Liu Xiaobo

Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist (1955–2017)

Liu Xiaobo: The Empty Chair in Oslo

On 10 December 2010 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to a man locked in a Chinese prison, and laid the medal and diploma on an empty chair. Fifteen governments had declined their invitations under pressure from Beijing. Liu Xiaobo had learned of the award two months earlier, from his wife, during a prison visit; he wept and dedicated it to the "Tiananmen martyrs." He was the third laureate to be held by his own government at the moment of the award, after Carl von Ossietzky and Aung San Suu Kyi. Seven years later he died in state custody — the first Nobel Peace laureate to do so since 1935.

The Black Horse of Chinese Criticism

He was born on 28 December 1955 in Changchun, Jilin province, into an academic household — his father, Liu Ling, was a professor of Chinese literature at Northeast Normal University, his mother, Zhang Suqin, worked at the university nursery. He was the third of five sons.

He took a BA in literature from Jilin University in 1982, where he founded a poetry group called The Innocent Hearts, then an MA in 1984 and a doctorate in 1988 from Beijing Normal University. His thesis, *Esthetic and Human Freedom*, passed unanimously and was published as his second book.

By then he was already notorious. His 1987 debut, *Criticism of the Choice*, attacked Li Zehou, then the most influential aesthetician in China, and became a bestseller. He assaulted Confucianism and official doctrine with equal relish, championing individual subjectivity and aesthetic freedom against every collectivist orthodoxy on offer. Observers called the phenomenon the "Liu Xiaobo Shock."

Three Hundred Years of Colonialism

The recklessness had a cost that followed him for life. In a 1988 interview he declared that "modernization means wholesale westernization" and that China would need "three hundred years of colonialism" to become what Hong Kong had become. It was a deliberate provocation, and the state press mined it for decades as proof that he despised his own country.

He did not defend it later. By 2002 he was describing his younger self as having been "nurtured in hatred, violence and arrogance." His view of the West had already been complicated by his travels — a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York prompted him to admit he had been overlooking the flaws of Western culture.

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Tiananmen

He was a visiting scholar at Columbia in the spring of 1989 and could have stayed there. He came home in April instead.

On 2 June he joined three others in a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square; the four became known as the four *junzis*, the four gentlemen. Then, as the army moved in on the night of 3–4 June, Liu did something that had nothing to do with martyrdom. He negotiated simultaneously with army commanders and with the student leaders, and secured a peaceful withdrawal for the several thousand students still in the square.

He was arrested on 5 June and held for nineteen months at Qincheng Prison. In January 1991 a court convicted him of "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement" — and then exempted him from punishment on the grounds of his "major meritorious action." The state had put on the record that the dissident saved lives its soldiers would otherwise have taken. His first marriage did not survive; his ex-wife and son emigrated to the United States.

The Years of Small Sentences

What followed was two decades of harassment punctuated by imprisonment. He was detained for nine months in 1995–96 for petitioning on the Tiananmen anniversary. In October 1996 he was sentenced to three years of reeducation through labour for co-authoring the October Tenth Declaration on Taiwan. While serving that sentence he married Liu Xia, a poet and visual artist, who became, in the Nobel Foundation's phrase, his most important link to the outside world.

He kept writing throughout — nearly 800 essays, 499 of them after 2005 — and served as president of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre from 2003 to 2007.

Charter 08, and "I Have No Enemies"

Charter 08 was a nineteen-point manifesto calling for freedom of expression, human rights, democratic elections and economic liberalism. Liu was among its principal drafters. He was taken from his Beijing home on 8 December 2008, two days before it was published with 303 signatories. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009, tried on 23 December, and on Christmas Day 2009 sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights for "inciting subversion of state power."

For the trial he wrote a statement he was never allowed to read aloud. "I Have No Enemies" argued that "the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit," and declared that he held no hatred toward the police who arrested him, the prosecutors who charged him, or the judges who would sentence him. It is the document his admirers regard as his real testament.

The Empty Chair

Nominated by Václav Havel and the Dalai Lama among others, Liu was awarded the 2010 Peace Prize "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." He became the first ethnically Chinese citizen living in China to win any Nobel Prize.

Beijing's response was total. It blocked CNN and the BBC, summoned Norway's ambassador, called the award a desecration, detained and surveilled dissidents, invented a rival "Confucius Peace Prize," and placed Liu Xia under house arrest without charge — a punishment she had done nothing to earn.

Why Liu Is Called a Genius

His raw intellectual capacity was certified early and is not seriously disputed: a unanimously passed doctorate at thirty-two, and a first book that took on China's leading aesthetician and outsold him. But the criticism, however electrifying in the 1980s, is not what the claim rests on.

The distinctive quality is moral reasoning performed under conditions engineered to destroy it — the repeated choice of the harder correct action over the more satisfying one. On the night of 3–4 June 1989 he was a hunger striker with every incentive toward martyrdom, and instead spent the night negotiating with the army that had come to kill him, getting thousands of students out alive. Twenty years later, facing eleven years, he wrote a statement insisting that enmity itself was the enemy. Both are acts of intellectual discipline under maximum pressure, which is rarer than brilliance.

The counter-case he largely supplied himself. The "three hundred years of colonialism" line was indefensible, and he said so. He endorsed the 2001 and 2003 American invasions as models of "how war should be conducted in a modern civilization" — a judgment that has aged very badly. Charter 08 was a collective document with 303 signatories and more than 600 later claiming shared responsibility; it was not a solitary feat. He was a courageous and inconsistent man, not a systematic political philosopher. What is unarguable is that he came home from New York in April 1989 when he could have stayed, and then paid, over twenty-eight years, the entire price.

Ashes in the Sea

Diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, Liu was granted medical parole on 26 June 2017. Foreign specialists who examined him said he wished to be treated abroad and was fit to travel; the hospital said no better treatment existed. He died on 13 July 2017, aged sixty-one. Two days later, after a stage-managed funeral, his body was cremated and the government announced his ashes had been scattered at sea at the family's request — leaving, as his supporters immediately noted, no grave to visit. Inside China, censors blocked his name and even the candle emoji. Outside it, Hong Kong held the only large Chinese commemoration, and Thorbjørn Jagland of the Nobel Committee made the comparison that Beijing least wanted made: to Ossietzky, who died in Nazi custody.