China’s Thug Diplomacy

Calls for China’s thug ambassador to be thrown out of Sweden 

• Gui Congyou lashed out at local media in an interview on the weekend, saying they ‘have a habit of criticising, accusing and smearing China’
• He has been summoned for a meeting at the foreign ministry on Tuesday, and three Swedish parties have called for him to be expelled.

Bloomberg

China's thug diplomat Gui Congyou has repeatedly angered Swedish lawmakers with his remarks since he became China’s ambassador to the country in 2017. 

Sweden’s government has demanded a meeting with the ambassador for China after he lambasted Swedish media.
Thug ambassador Gui Congyou caused a diplomatic furore over the weekend after giving an interview to Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT, in which he said that some local media representatives “have a habit of criticising, accusing and smearing China”.
He went on to compare the relationship between Swedish media and China to one in which “a 48kg weight boxer keeps challenging an 86kg weight boxer to a fight”.
Three parties in Sweden’s parliament have now called for Gui to be thrown out of the Nordic country, adding to tensions ahead of a meeting scheduled to take place with the ambassador at the foreign ministry in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has already ruled out the option of expelling Gui.

But she also made clear Sweden would not accept veiled threats from China.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has ruled out expelling China’s ambassador. 

Relations between the two countries have soured recently over jailed Chinese-born Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, who was honoured last year by the Swedish chapter of PEN International with its annual Tucholsky Prize.
Gui Minhai, who has written several books that are critical of China’s leadership, has been detained since late 2015 by Chinese authorities, who accuse him of crimes including “operating an illegal business”.

Gui Congyou says Minhai is a “lie-fabricator” who “committed serious offences in both China and Sweden”. 

He also said Swedish media “is full of lies” about the case and that the Tucholsky Prize, which was handed out by Sweden’s minister of culture, would result in Chinese “countermeasures”.

Gui Minhai has been detained since late 2015 by Chinese authorities. 

The spat comes amid a more assertive diplomatic stance from China, which dominates global export markets and is one of Sweden’s most important trade partners. 

In neighbouring Norway, the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 to Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo led to a deep-freeze of diplomatic relations that lasted more than half a decade and hurt trade. 

In 2018, Sweden exported goods and services to China worth 67 billion kronor (US$7 billion), making it the Nordic country’s eighth-largest export market.
Gui Congyou, who was appointed ambassador to Sweden in 2017, has repeatedly angered lawmakers in the country with his remarks over the years. 

Commenting on Swedish media’s coverage of Gui Minhai, Gui Congyou in December cited a Chinese proverb: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but we have shotguns for our enemies.”
The ambassador’s latest remarks prompted the Sweden Democrats as well as the Christian Democrats and the Left Party to demand that he be thrown out.

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.”

Liu Xiaobo: A Voice of Freedom

By JAMES A. DORN

The death of Liu Xiaobo from liver cancer on July 13, under guard at a hospital in Shenyang, marks the passing of a great defender of freedom—a man who was willing to speak truth to power. 

As the lead signatory to Charter 08, which called for the rule of law and constitutional government, Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting the subversion of state power.” 

Before his sentencing in 2009, Liu stood before the court and declared, “To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity, and to suppress the truth.” 

With proper treatment and freedom, Liu would have lived on to voice his support for a free society.
While Liu’s advocacy of limited government, democracy, and a free market for ideas won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, China’s leadership viewed him as a criminal and refused to allow him to travel to Oslo to receive the award. 

Instead, the prize was placed on an empty chair at the ceremony, a lasting symbol of Liu’s courage in the face of state suppression. 

Beijing also prevented liberal Mao Yushi, cofounder of the Unirule Institute, from attending the ceremony to honor Liu.

The mistreatment of Liu, and other human rights’ proponents, is a stark reminder that while the Middle Kingdom has made significant progress in liberalizing its economy, it has yet to liberate the minds of the Chinese people or its own political institutions.
The tension between freedom and state power threatens China’s future. 

As former premier Wen Jiabao warned in a speech in August 2010, “Without the safeguard of political reform, the fruits of economic reform would be lost.” 

Later, in an interview with CNN in October, he held that “freedom of speech is indispensable for any country.”
Article 33, Section 3, of the PRC’s Constitution holds that “the State respects and protects human rights.” Such language, added by the National People’s Congress in 2004, encouraged liberals to test the waters, only to find that the reality did not match the rhetoric.
The Chinese Communist Party pays lip service to a free market in ideas, noting: “There can never be an end to the need for the emancipation of individual thought” (China Daily, November 16, 2013). 

However, Party doctrine strictly regulates that market. 

Consequently, under “market socialism with Chinese characteristics,” there is bound to be an ever-present tension between the individual and the state.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (September 22, 2015), Xi Jinping argued that “freedom is the purpose of order, and order the guarantee of freedom.” 

The real meaning of that statement is that China’s ruling elite will not tolerate dissent: individuals will be free to communicate ideas, but only those consistent with the state’s current interpretation of “socialist principles.”
This socialist vision contrasts sharply with that of market liberalism, which holds that freedom is not the purpose of order; it is the essential means to an emergent or spontaneous order. 

In the terms of traditional Chinese Taoism, freedom is the source of order. 

Simply put, voluntary exchange based on the principle of freedom or nonintervention, which Lao Tzu called “wu wei,” expands the range of choices open to individuals.
Denying China’s 1.4 billion people a free market in ideas has led to one of the lowest rankings in the World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters without Borders. 

In the 2016 report, China ranked 176 out of 180 countries, only a few notches above North Korea—and the situation appears to be getting worse. 

Under Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in preparation for this year’s Party Congress, the websites of liberal think tanks, such as the Unirule Institute, have been shut down, and virtual private networks (VPNs) are being closed, preventing internet users from circumventing the Great Firewall.
Liu’s death is a tragic reminder that China is still an authoritarian regime whose leaders seek to hold onto power at the cost of the lives of those like Liu who seek only peace and harmony through limiting the power of government and safeguarding individual rights.

Huang Xiangmo's money

Australia’s shameful silence on Liu Xiaobo

By Elaine Pearson

Overnight, a Nobel laureate and former professor of literature died from complications of liver cancer. 

He had been imprisoned for more than eight years and appears not to have received genuine medical attention at a municipal hospital until recent weeks, when his illness was well advanced. 

On his deathbed, police guarded his room and barred all visitors except for immediate family members. 

Two foreign doctors were allowed to see him but authorities denied his request to leave the country for medical care.
What had this man done to deserve such degrading treatment? 

And why did a powerful nation like China prevent him from living out his remaining days in dignity and freedom?
Liu Xiaobo was a brilliant academic who wrote on Chinese society and culture with a strong focus on democracy and human rights. 

In other countries, his works would have been published, his ideas debated, and his intellectual contribution to society celebrated. 

But in China, for his efforts Liu only saw the inside of a prison cell.
After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese authorities jailed Liu for 21 months for his role in supporting students who had taken part in the peaceful protests.
For a brief period in 1993, Liu lived in Canberra. 

He was reportedly offered asylum by Australian authorities, but turned down the offer. 

After returning to China, authorities imprisoned Liu again for three years in 1996 for his human rights activities.
In December 2008 Liu was detained for his role in co-authoring a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08. 

A year later, he was convicted of ‘incitement of subversion of state power’ and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He was incarcerated ever since.
In 2010, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Liu the Peace Prize. 

China did not allow him to attend the awards ceremony in Oslo. 

Instead, a chair stood empty on the stage as a reminder of China’s unrelenting and cruel repression. 

Angry at the world’s celebration of Liu, Chinese authorities meted out retribution on his wife, Liu Xia, who has been held under house arrest without charge ever since the award ceremony.
After Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize, countries around the world urged China to free him. 

Australia’s then-Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd raised Liu’s case with the Chinese authorities. 

Julie Bishop, then in opposition, wrote an op-ed about Liu urging China to let him attend the ceremony.
But as Liu lay dying in the hospital, there was a shameful silence from Australia’s leaders on Liu’s case. 

Canada, France, Germany, Taiwan, and the US all called on the Chinese authorities to free Liu and allow him and his wife to travel abroad for medical treatment. 

Australia made so no such call.
Perhaps Australian officials thought raising his case publicly would be ineffectual. 

Perhaps they thought the case would not be worth risking China’s ire. 

But they should be reminded of what Liu told a journalist back in 2007:
Western countries are asking the Chinese government to fulfill its promises to improve the human-rights situation, but if there’s no voice from inside the country, then the government will say, ‘It’s only a request from abroad; the domestic population doesn’t demand it.’ 

I want to show that it’s not only the hope of the international community, but also the hope of the Chinese people to improve their human rights situation.
As the Chinese government commits abuses at home without accountability, ratchets up repression in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and abducts people beyond its borders, precisely the kind of pressure Liu called for is needed from both inside and out. 

China’s human rights defenders like Liu are the ones that risk their lives, yet without international support they are even more vulnerable.
Liu was one of thousands of political prisoners in China who have lost their freedom to boldly call for the rule of law, respect for basic rights, and democracy in China. 

Australia should not let his death pass without challenging Beijing on his mistreatment. 

Australia’s leaders should also call upon China’s leaders to allow Liu Xia to leave the country if she chooses and mourn her husband as she sees fit.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull likes to speak of freedom. 

This week in London he said, ‘to defend freedom we cannot give free rein to its enemies’. 

It’s time to stop having those discussions in the abstract and speak up on behalf of courageous people in China such as Liu Xiaobo, especially when they most need it.

Criminal Nation

Liu Xiaobo: The man China couldn't erase
By Carrie Gracie

Activist Liu Xiaobo has died after spending eight years in prison

"There is nothing criminal in anything I have done but I have no complaints."
So stated Liu Xiaobo in court in 2009, and in the eight long prison years between then and now, he refused to recant his commitment to democracy. 

No wonder China's leaders are as afraid of him in death as they were in life.
The Chinese Communist Party was once a party of conviction, with martyrs prepared to die for their cause, but it's had nearly 70 years in power to become an ossified and cynical establishment. 

It imprisons those who demand their constitutional rights, bans all mention of them at home and uses its economic might abroad to exact silence from foreign governments. 

Under Xi Jinping, China has pursued this repression with great vigour and success. 

Liu Xiaobo is a rare defeat.
Beijing's problem began in 2010 when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. 

That immediately catapulted Liu Xiaobo into an international A-list of those imprisoned for their beliefs, alongside Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Carl von Ossietzky.
The last in that list may be unfamiliar to some, but to Beijing he's a particularly uncomfortable parallel. 

Carl von Ossietzky was a German pacifist who won the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize while incarcerated in a concentration camp.

Hitler would not allow a member of the laureate's family to collect the award on his behalf.
Liu Xiaobo was also serving a prison sentence for subversion when he won the peace prize. 

Beijing would not let his wife collect the award and instead placed her under house arrest. 

Liu Xiaobo was represented at the 2010 award ceremony in Oslo by an empty chair and the comparisons began between 21st Century China and 1930s Germany.

While in jail, Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. An empty chair was left for him at the ceremony
Strict censorship is another shared feature of both cases. 

Mention of Carl von Ossietzky's 1935 Nobel peace prize was banned in Nazi Germany and the same is true of Liu Xiaobo's award in China today. 

For a time China even banned the search term "empty chair". 

So he has been an embarrassment to China internationally, but at home few Chinese are aware of him. 

Even as foreign doctors contradicted the Chinese hospital on his fitness to travel, and Hong Kong saw vigils demanding his release, blanket censorship in mainland China kept the public largely ignorant of the dying Nobel laureate in their midst.
Selective amnesia is state policy in China and from Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment until his death, the government worked hard to erase his memory. 

To make it hard for family and friends to visit, he was jailed nearly 400 miles from home. 

His wife Liu Xia was shrouded in surveillance so suffocating that she gradually fell victim to mental and physical ill health. 

Beijing punished the Norwegian government to the point where Oslo now shrinks from comment on Chinese human rights or Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize.

Liu Xiaobo (left) is seen here with his wife Liu Xia (right) in this undated photo

But in death as in life, Liu Xiaobo has refused to be erased. 

The video footage of the dying man which China released outside the country was clearly intended to prove to the world that everything was done to give him a comfortable death. 

The unintended consequence is to make him a martyr for China's downtrodden democracy movement and to deliver a new parallel with the Nobel Peace Prize of 1930s Germany.
Liu Xiaobo was granted medical parole only in the terminal stage of his illness, and even in hospital he was under close guard with friends denied access to his bedside. 

Nearly 80 years ago, Carl von Ossietzky also died in hospital under prison guard after medical treatment came too late to save him.
Comparisons with the human rights record and propaganda efforts of Nazi Germany are particularly dismaying for Beijing after a period in which it feels it has successfully legitimised its one-party state on the world stage. 

At the G20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, no world leader publicly challenged Xi over Liu Xiaobo's treatment. 

With China increasingly powerful abroad and punitive at home, there are few voices raised on behalf of its political dissidents.
Liu Xiaobo was not always a dissident. 

An outspoken academic with a promising career and a passport to travel, until 1989 he'd led a charmed life. 

The Tiananmen Square democracy movement that year was the fork in his path.

After the massacre on June 4th, the costs of defying the Party were tragically clear to all.
Most of his contemporaries, and of the generations which followed, judged those costs too high. 

They chose life, liberty and a stake in the system.
Liu Xiaobo was one of the few who took the other fork. 

He stayed true to the ideals of 1989 for the rest of his life, renouncing first his opportunities to leave China, and then, repeatedly, his liberty. 

Even in recent years, his lawyers said he had turned down the offer of freedom in exchange for a confession of guilt.
'If you want to enter hell, don't complain of the dark....' Liu Xiaobo once wrote. 

And in the statement from his trial which was read at his Nobel award ceremony alongside his empty chair, Liu Xiaobo said he felt no ill will towards his jailers and hoped to transcend his personal experience.
No wonder such a man seemed dangerous to Beijing. 

For a jealous ruling party, an outsider with conviction is an affront, and those who cannot be bought or intimidated are mortal enemies.
But for Liu Xiaobo the struggle is over. 

The image of his empty deathbed will now haunt China like the image of his empty chair. 

And while Beijing continues to intimidate, persecute and punish those who follow his lead, it will not erase the memory of its Nobel prize winner any more than Nazi Germany erased its shame 81 years ago.

Political Murder

True honor lies not with China’s rulers but with the man they imprisoned until his death
Washington Post

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in April 2008. 

POLITICAL DISSIDENCE is a great, and beautiful, mystery. 

For those living under repressive rule, the path of least resistance is, well, not to resist — to accommodate and survive, or, in less honorable but hardly rare cases, to collaborate. 

And yet, some do choose the more decent and difficult way. 

Out of idealism, necessity, sheer refusal to submit or some unfathomable combination of all three, they stand up, they speak out, they assume risks.
China’s Liu Xiaobo epitomized the dissident tradition, fighting back relentlessly but peacefully against a regime in his country that epitomized modern-day authoritarianism — until he died on Thursday at age 61.
Mr. Liu was born in 1955, amid the horrific throes of the early People’s Republic, and went on to study literature and philosophy, earning his doctorate in 1988. 

Moved by the fall of communism in Europe and the limited opening under Deng Xiaoping in China, he joined the student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

This conscientious activism earned him a two-year prison sentence. 

Later he served three years in a labor camp for other purported political offenses. 

Mr. Liu’s causes were liberty and democracy, which he considered universally applicable, not Western imports for which his native country was somehow “not ready.” 

His specific demand was that the Chinese Communist authorities accept the need for a constitutional overhaul that would establish elections, rule of law and freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and of religion.
In December 2008, Mr. Liu joined other intellectuals in publishing Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto modeled on the Charter 77 issued by Czech dissidents 31 years earlier. 

Notably, the document not only called upon China’s rulers to enable a better future for their people; it also told the truth about the “gargantuan” price China’s people had paid since the 1949 revolution: “Tens of millions have lost their lives, and several generations have seen their freedom, their happiness, and their human dignity cruelly trampled,” the charter observed.
Forthrightly addressing China’s past, present and future earned Mr. Liu an 11-year sentence, for “inciting subversion of state power,” which began in late 2009 and which he was still serving, albeit on medical parole at a hospital, when he drew his last breath. His steadfast dissidence also earned Mr. Liu the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, though Beijing refused to let him travel to Oslo for the award ceremony, just as it also refused to let him receive friends and well-wishers in his final days, or to go abroad for medical treatment.
These final indignities were intended to degrade and humiliate, but the attempt was futile and indeed shames those who made it. 

Shortly before Mr. Liu died, the man ultimately responsible for this and so many other abuses in China, Xi Jinping, was basking in the glamour and glory of international politics at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. 

Yet throughout Xi’s rule, the true locus of honor in China has been any place of confinement occupied by Liu Xiaobo.

Criminal Nation: Why China Is Afraid Of Ailing Dissident Liu Xiaobo

Since Chicoms won’t let Liu Xiaobo leave China for medical help, he probably will die soon. But his efforts to speak the truth will endure.
By Helen Raleigh

Chinese authorities accuse dying Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo of being one of the most dangerous enemies of the state. 

Yet Liu’s recently leaked picture shows him staring back, very thin and fragile, with a gentle smile. His glasses gave him a bookish look. 

You probably can’t help wondering: what could make this seemingly harmless man public enemy number one in China? 

His “crime”: believing in exercising his human right to free speech. 

That’s a dangerous thing in China.
Before he became a political dissident, Liu was a scholar and a teacher. 

He was among the first generation of Chinese youth to take the national college entrance exam and attend universities following the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). 

After he received a PhD in literature from Beijing Normal University, he became a teacher at the same university.
Besides teaching, he was known to offer sharp opinions that challenged government-sanctioned doctrines and ideology through his many published literature critique pieces. 

Thus he was nicknamed a “dark horse.” 

Liu didn’t considered himself a radical, though. 

In his words, he determined instead merely that, “whether as a person or as a writer, I would lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity.”

He Sacrificed Himself for His Country
The decade from 1980 to 1989 was probably the most liberal period in China’s history since the founding of communist China in 1949. 

China implemented a series of economic and political reforms under pragmatic political leaders, from Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang to Zhao Zhiyang. 

A group of Chinese intellectuals encouraged by the relatively relaxed political atmosphere, including Liu, explicitly advocated that China learn from Western civilization: rule of law, free and open markets, and more personal freedom. 

Liu was a rising star among them, but he wasn’t the most famous.
The year 1989 began as a relatively uneventful year until Hu Yaobang’s unexpected passing in April. Coincidentally, he died right around the Qingming holiday, a traditional Chinese holiday when people pay tribute to their deceased loved ones. 

Hu was regarded as a liberal hero in China. 

Many ordinary Chinese people took to the streets to pay tribute for Hu’s death. 

Gradually, mourning for Hu turned into a movement calling on the Chinese government to grant people more freedom and to apply meaningful anticorruption measures. 

Peaceful demonstrators, mostly students, started occupying Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
At this time, Liu was a visiting scholar in the United States. 

He could have stayed here, advocating for freedom and democracy in safety and comfort. 

Yet he chose to return to China and join the movement, knowingly putting himself in life-threatening danger. 

By doing so, he followed a long line of intellectuals throughout China’s 2,000-year history who aspired to become “junzi”—virtuous men who are driven by responsibility to their country and to “tianxia” (the world). 

They believed that it’s their responsibility as well as a symbol of their virtue to sacrifice themselves to make their country better.
The rest was history. 

On June 4, 1989, China’s supreme leader Deng Xiaoping ordered the Chinese military to forcefully take back Tiananmen Square and “remove” protestors. 

The crackdown resulted in an unknown number of deaths of the innocent. 

June 4 was a turning point for China as well as for Liu. 

He lost his teaching position and “was thrown into prison for ‘the crime of counter‑revolutionary propaganda and incitement.’”
In Liu’s own words, “Merely for publishing different political views and taking part in a peaceful democracy movement, a teacher lost his lectern, a writer lost his right to publish, and a public intellectual lost the opportunity to give talks publicly. This is a tragedy, both for me personally and for a China that has already seen thirty years of ‘Reform and Opening Up.’”

Repression Led to International Acclaim
Since 1989, Chinese authorities have punished Liu for his various pro-democracy activities by putting him in prison several times. 

In 2008, modeled after Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, Liu co-authored Charter 08, a manifesto calling for Chinese government to implement things Americans have taken for granted, such as freedom of expression, an independent judiciary, and freedom of association. 

Liu was promptly arrested and later sentenced to 11 years in prison. 

He has been in prison ever since.
What China didn’t expect was that its repression probably helped turn Liu into an internationally renowned political activist. 

In 2010, Norway’s Nobel committee awarded Liu the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Beijing was so furious, it froze diplomatic ties with Norway and heavily censored any Nobel-related news that year.
Liu was the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize, but he wasn’t allowed to claim it and his wife has since been put under house arrest. 

The picture of an empty chair representing him at the Nobel Prize ceremony is as iconic an image as the photo of the “tank man.” 

Both symbolize the Chinese people’s struggle for freedom.

The Nobel Peace Prize vindicated Liu’s moral and mortal bravery. 

Unfortunately it probably also sealed his fate, because Chinese authorities will never let Liu leave China after he gained such international fame. 

Recently Liu is reported to suffer from late-stage liver cancer but Chinese authorities are refusing to let Liu seek treatment abroad.

‘Hatred Can Rot a Nation’
China has made great strides in economic development. 

Internationally, China has used its newfound wealth and power to buy the silence of human rights critics. 

Many countries who are eager to profit from the world’s second-largest economy have complied by looking the other way. 

Within China, partly due to Chinese government’s censorship and partly by choice, Liu disappeared from many Chinese people’s collective memory. 

Most young people who were born after 1989 don’t even know who he is.
The news of Liu’s illness has renewed people’s interest in him and brought back discussions of his work, his struggle, and the part of China’s history that the government still eagerly suppresses. 

Liu’s ailing picture has cast a long shadow on China’s painstakingly crafted image of a benevolent and progressive global leader. 

Liu said before that he hoped he “will be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisitions and that from now on no one will be incriminated because of speech.” 

Unfortunately, Liu won’t be China’s last sacrificial lamb. 

China today is less free than back in the 1980s, and the fight for freedom goes on, only becoming more difficult.
Confucius said “Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of a junzi (virtuous man).” 

Liu certainly lives up to that high standard. 

He paid a high price for what he believes in, but he is never bitter. 

When he last had a chance to communicate to the outside world, he titled his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, read by Liv Ullmann, “I have no enemies.”
While maintaining his innocence and that the charges against him are unconstitutional, Liu gave sincere praise to almost everyone he encountered: policemen, prosecutors, and jailers. 

He did so not as a grandstanding gesture, but because he believes “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation’s progress toward freedom and democracy. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences as I look upon our nation’s development and social change, to counter the regime’s hostility with utmost goodwill, and to dispel hatred with love.”

Since the Chinese authorities won’t let the 61-year-old Liu leave China for medical help, he probably won’t have much time left on this earth. 

But his effort to dispel hatred with love and to never give up speaking the truth has been and will continue to inspire generations to come. 

“History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.’” 

Chinese people probably have a long way to go before they can speak their minds freely without worrying about government persecution. 

When that day finally arrives, they will remember the name Liu Xiaobo.

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.

Criminal Nation

Liu Xiaobo: German anger at China over hospital videos
BBC News

Mr Liu is currently being treated in a hospital in China for liver cancer

Germany has issued a sharp rebuke to China after videos of Western doctors visiting ailing Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in hospital were posted online.
The German embassy in Beijing posted a statement accusing China of recording the visit against its wishes. 

One of the doctors was German.
The statement adds that Chinese security services, rather than doctors, are steering the dissident's treatment.
The Chinese authorities are yet to respond to the German statement.
Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo was serving a sentence of 11 years for subversion, but was moved from prison to a hospital last month with terminal liver cancer.
Following international pressure, Beijing allowed two doctors -- Markus Büchler from Germany and Joseph M Herman from the US -- to examine the dissident in the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang.
Over the weekend the doctors said he could go abroad for palliative care, directly contradicting Chinese medical experts who said previously that Mr Liu is too ill to travel.

What do the videos show?
There are at least two known video clips which were first posted online on Sunday by Chinese government-backed groups.
One video appears to shows the two Western doctors at Mr Liu's bedside, along with his wife Liu Xia as well as several Chinese doctors and nurses.
A second video, which Chinese state news outlet Global Times later republished on its website, appears to show the Western and Chinese doctors in a conference room.
In the first clip, a man thought to be Dr Büchler says the Chinese doctors are "very committed" to treating Mr Liu, while in the second he is heard saying: "I don't think we can do better medically than you do".
The videos have been met with scepticism from Chinese-language news outlets and blogs outside of mainland China.
The recordings were edited to cast the Chinese doctors in a positive light and lend credence to Beijing's argument that Mr Liu is too ill to be medically evacuated.
The fact that the videos were first posted on YouTube -- which is blocked in China -- has also prompted speculation that they were intended for a foreign audience.

What does Germany say?
Late on Monday, the German embassy in Beijing released a statement accusing "certain authorities" of making audio and video surveillance recordings of the visit, and then leaking them "selectively to certain Chinese state media outlets".
This, they said, constituted a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.

Liu Xiaobo (left) is seen here with his wife Liu Xia (right) in this undated photo

The recordings were also "made against the expressed wishes of the German side, which were communicated in writing" before the visit.
"China's security organs are steering the process, not medical experts. This behaviour undermines trust in the authorities dealing with Mr Liu's case, which is vital to ensure maximum success of his medical treatment."
Separately, Mr Liu's lawyer Jared Genser told the BBC that it was "unfortunate and unsurprising that the Chinese government would be engaged in surveilling anybody who is having contact with Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia".

What has China said?
There has been no official response to the statement but on Monday China's foreign ministry said it "hopes relevant countries will respect China's sovereignty and will not use individual cases to interfere with China's internal affairs", when asked if Liu Xiaobo would be allowed to leave.
A Global Times editorial on Monday said Chinese authorities were "trying their best to treat Liu and have fulfilled their humanitarian obligations".
It accused foreign forces of "still squeezing Liu for their political goals in disregard of his critical condition".

What is Mr Liu's condition?
Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, is said to be in critical condition. 

Last week the hospital said his liver functions were worsening.

Mr Liu is being treated at a hospital in the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang

Mr Genser has called for his immediate medical evacuation.
He told the BBC: "My view is that China could demonstrate itself to be a strong power, and one that is secure by allowing him to travel abroad for medical treatment."
"Instead, they seem to be afraid of this one man and his views on how China could evolve from being a single party system to being a multi-party democracy," he said.

Freedom Fighter

Liu Xiaobo Has Suffered So Chinese May Be Free
By Nicholas Kristof

A man in front of a poster of Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo in 2010. 

Dear Liu Xiaobo,
You may be the man I most admire. 

For decades you’ve struggled and suffered to advance human liberty, at the cost of your own — and now, it seems, at the cost of your life.
You won the Nobel Peace Prize and are the Mandela of our age, but with a horrifyingly different ending. 

While Nelson Mandela eventually became South Africa’s president, you were recently moved from a Chinese prison to a hospital where you remain under guard. 

Your wife says your liver cancer is inoperable, and the Chinese government cruelly refused to allow you to go abroad for treatment to try to save your life.
I’m writing this open letter partly to appeal to Xi Jinping to allow you to travel for treatment. 

But I’m also writing this because I think we in the Western democracies have a lot to learn from you.
You’ve sacrificed your entire life to achieve liberty. 

I first encountered you when my wife and I moved to China in the 1980s. 

You rushed back from a visiting scholar position at Columbia University to join the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and quickly became a leading figure in it.
When the Chinese Army opened fire on protesters to crush the movement, you could have fled. Instead, at tremendous risk to yourself, you negotiated with the army to arrange safe passage for hundreds of student protesters gathered at the monument in the center of Tiananmen Square.
Some of the students wanted to stay and die if necessary, but you cajoled them to retreat and live another day. 

You averted a blood bath — but you were arrested and disappeared into the maw of Qincheng Prison for almost two years.
You then could have relocated safely abroad in the 1990s, but you chose not to. 

Instead, you continued to push for freedom — and so you went to prison again.
After being freed, in 2008 you helped draft a moderate, eminently reasonable document calling for democracy and liberty, and that’s the last time I spoke to you.
I was in Beijing and called your home to arrange a visit. 

You answered the phone, but as soon as I identified myself in Chinese, a State Security Ministry minder cut off the call and put your phone line out of commission.
Soon afterward, you were imprisoned and sentenced to 11 years. 

The government began to persecute your wife, Liu Xia, as a way to put pressure on you.
I remember the incredible love letter you once wrote her: “Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body … and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning.”
You’ve often spoken about what China can learn from the West. 

But, frankly, we in the West can learn so much from you — even about the meaning of democracy.
First, you preach the virtues of moderation and compromise, which many of us are now too stressed to remember. 

At a time when many of us see conciliation as a sign of weakness, you remind us that politics is about listening and getting things done. 

That’s how you saved all those lives at Tiananmen.
Second, you think beyond your tribe. 

You bravely signed a petition calling for more autonomy for Tibet, and for real negotiations with the Dalai Lama, although reflexive Chinese nationalism made that deeply unpopular. 

Pushing back at public opinion took moral courage, of a kind I wish more of our own leaders displayed.
Third, you model magnanimity in politics, showing a willingness to “go high” even when the regime treats you and your wife so monstrously.

You would be entirely justified in feeling malice, yet you declared, “I have no enemies,” and you went out of your way to speak fondly of your prosecutors.

“Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience,” you explained from your prison cell. You warned that an “enemy mentality” can “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity.”
In Chinese, you’re sometimes known as “Teacher Liu,” and we — your students — are hoping and praying that you find comfort in the way your sacrifices have left a mark on all of us. 

You truly are a teacher to the world.

Beijing’s Nobel Shame

Dying dissident Liu Xiaobo must be allowed to travel, UK and EU urge China
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Britain and the European Union have joined a growing chorus of voices calling for China to completely free its most famous political prisoner, the dying Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.
A spokesperson for the British embassy in Beijing said Britain had “repeatedly expressed serious concern at the treatment of Liu Xiaobo by the Chinese authorities”.
“We continue to urge the Chinese authorities to ensure Liu Xiaobo has access to his choice of medical treatment, in a location of his choice, and to lift all restrictions on him and his wife Liu Xia,” the spokesperson added.
A spokesperson for the EU delegation in Beijing said it had discussed the activist’s case with the authorities and asked “that China immediately grant Mr Liu parole on humanitarian grounds and allow him to receive medical assistance at a place of his choosing in China or overseas.”
In an earlier statement the EU had said it also expected China “to remove all limitations on the movements of Mr Liu’s wife and family members”.
A spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry, Geng Shuang, rejected the appeals. 

The calls came one day after two foreign doctors who were allowed to visit the dissident in hospital announced they believed he was well enough to be moved overseas, despite Chinese claims to the contrary.
In the light of that announcement, Jared Genser, a US lawyer who represents Liu and is lobbying for his evacuation, called on Xi Jinping to immediately free his client. 

He said Liu had expressed a desire to receive treatment in Germany or the United States, with hospitals in both countries ready and willing to take him in.
“Xi Jinping should honour a dying man’s wishes to be able to leave China and to obtain better treatment that is available abroad,” and could extend Liu’s life by several weeks, Genser said.
“My view is that not only should this happen, but that this must happen and I also believe that there will be enormous pressure placed on Xi from the international community to relent,” he added.
The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is also among those calling Liu’s release. 

“This is a historic mistake ... this is going to be remembered the whole world,” he said.

In a statement, the executive director of Pen America, Suzanne Nossel, said “the Chinese government’s morality and humanity” would be tested by its decision to allow Liu to leave China or not. 

“There can be no more powerful indicator of Beijing’s respect for human dignity than their treatment of Liu Xiaobo in this time of need.”
Liu, a veteran democracy activist and writer who became a lifelong campaigner after witnessing the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer in May while serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion. 

He is being held, reportedly under police guard, in a hospital in north-east China where authorities insist he is receiving “meticulous treatment”.
Liu was detained in late 2008 for his involvement in a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08 and was found guilty of incitement to subvert state power – effectively working to topple China’s one-party state – on Christmas Day the following year.
In 2010 he received the Nobel peace prize for his “unflinching and peaceful advocacy for reform”. 

Unable to attend the award ceremony in Oslo because he was in jail, Liu was represented by an empty chair.

Beijing’s Nobel Shame

Western doctors contradict China on Nobel laureate's cancer
BBC News

Supporters have appealed to China to allow Mr Liu to travel abroad for treatment

Two Western doctors have contradicted Chinese medical experts over the fate of a dying Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned pro-democracy advocate, was moved to hospital while serving an 11-year jail term, because of his advanced terminal liver cancer.
His doctors in China say he is too ill to travel abroad for treatment, and must remain in China.
But medics from the US and Germany who examined Mr Liu disagree and say he could go abroad for palliative care.
Joseph Herman from the University of Texas' cancer centre and Markus Büchler of the University of Heidelberg surgery department, released a joint statement saying a medical evacuation would have to happen "as quickly as possible".

Friends of Liu Xiaobo and his wife say he is near death

"While a degree of risk always exists in the movement of any patient, both physicians believe Mr. Liu can be safely transported with appropriate medical evacuation care and support," they said.
Liu Xiaobo and his family have both asked that he be allowed to leave.
Mr Liu was a key leader in the famous Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and has been a vocal advocate for full democracy in China since.
The state considers him a criminal dissident, and in 2009, sentenced him to 11 years in prison for subversive behaviour after he drafted a manifesto on democracy and human rights.
He was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2010 for his "long and non-violent struggle".
"Through the severe punishment meted out to him, Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China," the Nobel Committee wrote.
He had more than three years remaining on his sentence when authorities moved him into a hospital.
Following his Nobel prize, Mr Liu's wife, a poet, was placed under house arrest, and has had her movements restricted ever since. 

She has never been charged with a crime.

The love that survived a Chinese labour camp

"I found all the beauty in the world in this one woman."
Their wedding banquet was in the labour camp's cafeteria, a scenario that would prove to be symbolic. 

Throughout their intense romance, the Chinese government was a relentless and interfering third wheel, the uninvited partner providing a constant backdrop to their interactions.
By all accounts, Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia were inseparable, except when they were forcibly separated.

As Liu Xiaobo fades, his hopes for reform in China are dying as well

China’s Nobel peace laureate will be hard to replace, amid ever-tighter control
By Emma Graham-Harrison

Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia, in a photograph released by friends.
When the Chinese dissident and Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo succumbs to liver cancer, on a day that now seems both inevitable and imminent, the world will not only lose a moral giant. 

A fierce hope for change, a particular dream of a different China, is also lying on its deathbed in the northern Chinese hospital where Liu’s treatment is being rationed out, by doctors of unknown competence and uncharted loyalties.
Poet, intellectual, champion of peaceful protest, little-known inside China because of censorship but a much-lauded name beyond its borders, Liu embodied the fight he led courageously for nearly three decades.
Always resurgent after jail and harassment, he returned to the fray repeatedly over those years, despite the personal cost. 

“Even though I might be faced with nothing but a series of tragedies, I will still struggle, still show my opposition,” he said in a 1988 interview, before the Tiananmen Square massacre.
That spirit made change seem possible, perhaps even within his lifetime. 

His most recent jail sentence, handed down in 2009, was exceptionally severe, but he was still due to emerge at the end of this decade, with release offering the possibility of new writing, a new challenge to authorities.
His death will be convenient for the party he opposed for so long, allowing him to diminish into myth, and leaving no obvious successor.
There are many other dissidents in China – friends, supporters and even rivals of Liu – who face down the growing might of a wealthy authoritarian state with a courage that is hard for anyone protected by the guarantees of a democracy to fully understand.
But today, China seems more tightly controlled than at almost any time since the death of Mao Zedong. 

Even protests with no overt political agenda, such as feminists opposing sexual harassment, are ruthlessly crushed. 

The international community defers more to Beijing’s wishes than it has perhaps for centuries. 

And there is no substitute for the hope Liu offered through his life, as well as through his intellect, long after others had abandoned the idealism of the 1980s.
“Because of him, Chinese history does not come to a stop,” one of his oldest friends, Liao Yiwu, said after he had been awarded the Nobel prize. 

“After [the Tiananmen Square crackdown of] 1989, many people chose to forget what had happened, chose to go abroad, chose to divert themselves into doing business, or even to working with the government – but he did not.”
Liu first became known as a rebel in the 1980s, one of the most politically open decades in China’s recent history, when internal debates raged about where the country should head as it recovered from the cultural revolution.
“[Democracy] has not been a western preoccupation because when there has been opening up, we see people flock to a demand for freedom within China,” said Stein Ringen, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford and author of The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century. 

“All through the 1980s, things were quite fluid, in part because there wasn’t really agreement in the leadership on what the [political] direction should be.”
Liu rose to international prominence during the Tiananmen Square protests, abandoning a position at Columbia University in the US to join students there. 

Jailed for his role, he took up the fight again after his release. 

He was never free from surveillance once he had raised his head above the parapet, often harassed, repeatedly jailed. 

He did not become an accidental hero. 

“If you want to enter hell, don’t complain of the dark; you can’t blame the world for being unfair if you start on the path of the rebel,” he said, in early writings quoted by translator and friend Geremie Barthe.
The crackdown in Tiananmen Square ushered in an era of international isolation, but censure could not survive the siren call of Chinese markets indefinitely, and Beijing was keen to mend the rift, seal its rapid rise in international standing. 

After China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, and in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the door towards reform seemed to open a crack again.
This was the China I came to know as a correspondent with Reuters, where authorities continued to jail dissidents, but lawyers, journalists and activists pushed the boundaries of state control and sometimes won victories too.
I even met Liu briefly then, though such was his reputation I was left virtually mute so remember little from the encounter but exchanging greetings.
Soon after, he would take on the authorities, be jailed, then awarded the Nobel prize, after joining forces with other dissidents to draft Charter 08. 

It was a call for change based on the anti-Soviet Charter 77, drawn up by activists in the former Czechoslovakia, also named for the year it was written, and radical only in the challenge they posed authorities.
“When Charter 08 was signed, there was a yearning for more open dialogue and talk about a peaceful societal transition,” Ai Xiaoming scholar and documentary filmmaker in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou who signed the charter told the New York Times. 

“But now there is even more strict social control, and the room for civil society has shrunk significantly.”
Liu himself is fading, his final words and thoughts may collected imperfectly in some kind of brief outline, but as he is already reported to be severely ill, they may also be lost entirely.
The foreign support that might have bolstered his friends and buoyed dissidents taking on his legacy has been conspicuous by its absence or muted tone. 

Even Norway, which hosts the Nobel prize committee, has stayed silent on Liu’s illness, influenced by new ties with Beijing.
China’s economic might, and Xi Jinping’s search for absolute control means that Liu’s death brings a curtain down on a period where hope survived, even if it did not always flourish, and ushers in something darker.
“It’s very hard to see any organised opposition now emerging, or any person able to take a real position of authority against the regime,” Ringen said. 

“About these matters I am extremely pessimistic. I see absolutely no room for speaking out.”