[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Update: On 13 July 2017 the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his pro-democracy work, died in hospital aged 61.
Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate and writer Liu Xiaobo, who was imprisoned since 2009 for calling for more freedom in his country, has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He was recently released into hospital for treatment and his state of health is considered critical.
Index calls on the UK government to urge China to release Liu immediately and allow him to travel abroad for treatment. It also calls on the UK ambassador to visit Liu and his wife the poet Liu Xia in the hospital. In the past few days, Liu has reiterated his request to be able to travel to have medical treatment.
Liu’s friends and journalists report trying to visit the couple in the hospital and being beaten by police.
In December 2008, Liu co-drafted Charter 08, a document modelled on Václav Havel’s Charter 77, written in Communist Czechoslovakia 30 years earlier. The document outlines the basic principles and fundamental rights that should govern China’s political landscape including freedom of association. Over 350 intellectuals and activists initially signed it, with a further 10,000 people including academics, journalists and businessmen adding their names to it upon its release. The government’s reaction to Charter 08 was swift and harsh. Liu was initially arrested two days prior to its official publication and later charged with 11 years in prison for incitement to subversion, during a trial in which he said he had no enemies. Index has repeatedly called for his release.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1499953076038-54c71786-d828-10″ taxonomies=”85″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Update: On 13 July 2017 the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, jailed for his pro-democracy work, died in hospital aged 61.
When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Chinese authorities were sent into a state of panic. Liu had been in prison since 2009, following the release of Charter 08, a pamphlet he co-wrote that called for greater democratic freedoms. As the world’s attention was on China and on Liu, all references to Liu and the prize were blocked online and off. Then his wife and many of his acquaintances were detained in an attempt to stop them from going to Oslo and collecting it on his behalf. At the ceremony itself, an empty chair became a stark reminder of his absence and soon the words “empty chair” started to race through the internet. These too were blocked.
Liu has since remained in prison and efforts to stamp out his name continue. But last week he once again made headlines following his release from prison on health grounds. At the time of writing, reports say Liu, who is suffering from late-stage liver cancer, is close to death. For free speech advocates around the world, this news is saddening. No figure has come to represent the fight for Chinese democracy as much as Liu Xiaobo.
Born in 1955 in Jilin province in northeast China, the son of two teachers, Liu went on to become a writer, activist and academic. It was while teaching at Columbia’s Barnard College in New York in 1989 that the Tiananmen Square protests broke out. Liu decided to return to China to take part in them on their final, fateful day. This led to his arrest and imprisonment, the first of four times.
Liu was shunned by China’s academic community when he left prison two years later, but that did not silence him and he continued to build on his reputation within China as an outspoken critic of the Communist Party. He also started a tradition of writing poems about Tiananmen every year to mark the anniversary – a powerful reminder that the government does not have a monopoly on memory.
For Liu the internet was a lifeline. He described it as “God’s gift to the Chinese people” in an essay that was published in Index on Censorship magazine in 2006. The web became his primary portal to publish his thoughts to the outside world and to reach audiences when traditional forms of media were out of bounds. Liu wrote that “the effect of the internet in improving the state of free expression in China cannot be underestimated”.
Liu’s influence peaked in December 2008 with Charter 08, a document modelled on Václav Havel’s Charter 77, written in Communist Czechoslovakia 30 years earlier. The document outlines the basic principles and fundamental rights that should govern China’s political landscape. Over 350 intellectuals and activists initially signed it, with a further 10,000 people including academics, journalists and businessmen adding their names to it upon its released. The government’s reaction to Charter 08 was swift and harsh. Liu was initially arrested two days prior to its official publication and later charged with 11 years in prison for incitement to subversion, during a trial in which he said he had no enemies. Index has repeatedly called for his release.
Isabel Hilton, a leading expert on China, told Index back in 2010 that “when the history of free expression and freedom of ideas is written, he and the other signatories of Charter 08 will be remembered as courageous citizens who sought the best for their country”.
In an interview Liu gave prior to his arrest, he said: “The way I see it, people like me live in two prisons in China. You come out of the small, fenced-in prison, only to enter the bigger, fenceless prison of society.” Since Liu’s arrest almost a decade ago, China has continued to change at breakneck speed. When it comes to human rights and free speech, sadly this change has been predominantly for the worse. The bigger, fenceless prison that Liu spoke of is today a lot more closed and draconian. China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, has overseen a huge crackdown on dissent. And the internet, God’s gift to China, is more regulated that ever before. Even seemingly innocent entertainment channels are frequently shut down, such as Kuaishou, a video-sharing site, which Index on Censorship reported on in its most recent issue.
Despite this, people continue to fight for greater freedom and rights in China, exploiting loopholes online as and when they can, and showing remarkable courage in the face of extreme adversity. The role of Liu in setting an example and providing inspiration cannot be underplayed. Liu’s Nobel chair might still be empty, but he is never forgotten, nor will he ever be.
The Ministry of Truth is an Orwellian notion. But in China directives dictating what newspapers can and cannot write about actually exist. China Digital Times (CDT), an excellent online publication co-ordinated by Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at UC Berkeley, California collects directives and publishes them on a weekly basis, under the title of the Ministry of Truth directives. The censorship directives aren’t widely available, Xiao’s sources vary, but they include twitter accounts and blogs. The CDT translate the instructions and check “them against official Chinese media reports to confirm their implementation.”
A directive published by CDT on 12 December makes clear that after the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony on 10 December, the Ministry of Truth pointedly told newspapers not to report on the Chinese winner of the nobel peace prize dissident Liu Xiaobo. As usual some Chinese citizens and journalists found a way to covertly talk about the issue, one newspaper front page — the groundbreaking Southern Metropolis Daily — broke this rule. The chairs on the cover, which were for a story on the opening of the Asian Para Games, were widely interpreted as representing Liu’s empty chair at the Nobel ceremony, with the cranes apparently indicating a tribute to the empty chair.
One of the comments from netizens, translated by CDT, was:
qqxk 缱绻星空: Congratulating the empty chair??? This is fatalistic. I love Southern Metropolis Daily. Very talented. But I am extremely worried how long [the paper] will last?!!
Other Chinese citzens celebrated the award via the Sina microblog, the hottest new social media in China, which is often used to publish fresh information and celebrate censored events. In the weekend that followed the ceremony, people began to publish descriptions of people they admired, people who just happened to have the surname Liu. Cooincidently these Liu’s seemed to share many attributes with Liu Xiaobo, they had “won many awards” the were also “unjustly accused and spent many years in prison.” The ultimate name, though, would be a celebrated actor, political figure or sportsman. Examples that were wildly circulated were translated by China blog Danwei’s Joel Martinsen:
From @VicCh:
Essay: The person I admire most — “The person I most admire has the surname Liu. He has won major international prizes, and his deeds have inspired a fighting spirit in his countrymen. Although for a time he vanished from our sight, I believe his spirit will live on….” The teacher moves to call the police. The next line: “His name is Liu Xiang (刘翔).”
From @doubleaf (陈双叶) via @songshinan (宋石男):
The person I most admire has the surname Liu. He led students campaigns, published books, and won international prizes. Later he was unjustly accused and spent many years in prison. But I believe that all of this is but the test of history, because he said that fortunately, history is written by the people. His name is Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇).
There have been few other ways of celebrating or reacting to the ceremony this month, either on the internet or in state media. iZaobao, a well-known (and blocked) news analysis blog, mentioned only the “award ceremony in Oslo”, and not to the person or prize by name. Liu Xia, Liu Xiaobo’s wife, is still under close surveillance and had her telephone line was cut on the day of the ceremony. Those who feel the confinement unnecessary so long after the event have condemned this act. Members of Liu’s family are also still prevented from visiting him in prison.
With less than a day to go before the Nobel Committee awards Chinese imprisoned dissident (or convicted criminal if you are the Beijing government) Liu Xiaobo this year’s peace prize, China has been stumbling over itself to create diversions, block news, gather allies, and negate the legitimacy of the award.
The first things to go were the news websites. As early as Thursday 9 December, the BBC, CNN and NRK, a Norwegian television channel, were all blocked on the mainland. Naturally nobelprize.org is blocked.
The English-language domestic press, however, were not shy about raising the issue. In the China Daily this morning, a front page lead declared “’Most nations’ oppose peace prize to Liu.” The story, which was merely reporting comments made by Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu also linked to a curious opinion piece: “Insult of the Nobel Peace Prize,” which selected excerpts from an earlier editorial in an unidentified Norwegian newspaper.
It was a similar story in the other English-language daily, Global Times. “Beijing firm on Nobel,” ran the top front-page story, which also carried Jiang’s comments. The lead editorial, “Oslo puts on a farce against China ,” was much more dramatic than China Daily’s. “It’s unimaginable that such a farce, the like of which is more commonly seen in cults, is being staged on the civilized continent of Europe,” it runs. “Tonight’s political show is not an easy task for the Norwegians. They have to ignore the signs of China’s drastic changes and social progress, in a bid to convince themselves that China’s “darkness” is real.”
At least 18 countries have made their excuses, including Russia, Serbia and Saudi Arabia. That leaves approximately two thirds of embassies accepting the invitation. Western news reports say China has pressured diplomats not to attend, but China denies this while publicly making comments such as: “We hope those countries that have received the invitation can tell right from wrong.”
Meanwhile, in China itself, scores of dissidents have had their movements curtailed — put under house arrest, forcibly moved out of Beijing, prevented from leaving the country and having their phone lines cut. “While such tactics are common before important events such as political meetings, it is rare for pressure to last so long and be applied so extensively,” reports The Guardian. Chinese police have surrounded the home of Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, in Beijing, where she is believed to be under house arrest.
However, perhaps the most perplexing of China’s anti-Nobel preparations was the quick whipping up of a new peace prize to rival the Nobel award. The first Confucius Peace Prize was awarded to former Taiwanese vice-president Lien Chan yesterday at a hurriedly held press conference in Beijing. Lien’s office says it knew nothing about the prize, and an infant girl was carried in to accept the prize on his behalf.
Like Lien, Liu will not be picking up his prize in person. Nobel committee secretary Geir Lundestad said Liu will be represented “by an empty chair … the strongest possible argument” for awarding it to him.
If you want a look at the power of Liu’s pen and why the Chinese government considers him a threat, The Telegraph has published parts of a speech he gave two years ago. Read it here.
