Liu Xiaobo's widow reappears in YouTube video

Liu Xia resurfaces for the first time since her husband Liu Xiaobo's funeral amid concerns about her fate.
Aljazeera
Liu Xia was last seen in government-released images of Liu Xiaobo's funeral.

The widow of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has appeared for the first time since her husband's funeral in a video posted on YouTube, which is blocked in China.
Liu Xia's friends have raised concern about her fate, saying they have not been able to speak to her since her husband's sea burial on July 15.
She was last seen in government-released images of Liu Xiaobo's funeral.
"I am recovering in a province outside of Beijing. I ask you to give me time to mourn," said Liu in the minute-long video posted on Friday.
Dressed in a black t-shirt and black trousers, Liu Xia was sitting on a white sofa next to a coffee table while holding a lit cigarette.
"I will see you one day in top form. While Xiaobo was sick, he also looked at life and death with some distance, so I also have to readjust. I will be with you again when my situation generally improves," she said.
Liu Xia, 56, has been under effective house arrest since her husband, a prominent dissident since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, won the Nobel Prize in 2010. 

He was sentenced to 11 years in jail on subversion charges in 2009.
Friends of the couple raised questions about whether Liu Xia made the comments in Friday's video out of her own free will.
"It is certain that she was forced by the authorities to make this video," Hu Jia, a Chinese dissident and friend of the couple, told the AFP news agency on Saturday.
"How can anyone who does not even enjoy freedom express her will freely?"
The name of the film-maker, the place and date of filming, were not specified, but it would be unusual for the video to be released without the knowledge of the authorities. 

Plainclothes security agents guard Liu Xia's Beijing apartment.
Jared Genser, Liu Xia's lawyer, who has filed a complaint to the United Nations, has accused the Chinese government of her "enforced disappearance".
Chinese authorities have said that Liu Xia was "free" and have told diplomats who asked about her whereabouts that her lack of communication was due to her desire to mourn in peace.
Before the death of her husband, Liu Xia had told diplomats and friends that she wished to leave China should Liu Xiaobo be released.
Liu had requested to receive treatment abroad after his terminal cancer diagnosis, a wish that friends believe was in reality for his wife's sake. 

The government, however, refused to release him.
He died aged 61 while still in custody at a Chinese hospital on July 13, becoming the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1938.

Hong Kong democracy campaigners jailed over anti-China protests

Alex Chow, Nathan Law, and Joshua Wong given six to eight month sentences for roles in anti-government occupation known as the umbrella movement
By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Joshua Wong (L) and Alex Chow, leaders of Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Movement’, before their court appearance.

Hong Kong’s democracy movement has suffered the latest setback in what has been a punishing year after three of its most influential young leaders were jailed for their roles in a protest at the start of a 79-day anti-government occupation known as the umbrella movement.
Alex Chow, Nathan Law, and Joshua Wong, the bespectacled student dubbed Hong Kong’s “face of protest” were sentenced to between six and eight months imprisonment each.
The trio, aged 26, 24 and 20 respectively, had avoided jail a year ago after being convicted of taking part in or inciting an “illegal assembly” that helped spark the umbrella protests, in late September 2014. 

But this month Hong Kong’s department of justice called for those sentences to be reconsidered, with one senior prosecutor attacking the “rather dangerous” leniency he claimed had been shown to the activists.
“See you soon,” Wong tweeted shortly after the verdict was announced.
In another message he wrote: “Imprisoning us will not extinguish Hongkonger’s desire for universal suffrage. We are stronger, more determined, and we will win.”
“You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds! We want democracy in Hong Kong. And we will not give up.”
The decision to increase the activists’ punishments sparked outrage among supporters and campaigners who condemned what they called the latest example of Beijing’s bid to snuff out peaceful challenges to its rule.
“It smacks of political imprisonment, plain and simple,” said Jason Ng, the author of Umbrellas in Bloom, a book about Hong Kong’s youth protest movement.
Mabel Au, Amnesty International’s director in Hong Kong, said: “The relentless and vindictive pursuit of student leaders using vague charges smacks of political payback by the authorities.”
There was also criticism from the United States where Republican senator Marco Rubio attacked the decision as “shameful and further evidence that Hong Kong’s cherished autonomy is precipitously eroding”.
“Joshua Wong, Nathan Law, Alex Chow and other umbrella movement protesters are pro-democracy champions worthy of admiration, not criminals deserving jail time,” said Rubio, who heads the congressional-executive commission on China.

“Beijing’s heavy hand is on display for all to see as they attempt to crush the next generation of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement,” he added.
Speaking before the verdict, Wong told the Guardian he was sure he would be jailed since the decision to seek stiffer punishments was driven by politics, not legal arguments. 

“It’s a political prosecution,” he said. 

“It is the darkest era for Hong Kong because we are the first generation of umbrella movement leaders being sent to prison.”
Wong claimed the decision to use the courts to crack down on umbrella activists showed China’s one-party rulers had managed to transform the former British colony, once a rule-of-law society, into a place of “authoritarian rule by law”.
“No one would like to go to prison but I have to use this as a chance to show the commitment of Hong Kong’s young activists,” he said. 

“It is really a cold winter for Hong Kong’s democracy movement – but things that cannot defeat us will make us stronger.”
Thursday’s controversial ruling caps a torrid year for the pro-democracy camp of this semi-autonomous Chinese city, which returned to Beijing’s control on 1 July 1997 after 156 years of colonial rule.
During a June visit marking the 20th anniversary of handover, Xi Jinping oversaw a tub-thumping military parade which observers said underscored the increasingly hardline posture Beijing was now taking towards Hong Kong amid an upsurge in support for independence. 

“The implication is: ‘We will come out in the streets and put you down if we have to,’” the political blogger Suzanne Pepper said at the time.
A fortnight later, the democracy movement suffered a body blow when four pro-democracy lawmakers, including Law, were ejected from Hong Kong’s parliament for using their oath-taking ceremonies to thumb their noses at Beijing. 

That decision robbed the pro-democracy camp of its veto power over major legislation.
In an interview with the Guardian, Law, who had been the youngest person elected to Hong Kong’s legislature, said the disqualifications were an attempt by Beijing to “suppress the more progressive voices in Hong Kong”.
“I won’t give up fighting. If Liu Xiaobo can persist under much harsher circumstances, so can we,” Law vowed, referring to the late democracy icon who died in Chinese custody last month, becoming the first Nobel peace prize winner to perish in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who died in 1938 after years in Nazi concentration camps.
On Tuesday, 13 umbrella activists were jailed for storming Hong Kong’s parliament in 2014, a decision Human Rights Watch condemned as part of a surge in politically motivated prosecutions.
Ng, the author, said he believed the decision to jail Wong and Law was deliberately designed to stop them running for office later this year in local byelections. 

Their imprisonment was not intended to deter violence or social disorder but to crack down on “the willingness of young, idealistic people to engage politically”.
“[These sentences] significantly increase the cost of dissent in Hong Kong,” Ng warned. 

“From now on, protesters will need to think about the possibility of getting locked up for months or even years.
“It has an enormous chilling effect … especially on young people, and sends a strong message to them that they should shut up or else.”
Speaking on Wednesday night, Wong said he would not be silenced, even behind bars where he planned to spend his time reading novels, studying and writing columns about politics.
Wong also used his final hours of freedom to send a message to Xi: “Please respect the desires of Hong Kong people. The people are united and they will never stop.”

China accused over 'enforced disappearance' of Liu Xiaobo's widow

Liu Xia not seen since sea burial of late Nobel peace prize winner in July

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

Liu Xia (centre, holding a portrait of Liu Xiaobo) has not been seen since Beijing released photos of her at her husband’s funeral. 

Chinese authorities are guilty of the Kafkaesque enforced disappearance of Liu Xia, the wife of late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, the couple’s US lawyer has claimed.
Jared Genser, a Washington-based human rights attorney who has represented them since 2010, made the claim in a formal complaint submitted to the United Nations on Wednesday.

A plainclothes agent outside the Beijing apartment of Liu Xia, the wife of the late dissident Liu Xiaobo. 

Almost three weeks after the Chinese dissident became the first Nobel peace prize winner to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky – who died in 1938 after years in Nazi concentration camps – his widow’s precise whereabouts are a mystery.
Friends say the 56-year-old poet was initially forced to travel to southwest China with security agents, but may now have returned to the capital, where she has lived under virtual house arrest since her husband won the Nobel peace prize in December 2010.
Foreign journalists who have attempted to visit the couple’s Beijing flat have faced harassment and physical violence while Chinese officials have refused to answer questions on the subject.
Genser said Beijing’s continued persecution of his client took Communist party repression to an “incredibly disturbing new low” and constituted an enforced disappearance.
In his petition to the UN’s working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances, requesting “urgent intervention”, he wrote: “According to international law, an enforced disappearance involves (1) deprivation of liberty against the will of the person; (2) involvement of government officials; and (3) refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.”
Genser told the Guardian: “It is crystal clear to me that what has happened to Liu Xia falls squarely and unequivocally within this definition.”
Liu Xia was last seen on 15 July when authorities released photographs showing her attending her husband’s controversial sea burial, which supporters suspect was devised to deny them a place to remember the democracy icon and his ideas.
“There has been no information as to where she is, who is detaining her or when she might reappear. [But] it is clear to me … that the Chinese government has her,” said Genser. 

“She continues to suffer enormously … I actually don’t think Kafka could have imagined a scenario as terrible as hers.”
Genser said he expected that, having received his complaint, the UN body would now ask Beijing to respond to claims that Chinese security forces were behind Liu Xia’s disappearance. 

He hoped the move would force Beijing to “reappear” Liu Xia, who has never been charged with any crime, and allow her to leave China. 

The United States, Germany and Britain are among the governments that have called for her release.
Genser also voiced support for a congressional push to rename the street on which China’s US embassy is located, in homage to the late democracy icon. 

According to the Washington Post, Chinese leaders are livid at the campaign and have been lobbying the Trump administration to veto the proposal. 

China’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, recently warned the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, that changing the street’s name from International Place to Liu Xiaobo Plaza would “seriously affect Chinese cooperation on major issues”.

Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo

Genser called for similar moves in European capitals that might see Rue de Washington in Paris become the Rue de Liu Xiaobo and London’s Portland Place renamed Liu Xiaobo Place. 

“It is clear that the Chinese government would like to erase the memory of Liu Xiaobo from the world’s imagination. The idea … that every piece of mail that would go to a Chinese embassy in Washington, London and Paris would be [stamped with his name] would really be anathema to the Chinese government.”
Genser said that while his focus was freeing Liu Xia, the campaign was an effective way to pressure Beijing. 

“To me this is a means to an end. I’m not committed to having the street renamed.
“But if the government won’t relent … they are leaving advocates with really no option other than to go down this road.”
China’s foreign ministry, the only government body that regularly interacts with journalists, has repeatedly ignored questions about Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year jail term for subversion when he was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer in May.
Questions about their plight have been purged from official transcripts of its press conferences. 

“I do not know the information you mentioned and is not a diplomatic question,” foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a reporter from Sky News who inquired about Liu Xia’s whereabouts last week. 

“Next question.”

Criminal Nation

Malala condemns China over death of fellow Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo
By Paul Carsten

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai 
ABUJA -- Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai condemned China's treatment of her fellow peace prize-winner Liu Xiaobo following his death of liver cancer in custody last week.
Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for sweeping political reforms in China.
Liu's incarceration meant he was unable to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, and he became the second winner of it to die in state custody, the first being Carl von Ossietzky in Germany in 1938. Liu's wife Liu Xia remains under effective house arrest.
"I condemn any government who denies people's freedom," Yousafzai, 20, a Pakistani education activist who came to prominence when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012, told Reuters at a school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri.
"I'm hoping that people will learn from what he (Liu) did and join together and fight for freedom, fight for people's rights and fight for equality," she said.
Yousafzai's trip to Nigeria was aimed at raising awareness of education problems in Africa's most populous country where over 10.5 million children are out of school, more than anywhere else in the world.

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai speaks during an exclusive interview with Reuters in Maiduguri, Nigeria.

The issue is felt more severely in the mainly Muslim north. 

The south has over the decades seen greater investment and a system of schools started by Christian pastors affiliated with British colonists.
Nigeria needs to "increase spending on education and they need to make it public, the rate of spending planned and how much they're spending," said Yousafzai. 

Since her first trip to Nigeria three years ago, the proportion of the budget allocated to education has dropped from above 10 percent to around 6 percent, she said.
The eight-year Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram, whose name roughly means "Western education is forbidden," has compounded problems with education in Nigeria's north.
The militants have destroyed hundreds of schools and uprooted millions, forcing them into refugee camps which often lack the most basic necessities, let alone decent schooling.
On Monday, Malala called on Nigeria's acting president, Yemi Osinbajo, to call a state of emergency for the country's education.
"Nigeria in the north has been suffering through conflicts as well and extremism," she said.
"So it is important in that sense as well that they prioritize education in order to protect the future."

The death of Liu Xiaobo marks dark times for dissent in China

By Ishaan Tharoor 

It has been a week since the death of Liu Xiaobo, the famed Chinese dissident who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace while imprisoned.
Late last month, Chinese officials announced that the prominent writer, who had been detained since 2009, was being moved to a hospital to receive treatment for late-stage liver cancer. 

Despite the entreaties of his family, friends and foreign governments, Beijing refused to release him to seek care overseas. 

He died July 13, becoming only the second Nobel laureate to perish in custody (Carl von Ossietzky, an anti-Nazi pacifist, died in 1938).
In a move that sparked the ire of Chinese activists, authorities apparently ensured that his ashes were buried at sea and not on Chinese soil. 

Acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei, who lives in Germany, said the move was aimed at denying Liu’s supporters “a physical memorial site” and that it “showed brutal society can be.”
“It is a play,” said Ai. 

“Sad but real.”

Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, prays as his ashes are buried at sea off the coast of Dalian, China, on July 15.

Indeed, for China’s authoritarian leadership, what Liu represents is all too real. 

The poet and essayist was admired by many among the Chinese diaspora and the international community. 

“He fought for freedom and democracy for more than 30 years, becoming a monument to morality and justice and a source of inspiration,” Wen Kejian, a fellow writer, told my colleague Emily Rauhala.
“Liu Xiaobo was a representative of ideas that resonate with millions of people all over the world, even in China. These ideas cannot be imprisoned and will never die,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in a statement.
Ironically Liu’s legacy and oeuvre are more visible abroad than at home, where even Internet searches of his name are censored and tributes to his life were hurriedly erased from social media.
But what further underscores the tragedy of his life was the nature of his politics. 

Liu was not calling for radical change or an overthrow of the regime. 

The putative reason for his 2009 imprisonment was his co-authorship of “Charter 08,” a manifesto calling for reform and greater freedom of expression within the Chinese system.
“Inevitably, some in the West will think that honoring Liu Xiaobo is an act of offense against China (or, more practically, a potential risk to relationships with the government). That’s a mistake,” wrote Evan Osnos, author of the National Book Award-winning “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.” 

“Honoring Liu is an act of dedication to China at its best. He was, to the end, unwilling to renounce his principled commitment to China’s constitution — to the freedoms enshrined in law but unprotected in practice.”
Osnos also offered an anecdote from when he met Liu: “If you never had a chance to meet him, it was easy to misread him as a cynic. On the contrary, in person, Liu could be unnervingly optimistic. On that day when I met him, in 2007, at a teahouse near his apartment, he told me that as China became stronger and more connected to the world, he imagined that the ‘current regime might become more confident.’ He went on, ‘It might become milder, more flexible, more open.’ In that prediction, he was, for now, wrong, and he paid with his life.”

People sign their names at a memorial event for late Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong on July 19. 

“Although the regime of the post-Mao era is still a dictatorship, it is no longer fanatical but rather a rational dictatorship that has become increasingly adept at calculating its interests,” Liu once said in 2006, in another illustration of his optimism about the capacity for change.
“In calculating those interests, the regime has decided that it was safer to turn Liu into a dead martyr than to allow his ideas to spread unchallenged,” wrote Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times. 

“This conclusion is probably correct in the short term. Thanks to the party’s efforts, the vast majority of Chinese people have never heard of Liu and most of those who have heard of him think he was a hopeless troublemaker. His death will not spark a revolution.”

Under Xi Jinping, the invasive, authoritarian control of the ruling government has expanded, while the space for civil society has contracted. 

Dissent and critical expression have been chilled, and it seems increasingly clear that Chinese officials aren’t bothered by censure from abroad.
“What is really important isn’t so much that the party is tightening its control — that is happening anyway,” noted Steve Tsang of the Chatham House think tank in London. 

“What is more important is that the party is not that worried about how the Liu Xiaobo case affects international opinion.” 

A budding global hegemon, China can withstand the clucking of outside powers over its human rights record.
It also doesn’t help that there is an American president who has explicitly argued against fighting for universal values and rights elsewhere. 

On the day of Liu’s death, Trump happened to hail Xi as a “terrific” and “talented” leader.
“It is especially shameful that Donald Trump praised Xi Jinping at the moment when Liu Xiaobo was dying,” said Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer living in exile in the United States. 

“Xi Jinping is not a respectable leader. He is a brutal dictator.”
“Western countries have adopted a policy of appeasement,” said Hu Jia, a prominent dissident who served more than three years in prison, to the New York Times. 

“The Communist Party has the resources to whip whomever they want.”
Hu, who still faces regular surveillance from police, offered an ominous warning: “Some have turned to believe in violent revolution. It makes people feel the door to a peaceful transition has closed.”

China's growing intolerance for dissent will come at a high price

By pushing the Hong Kong opposition out of the legislature and persecuting Liu Xiaobo, Beijing has set in motion a new era of resistance

By Jason Y Ng

People attend a candlelight march for the late Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong. 

On Thursday evening, Chinese dissident and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo died from liver cancer in a Shenyang Hospital. 

Liu was, as the Western press sharply pointed out, the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in custody since Carl von Ossietzky did in Nazi Germany in 1938. 

Supporters the world over mourned the death of a man who lived and died a hero. 

The only crime he ever committed was penning a proposal that maps out a bloodless path for his country to democratise.
Then on Friday afternoon, Beijing’s long arm stretched across the border and reached into Hong Kong’s courtroom. 

Bound by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s decision on oath-taking etiquettes, the Hong Kong High Court ruled to unseat four democratically-elected opposition lawmakers, including Nathan Law, the youngest person ever to be elected to the legislature. 

The only infraction the four ever committed was straying from their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony to voice their desire for their city to democratise.
The two news stories, less than 24 hours apart, share a chilling symmetry. 

They underscore the Chinese government’s growing intolerance for dissent on both the mainland and the territories it controls.
But Beijing’s tightening grip comes at a cost. 

In Hong Kong, Liu’s death has rekindled an anti-mainland sentiment that has been smouldering for years. 

To the seven million citizens who watched Liu’s slow death in equal parts horror and grief, any remaining pretence that modern China is a benevolent paternal state that has moved beyond a brutal response to political debate has been shattered once and for all. 

And all current and future attempts by Beijing to win over Hong Kong people, especially the younger generations, are doomed to fail. 

The indelible images of a skin-and-bone dissident on his deathbed or of that famous empty chair in the Oslo City Hall have been seared into their collective mind. 

China has lost Hong Kong forever.
Similarly, the removal of four pro-democracy lawmakers is not without consequence for Beijing. 

By reinterpreting the oath-taking provisions in the Basic Law, the Chinese government has sidestepped the judiciary in Hong Kong and dealt another blow to the city’s rule of law. 

Each time the NPCSC rewrites the rules and overrides local judges, Hong Kong’s independent judiciary—the bedrock of its economic success—means a bit less. 

With each heavy-handed attempt to squash the opposition, “one country, two systems”—the framework of happy coexistence for Hong Kong that Xi Jinping is fond of parading in front of world leaders and hopes that Taiwan will one day embrace—looks a little more like a broken promise.
What’s more, the loss of four pro-democracy seats has removed the checks and balances in Hong Kong’s bicameral legislature – the Legislative Council – which comprises the democratically-elected Geographical Constituencies and the undemocratic Functional Constituencies stacked with pro-business special interest lobbyists. 

The unseating of the foursome has cost the opposition its majority in the Geographical Constituencies, which means that any unwanted bill proposed by a pro-Beijing lawmaker will sail pass both houses.
One of the first things that the pro-Beijing camp plans on doing is amend the voting procedures in the legislature to put an end to filibusters. 

Without the ability to block that amendment, the opposition will see its only effective weapon against the government taken away. 

That means there will be nothing to stop the Hong Kong government from pushing through Beijing’s political agenda for Hong Kong, from the passing of a highly unpopular anti-subversion law to the approval of multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects for great economic integration with the mainland.
All that will work in Beijing’s favour in the short run, but the headache won’t be far behind. 

A legislature that acts with complete impunity will further embitter the population and destabilize Hong Kong. 

By pushing the opposition out of the legislature and back onto the streets, Beijing may have inadvertently set in motion a new era of resistance.
The same ingredients that ignited the Occupy Movement three years ago will once again bubble to the surface, pushing the city toward a political movement of a larger scale and with more far-reaching repercussions. 

None of that is in Xi’s interest, considering that the senior Chinese leadership is already mired in factional infighting and an increasingly ungovernable Hong Kong will hurt the strongman image that Xi has so carefully crafted for himself.
What separates a skilled autocrat from the rest of the mad dictators is his ability to judge the difference between going too far and just far enough. 

Control may be the Chinese Communist Party’s best substitute for legitimacy and a necessary condition for self-perpetuation, but how much control is too much continues to confound –and may one day trip up – Xi’s leadership. 

What happened to Liu Xiaobo and the four ousted lawmakers in Hong Kong suggests that Beijing is now dangerously close to overstepping that line. 

The price for misjudging the situation will be high, and while most of it will be borne by mainland dissidents and the citizens of Hong Kong, it may pack enough punch to upset the ever-delicate balance in the house of cards.

Kowtowing to China’s despots

Paying The Price Of Chinese Business ‘Partners’

Byy Larry M. Elkin

A portrait of Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Peace Center in 2010. 

Two stories juxtaposed in the news late last week show just what it means to have China as a business “partner.”
First came word that famous dissident and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo died in a Chinese prison hospital, where he was suffering from liver cancer, at age 61. 

Both a German doctor and an American doctor recently examined Liu and pronounced him fit to travel abroad for treatment, which many Western governments urged China to allow. 

The Chinese government disputed the Western doctors’ findings, however, declaring Liu too ill to travel.
Beijing was never going to let Liu go, regardless of his state of health. 

His prompt death will surely be cited by his captors as evidence that they were right about his condition. 

Hardly anyone outside China will take such a claim at face value, when Liu’s death was so conveniently timed to remove a problem for the regime.
Liu had been in custody since late 2008 for his part in drafting Charter 08, a call for democratic, multi-party elections and the recognition of Chinese citizens’ human and civil rights. 

Not only did China refuse to let Liu accept his Nobel Prize in 2010, but the government did its utmost to ensure any Chinese invitee could not attend. 

It also threatened to retaliate against governments, including Norway, that it viewed as celebrating Liu’s recognition. 

Even before Charter 08, Liu had been an active voice for governmental reform since the Tiananmen protests of 1989. 

As The Wall Street Journal observed, Liu was the first Nobel Peace laureate to die in custody since 1938, when Carl von Ossietzky died in a prison hospital in Nazi Germany.
The second news item also appeared in The Wall Street Journal. 

The news outlet reported that Western companies face a major obstacle to introducing self-driving cars in China: The country won’t let them map its roads. 

Chinese mapping is done under licenses issued only to Chinese companies, 13 of them to date. 

Even Google Maps, ubiquitous in so much of the world, is restricted to use on desktop computers – not especially handy for turn-by-turn directions. 

These restrictions are in place for national security reasons, according to the government.
In contrast to the assertions about Liu’s medical condition, I am inclined to take this one at face value – just not in the way China presumably intends. 

Advanced weapons used by America and its allies have all the precise guidance they need; they don’t require Waze to find the places they need to go. 

On the other hand, if China’s citizens ever rise up against the country’s self-appointed and self-perpetuating ruling class, we can be sure that one of the government’s first counterrevolutionary steps will be to sharply restrict travel – and to turn off the mapping software that could guide everything from flash mobs to rogue soldiers driving tanks.
National security, indeed.
So, under the circumstances, will Western car companies walk away from the Chinese market? 

Not a chance. 

Robert Bosch GmbH, a German auto supplier, has already announced a partnership with Chinese mapping firms, according to the Journal. 

South Korea’s Hyundai Motors has also said it will work with one of China’s licensed mappers, and GM may not be far behind. 

Volvo may likewise follow, although that prominent brand with Swedish roots is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate. 

If history is any indication, few in the autonomous car industry will walk away from the huge consumer market that China represents, regardless of the draconian restrictions involved.
Like virtually every other Western industry – other than defense – over the past three decades, the makers of self-driving cars will kowtow to China’s rulers and take whatever crumbs happen to drop off the country’s economic banquet table. 

The shame this choice entails will only be briefly highlighted by the death in captivity of the fearless Nobel Prize laureate who devoted his entire adult life to the liberation of his nation, currently held captive by itself.

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.

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.