Asia-Pacific Features

Liu Xiaobo Profile

By Bill Smith Oct 8, 2010, 13:15 GMT

An undated Liu Xia handout image showing of jailed Chinese dissident and civil rights activist Liu Xiaobo in Beijing, China. EPA/LIU XIA/HANDOUT

   Beijing - 'I believe that my work has been just, and that someday China will be a free and democratic country,' Liu Xiaobo said in a statement issued by supporters shortly after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for subversion in December.

   Liu's firm stand for democracy and freedom of speech over two decades, despite Chinese authorities' attempts to silence him, won him many admirers inside and outside the country, culminating in the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

   His prison sentence was passed one year after his arrest at his Beijing home as he was about to release the Charter '08 for democratic reform.

   Liu, 54, had previously spent about five years in different forms of imprisonment, and many more years under police surveillance or house arrest.

   The former Beijing Normal University literature lecturer lost his job and was detained for nearly two years for defending students who joined the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and urging an investigation into the party's brutal military crackdown on the protestors.

   Born in 1955 in the north-eastern city of Changchun, by 1989 Liu was a reputed literary critic and philosophical essayist.

   He married his wife, Liu Xia, in 1996 after both had divorced previous spouses.

   Shortly after the wedding, Liu Xiaobo was sent to a 're-education through labour' camp for three years because of his continued activism.

   Following his release, Liu persisted in writing and publishing essays critical of China's authoritarian one-party political system under the ruling Communist Party.

   In 2001, he published the essay 'The price of suppressing Falun Gong,' in which he criticized a crackdown on the huge spiritual movement that was banned and labelled an 'evil cult' following anti-government protests in 1999.

   He headed the Independent Chinese PEN writers' group from 2003 and published regular critiques of Chinese politics and society on overseas websites, winning the 2004 press freedom prize from Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

   Liu became even more publicly outspoken in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, saying the government had broken its pre-Olympic promises and rejected the optimism of some Western politicians and analysts who claimed the awarding of the games to China would encourage greater political freedom and improvements in human rights.

   'Previously, I thought the human rights situation would improve as they promised. But now it seems not,' Liu told the German Press Agency dpa at the time.

   The same year, Liu was among a group of dissidents who urged the government to hold direct talks with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader, and allow a United Nations' investigation of Tibetan areas of China.

   Appealing shortly after anti-Chinese protests had escalated into deadly ethnic violence, Liu and the other activists accused the government of 'serious mistakes' and 'failed' policies in Tibet.

   Police arrested Liu again at his Beijing home as he was writing an article on Charter '08 in December 2008, two days before the publication of the charter.

   The charter demands sweeping changes to create a 'free, democratic and constitutional state,' and urges the release of all political prisoners. The original 303 signatories set out their ideals for transforming China into a liberal democracy and lament a lack of 'freedom, equality and human rights' under the Communist Party.

   More than 10,000 names were added to global online petitions supporting Charter '08, which was modelled on the Charter '77 produced by Czechoslovak dissidents.

   More than 150 leading US and European-based intellectuals, including award-winning writers Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Seamus Heaney and Hari Kunzru, issued an open letter calling for Liu's release.

   Former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who had signed Charter '77 as a dissident writer, joined the calls for Liu's freedom and was one of his most active backers for the Nobel Peace Prize.

   'The Chinese government should learn well the lesson of the Charter '77 movement: that intimidation, propaganda campaigns and repression are no substitute for reasoned dialogue,' Havel wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

   Nearly two years after Liu's latest arrest, international support for Liu has grown, making him a focus of Chinese democracy activists inside and outside the country.

   In the statement issued at his sentencing, Liu said he approached his latest imprisonment 'without the slightest regret.'

   'I have long been aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison,' he said. 'Now I am taking that step; and true freedom is that much nearer.'