Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo (28 December 1955 – 13 July 2017) was a Chinese literary critic and democracy advocate. He served as a lecturer in the Chinese department at Beijing Normal University and participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, including a hunger strike, for which he was subsequently imprisoned. In 2008, he was one of the principal authors of Charter 08, a manifesto calling for constitutional reform and human rights protections that gathered thousands of signatures from Chinese citizens. He was arrested in December 2008 on charges of inciting subversion of state power and sentenced in December 2009 to eleven years in prison. In 2010, the Nobel Committee awarded that year's Peace Prize to the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo. In May 2017, he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer while serving his sentence and died in state custody in July of that year.