day after a human rights dialogue between European Union and Chinese officials in Beijing ended Monday. 

An annual summit meeting between China and the European Union is scheduled for next week in Beijing.
Ms. Liu was placed under police surveillance in 2010, the same year her husband was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for what the committee called “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental rights in China.” 

He was not allowed to go to Oslo to receive the prize; Ms. Liu was also barred from attending the ceremony.
Mr. Liu, who was detained in 2008 after promoting a pro-democracy charter, died of liver cancer at age 61 while serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.”
Though he was being treated at a Chinese hospital, the government did not reveal his illness until it was in its late stages, and it would not allow Mr. Liu to travel abroad for medical care.
Ms. Liu has friends in Germany, and had asked the Chinese authorities to let her go there so she could receive treatment for depression.
In a recorded telephone call released in May by the Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu, who lives in exile in Germany, Ms. Liu said: “It would be easier to die than to live. Nothing would be simpler for me than dying in defiance.”
European diplomats had said over the last several months that China had left Ms. Liu in limbo as a show of resolve against Chinese human rights dissidents, despite aggressive efforts by Germany to press for her release.
After Ms. Merkel’s visit to Beijing in the spring, the Chinese authorities let the Europeans know that if Ms. Liu’s case was not publicized, her release would be possible, a European diplomat with knowledge of the case said.
In Hong Kong, at a makeshift statue of Mr. Liu that has become a fixture near the city’s Victoria Park, supporters of the couple expressed relief at Ms. Liu’s departure from China.
“What happened was tragic,” one passer-by, Katie Wong, said of the couple and their ordeal. 

“The both of them have helped China so much, I now wish for her to have a good, relaxing life with her newfound freedom.”

Oriental Barbarians

Hear China’s totalitarian cruelty in this widow’s sobs
The Washington Post

Liu Xia, center, holds a portrait of Liu Xiaobo during his funeral in 2017. 

FOR AN example of gratuitous cruelty in the service of 21st-century totalitarianism, listen to the sob-choked voice of China’s Liu Xia. 

The widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate and dissident Liu Xiaobo, Ms. Liu was recently recorded by a friend as she described her despair at being denied sanctuary in Germany and subjected to an endless continuation of the house arrest she has endured since 2010 — even though her husband died 10 months ago and she has never been charged with a crime.
“If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home,” Ms. Liu told her friend Liao Yiwu, a writer who lives in Germany, in an April 30 conversation. 

“It’s easier to die than live. Using death to defy could not be any simpler for me.” 

In an earlier call, an excerpt of which Mr. Liao posted online, “Liu Xia was crying non-stop,” he said.
China punished Liu Xiaobo for his advocacy of peaceful democratic change in China with multiple imprisonments, including an 11-year sentence he was serving when he died last July, at 61, of liver cancer. 

Ms. Liu, 57, a poet and artist, has, if anything, been treated even more unconscionably. 

She has been confined to her home for more than seven years without access to a phone or computer, even as the government portrays her as a free citizen. 

Meanwhile, her brother was prosecuted and sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges in 2013. 

Mr. Liao says Ms. Liu, not surprisingly, has suffered from clinical depression for several years.
The regime compounded the abuse by encouraging false hopes of freedom. 

Germany has offered Ms. Liu harbor and medical treatment, and Mr. Liao and other friends said security officials repeatedly promised Ms. Liu that she would be allowed to leave the country. 

First she was told to wait until after last fall’s Communist Party Congress; and then until after the meeting of Beijing’s rubber-stamp legislature in March, where Xi Jinping consolidated his position as dictator for life. 

She waited, while the Germans and her supporters obeyed the regime’s demands that they remain silent.
“On April 1, before Liu Xia’s 57th birthday, the German Ambassador called her to convey Chancellor Angela Merkel’s special respects, and invited her to play badminton in Berlin before long,” Mr. Liao recounted. 

Yet five weeks later, the siege on her home remains unbroken, prompting the despair she expressed in the phone calls. 

Some of her frustration seemed directed at the German Embassy, which, she said, “keep[s] on asking me to do these documents over and over again,” even though she lacked the means to do so.
The real fault lies with a regime that appears bent on crushing the spirit of a woman simply because her husband was recognized for what the Nobel committee called “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” 

That regime claims to offer a new model of greatness for other nations to emulate. 

But how great can it be if it so fears a 57-year-old poet who only wants to live out her life in peace?

Chinese Nobel laureate's widow ready to die in house arrest

Liu Xia, wife of the late human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, says she has nothing left to live for
By Lily Kuo

Protesters display a portrait of Liu Xiaobo and his detained wife Liu Xia. 

Liu Xia, the widow of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, has said she is ready to die in protest at being held under house arrest in China for more than seven years.
“Now, I’ve got nothing to be afraid of. If I can’t leave, I’ll die in my home. Xiaobo is gone, and there’s nothing in the world for me now. It’s easier to die than live. Using death to defy could not be any simpler for me,” she said, according to a phone call on 30 April, recorded by her friend and exiled writer, Liao Yiwu, and posted online.

'I live like a plant': Nobel winner's wife 'going mad' under Chinese detention.

Liu, 50, has been under house arrest since 2010 after her husband, Liu Xiaobo, was awarded the Nobel peace prize in absentia for his activism in China. 

Her husband, a civil rights campaigner, was jailed in 2009 for subversion and died last year from liver cancer while serving an 11-year prison sentence.
In an excerpt of the 16-minute phone call with Liao, Liu is heard crying and cursing. 

“I’m so fucking angry that I’m ready to die here … If I’m dead, it’ll all be done with.”
At one point, Liu cries for several minutes. 

In the recording, Liao plays the song Dona, Dona, from a Yiddish song released during the second world war about a calf being led to slaughter.
“Please allow me to use Liu Xia’s sobbing as its new lyrics,” Liao wrote. 

“Dona, Dona, give her freedom. Dona, Dona, please cry out loudly for her.”
Advocates have repeatedly called for Liu’s release. 

A former civil servant and a poet, she has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. 

Chinese authorities insist she “enjoys all freedoms in accordance with the law”, but her movements have been severely restricted and she lives under constant surveillance.
During this time both of Liu’s parents died and she has been taken to hospital at least twice for a heart condition. 

According to the rights activists, Liu has told her lawyer about having severe depression.
After her husband’s death, Liu’s supporters hoped she would be allowed to leave the country.
“First they told her to wait until the party congress was over; next they told her to wait until the conclusion of the ‘Two Sessions’ in Beijing in March of this year,” Liao wrote in his post on the US-based human rights site, Chinachange.org, citing legislative meetings held late last year and this year.
Germany and the US have both called on China to remove restrictions on Liu and allow her to leave the country. 

But activists say Chinese authorities are likely to keep her silenced to prevent her from becoming a symbol or rallying point for other dissidents.
“The cruelty the Chinese government has shown Liu Xia is a chilling signal for human rights defenders across the country that Xi Jinping’s regime does not care about international pressure. She’s never been suspected, charged or convicted of a crime, but has lived in a prison for eight years,” said Frances Eve, a researcher with the advocacy group, Chinese Human Rights Defenders. “Xi Jinping needs to let her go.”

Criminal Nation

In Liu Xiaobo’s Last Days, Supporters Fight China for His Legacy
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Protesters with pictures of Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese Nobel Peace laureate, outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong on Monday. 

BEIJING — As the life ebbs from Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident and only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a battle is shaping up over his life, his legacy, his words and maybe even his remains.
It is a battle that other countries are largely sitting out, even though Mr. Liu could become the first Nobel laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist and foe of Nazism who died under guard in 1938. 

The tepid international response to Mr. Liu’s case is a reflection of China’s rising power, and its ability to deflect pressure over its human rights record.
The Chinese government has sequestered Mr. Liu in a hospital room in northeast China and refused his request to go abroad for treatment, saying it wants to ensure that he receives the best care for his terminal liver cancer. 

The hospital is surrounded by guards, and Mr. Liu has been filmed lying still and frail in his bed. 

The footage, which shows him surrounded by doctors praising his medical care, was released without his permission for propaganda purposes.
Mr. Liu’s supporters have expressed outrage, saying the government wants to control his last days in defiance of his lifelong cause: the right of the individual to live, speak and remember, free of authoritarian control and censorship.

“The key is control of his talk — they don’t want him to be able to speak freely,” said Perry Link, a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Riverside, who edited an English-language selection of Mr. Liu’s essays and poems. 

“If he’s let out for treatment, he could talk, and that’s what the regime is afraid of.”

Mr. Liu has written about “angry ghosts” who denounce official misdeeds from the grave, and Beijing seems fearful that he will become one of them, inspiring opposition even in his afterlife. 

On Tuesday, the hospital that is treating Mr. Liu said he had septic shock and organ dysfunction, suggesting his condition was grim.
The panoply of state censorship and propaganda around Mr. Liu is testament to his tenacious influence, almost seven years after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, nearly a decade after he was last detained and sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion, and 28 years after the Communist Party denounced him as a seditious “black hand” for backing the student protests that swept China in 1989.
Mr. Liu has not been allowed to speak freely since he was arrested in late 2008, and his wife, Liu Xia, has been under heavy police surveillance since 2010, when he was awarded the Nobel medal. But lately, the Chinese authorities have released images and videos abroad to make the case that the couple are contented and cooperative.
“They want everything to be controllable, and if he went abroad, he would lie beyond their control,” Cui Weiping, a retired professor of Chinese literature and friend of Mr. Liu, said from Los Angeles, where she now lives. 

“This has always been the purge approach for dealing with dissidents — minimize their influence so they don’t become a focus.”

A picture shared on Twitter by the activist Ye Du showing Mr. Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.

Yet while the government wants Mr. Liu to stay silent and to ensure that his legacy fades as quickly as possible, his supporters have mobilized, despite intense restrictions and police warnings. 

They want to win him the right to speak out, go abroad for palliative treatment and decide how he is memorialized.
Some sympathizers of Mr. Liu have tried to visit him in his hospital, where the police blocked their way; some organized a petition calling for him to be given freedom at the end of his life. 

Longtime friends of Mr. Liu have been warned not to speak out or placed under police watch, including Zhou Duo, a scholar who joined Mr. Liu on Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989, as armed soldiers closed in, when they and two other friends negotiated the safe passage of protesters who were still there.
“To make Liu Xiaobo spend his final time like this doesn’t bring honor to the government, but they’ll stick to their ways,” said Wen Kejian, a friend of Mr. Liu who unsuccessfully tried to visit him in the hospital. 

“I think the chances that we’ll get what he wants are slim — that would require a dramatic change in the system — but we must try our best.”
Mr. Liu, 61, was moved from prison to the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, 390 miles northeast of Beijing, last month, and officials revealed that his cancer had already reached a terminal stage. 

Mr. Liu has said that he wants to travel to Germany or the United States for treatment. 

The Chinese government has not flatly rejected that request, but it has left little hope it will say yes.
But by keeping Mr. Liu locked up as he dies, the Chinese government has soiled its own image, said Liao Yiwu, an exiled Chinese author living in Berlin who knows Mr. Liu. 

Domestic Chinese news reports about Mr. Liu are heavily censored, and his illness has gone virtually unmentioned, except in English-language outlets read by few. 

But the images of Mr. Liu, gaunt on a hospital bed, have caused anger and disgust in China among the small minority who have seen them, Mr. Liao said.
“By locking him up and preventing him from traveling abroad, they’re actually making him even more symbolically powerful,” Mr. Liao said by telephone. 

“Now the whole world is paying attention, and I think that’s even more powerful.”
The tensions over Mr. Liu have also spilled abroad. 

Xi Jinping exudes disdain for human rights lobbying, and Western governments have weighed how far to press his case even as rights groups call for action.
A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Geng Shuang, on Monday denounced calls for Mr. Liu to be freed to go abroad as “meddling” by foreigners, even though two doctors, a German and an American, who were invited by the government to examine Mr. Liu said that he could travel and that their hospitals would treat him.
“Politically, it’s 100 percent sure that the Communist Party doesn’t want Mr. Liu to be freed or leave China,” said Zhao Hui, a writer and friend of Mr. Liu who goes by a pen name, Mo Zhixu. 

He said: “Whatever chance we have of making that happen depends on external pressure.”
But so far most Western leaders, including Trump, have said nothing publicly about Mr. Liu, leaving any comment to lower-ranking officials.

The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, where Mr. Liu is believed to be undergoing treatment. 

When Trump met with Xi during the Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, last week, Trump did not mention Mr. Liu, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. 

But Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, raised his treatment with Chinese officials, asking that he be allowed to go abroad for treatment accompanied by his wife, the official said.
European leaders have also chosen their words cautiously. 

The French Foreign Ministry said on June 29 that it was “preoccupied” with Mr. Liu’s condition and called on China to free him for humanitarian reasons.
A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Monday that “this tragic case of Liu Xiaobo is a great concern of the chancellor” and that “she would like a signal of humanity for Liu Xiabao and his family.”
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, and after Mr. Liu was announced as the recipient, the Chinese government vented its anger on the Norwegian government, curtailing diplomatic and economic cooperation. 

Ties revived only this year, and the Norwegian government has trod carefully on the subject of Mr. Liu’s terminal illness.
“This is a demanding case that we are following closely. We have waited over six years to return to normal relations with China,” said Frode O. Andersen, the head of communications for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to Norwegian news reports. 

“Our thoughts go out to him and his family. It is important that he gets medical treatment.”
There is no guarantee that Xi would bow to stronger foreign pressure to free Mr. Liu. 

In past decades, Chinese leaders were willing to release political prisoners to Western countries after granting medical parole. 

They included Wei Jingsheng, the most prominent dissident of his generation, who reached the United States in late 1997 after Bill Clinton pressed his case with China’s president at the time, Jiang Zemin.
But as the Chinese government has grown more confident and impatient with Western criticism, it has stopped that practice. 

Xi appears particularly set against making concessions that could weaken his strongman reputation.
“The Chinese government is legitimate in its refusal of calls for Liu to be taken overseas for treatment,” the English-language edition of Global Times, a party-run tabloid with a nationalist tinge, said in an editorial on Monday. 

In any case, it added, “Western mainstream society is much less enthusiastic than before in interfering with China’s sovereign affairs.”
Even after Mr. Liu dies, his funeral arrangements could become a focus of contention. 

Chinese rules say that prisons control the funerals of prisoners and can cremate them even if the family objects.
But the “whole area of the rights of individuals serving sentences on medical parole is a murky one indeed, including funereal rights,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, an organization in San Francisco that has worked to free Chinese prisoners.
The Chinese government will almost certainly try to prevent any grave site for Mr. Liu from becoming a place of pilgrimage for dissenters. 

The grave of Lin Zhao, an outspoken writer executed during the Cultural Revolution, has become one such site, and Mr. Liu’s pull would be more powerful.