Liu Xiaobo

Literary "Dark Horse" and the 1989 Democracy Movement

Liu Xiaobo (28 December 1955 – 13 July 2017) was born in Changchun, Jilin, and became a Chinese literary critic and democracy advocate. After the resumption of the national college entrance examination in 1977, he was admitted to the Chinese department of Jilin University, graduating in 1982 before pursuing a master's degree at Beijing Normal University, where he earned an M.A. in literary theory in 1984 and stayed on as a lecturer; in 1988 he received a doctorate in literary theory from the same university and spent that year as a visiting researcher at the University of Oslo, the University of Hawaii, and Columbia University. His 1988 book "Critique of Choice: A Dialogue with Li Zehou" drew wide attention and earned him a reputation as a "dark horse" of the literary establishment. When the Beijing student movement erupted in 1989 he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University and returned to China immediately to join it. On 2 June he launched a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square together with Zhou Duo, Gao Xin, and Hou Dejian, issuing the "June Second Hunger Strike Declaration"; the four became known as the "Four Gentlemen of the Square." Late on 3 June, as martial law troops closed in on the square, the four negotiated with the military, helping secure a peaceful student withdrawal and averting greater bloodshed. He was arrested on 6 June, officially branded the movement's "black hand," and expelled from Beijing Normal University in September. In 1991 the Beijing Intermediate Court tried him for "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement" but exempted him from criminal punishment, citing "meritorious service."

Continued Dissent and Re-education Through Labor

Liu Xiaobo did not stop publishing dissenting essays after his release. In August 1996, after co-signing the "October Tenth Declaration" calling for peaceful reunification across the Taiwan Strait, he was detained by Beijing police two days before its publication and subsequently sentenced to three years of re-education through labor, serving his term at a labor camp in Dalian until his release in October 1999. Around 2000 he helped found the Independent Chinese PEN Center, was elected its first president in November 2003, was re-elected in November 2005, and did not seek another term after October 2007.

Charter 08 and the Final Arrest

In 2008, Liu Xiaobo was one of the principal drafters of Charter 08. Modelled on Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, the manifesto called for constitutional revision, separation of powers, judicial independence, and protection of basic human rights; it was set to be released on Human Rights Day, 10 December 2008, with an initial 303 signatories, a number that continued to grow to more than 13,000 by 2011. Two days before its release, on 8 December, he was taken away by police; he was formally arrested in June 2009, tried on 23 December, and sentenced on 25 December to eleven years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" — among the harshest sentences given for such a charge at the time.

The Nobel Peace Prize and Its Aftermath

In 2010, Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison, becoming the first citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive it. He was only the third person in history to win a Nobel Prize while serving a sentence or in detention, after Carl von Ossietzky of Germany in 1935 and Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar in 1991, and the only laureate ever to go from the announcement of his prize to his death without regaining full personal freedom. At the Oslo award ceremony that December, his seat was left empty throughout — one of the ceremony's most widely remembered images. His wife, Liu Xia, was placed under extralegal house arrest from that October, barred from communicating or leaving her home, restrictions that continued for years afterward. In May 2017, while still serving his sentence, Liu was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and granted medical parole, transferred to the First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, though he remained under close guard; offers from doctors in Germany and the United States to treat him or facilitate his travel abroad for treatment were not granted. He died in Shenyang on 13 July of that year from multiple organ failure, at the age of 61. On 15 July, the same day his body was cremated, authorities held a sea burial for his ashes — an arrangement widely understood as intended to prevent the creation of a gravesite that could become a place of public mourning.