It was China’s decision to jail Liu Xiaobo for 11 years over a call for peaceful democratic reform that spurred the Norwegian Nobel committee to honour him with its peace prize in 2010 and propelled him to international renown. But his first nomination had come two decades earlier, after the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests of 1989, in which the author and intellectual played a key role, first as one of the prominent “four gentlemen” who launched a hunger strike in support of the students; then by helping to broker a peaceful exit from the square for remaining demonstrators amid the bloody crackdown.

The events were the turning point in Liu’s life. The writer, who has died aged 61 of cancer, was abroad when the movement erupted and he went home despite the risks. It brought jail, an end to his career as a brilliant young literary professor, and the ending of his first marriage to Tao Li; thereafter his contact with his son, Liu Tao, was limited. But the transformation was internal too. He never forgave himself for writing the confession that shortened his sentence. He believed he had not only sold out his dignity, but also the souls of the dead.

After 1989, many outspoken figures fled abroad or fell silent: “Others can stop. I can’t,” said Liu, believing that to abandon course would be a second betrayal. He dedicated his Nobel prize to the martyrs of Tiananmen Square.

Liu was born in Changchun, Jilin, in north-east China, into an intellectual family. His parents, Liu Ling and Zhang Suqin, were devoted to the party, but from his youth Liu struck an independent course. After studying Chinese literature at Jilin University, he began an MA in 1982 at Beijing Normal University, where he stayed on as a lecturer. His keen intelligence and razor tongue soon established his reputation: hundreds watched his dissertation defence, while students from other universities packed out his electrifying lectures. He was also a visiting lecturer at the universities of Oslo and Hawaii, and Columbia University in New York.

He made as many enemies as admirers in those years. He was as merciless in dissecting friends and apparent allies as political opponents. He was individualist to the core, his friend and biographer Yu Jie noted, and it cost him close friendships. Later on, he acknowledged that he had been preoccupied with ideals of justice and human rights, showing little concern for the people around him. While he let some down he was steadfast in his commitment to others, becoming especially close to Ding Zilin and Jiang Peikun, who had founded the Tiananmen Mothers pressure group in response to the killing of their 17-year-old son.

Friends noted that he was far less abrasive in maturity and, as co-founder and director of the Independent Chinese PEN centre, showed an unexpected talent for dialogue and compromise.

In 2008 he helped to draft and gather support for Charter 08, a bold call for peaceful political reform and an end to one-party rule, inspired by the Czechoslovakian dissidents who issued Charter 77 in 1977. Police detained him at his flat two days before its release and the following year he was given a punitive 11-year sentence for inciting subversion. He was adamant that this time no confession would shorten his sentence.

China censored discussion of Liu and his Nobel win domestically. But intermittently its media denigrated him as a shill for western governments, highlighting his support for the Iraq war and a remark in a 1980s interview that it would take “300 years of colonialism” for China to reach Hong Kong’s level of development. Such comments were never contextualised, and though Liu saw western civilisation as a tool that was useful to reform China, he said it was utterly flawed and in need of critique itself. In any case, those comments bore no relation to his jailing.

Despite Liu’s sometimes acid remarks he was anything but austere; and was warm and playful with those he knew well – one letter to a fellow dissident, a serious discussion of political resistance, begins “Dear Baldie, or is it Beardie?”. He relished good red wine until hepatitis stopped him drinking. Friends teased him about his love of good food and voracious appetite, which he ascribed to the devastating famine of his youth, as well as to being one of five sons.

But even when notionally free, his life was shadowed by harassment, questioning, house arrest and surveillance. Asked why he continued – and why he made ambitious calls for fundamental reforms instead of targeting incremental improvements – he said his role was to push for changes that would benefit everyone.

It was in a labour camp, in 1996, that he married the poet Liu Xia. Her devotion sustained him and – painfully aware of his shortcomings in his first marriage – he was a very different husband the second time around. He took enormous pride in his wife’s talents.

“Your love has been the sunlight that leaps over high walls and shines through iron bars,” he said in a statement at his trial in 2009. “My love for you … is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight.”

They were planning for their life after his release. But late last month it emerged that Liu Xiaobo had been diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer, and he was transferred from prison to hospital, still under heavy guard.

“A calm and steady mind can look at a steel gate and see a road to freedom,” Liu once wrote of life as a prisoner. The gate remained locked and outside the political repression increased. Friends were bitter at the strikingly late diagnosis and the authorities’ refusal to let the couple go abroad or release them fully. Yet the man who alienated so many in his youth had told his trial that he had no enemies, speaking kindly of the police, prosecutors and judges.

He insisted that love could dissipate hate, and that progress would be made. No Enemies, No Hatred, a selection of his essays and poems, was published in 2013.

Liu is survived by Liu Xia, who has been living under house arrest since 2010, and by Liu Tao.

• Liu Xiaobo, author and Nobel peace laureate, born 28 December 1955; died 13 July 2017

(the guardian)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee condemned the Chinese authorities in a rare statement.

Liu Xiaobo, the first and so far the only Chinese citizen who has won the Nobel Peace Prize, has been released from Chinese prison on medical parole with liver cancer diagnosis.  The news has been widely transmitted around the world, yet in mainland China, only a few Chinese people were able to get access to the information through the Great Firewall.

On June 26, Liaoning Provincial Prison Administration released a brief statement about Liu’s release:

Liu Xiaobo, the prisoner of Jinzhou prison in Liaoning Province, was diagnosed with liver cancer. Recently, the Liaoning Provincial Prison Administration lawfully approved Liu’s medical parole. The First Hospital of China Medical University has formed a medical treatment group composed by eight well-known domestic cancer experts to treat Liu. Liu Xiaobo is receiving medical treatment accordingly.

Soon, Liu’s lawyer Shang Baojun verified the news to multiple media and acknowledged that Liu’s liver cancer is already in the late stage. A Hong Kong online magazine, Duan, posted a short video of Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who cried and talked about her husband’s condition in a staccato sentence:  “[They] cannot perform surgery, or radiotherapy, or chemotherapy.”

Liu Xiaobo, 61, a famous writer and commentator on Chinese politics, was sentenced to 11 years in Chinese prison in late 2009 for “subversion of state power.” He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Liu’s good friend Mo Zhixu told the Hong Kong magazine that in the prison, “Liu lived an isolated life. He had a piece of land to grow vegetables or to run around. But he was completely isolated from the outside world or other people.” In the eight years Liu was in prison, Mo added, “no book could be sent to him … for an intellectual, a life that is completely isolated from information is a harsh torture.”

Facing Liu’s current situation, the Norwegian Nobel Committee released a rare statement on June 26, condemning the Chinese authorities with unusually strong words. It said:

…the Committee strongly regrets that it took serious illness before Chinese authorities were willing to release him from jail. Liu Xiaobo has fought a relentless struggle in favor of democracy and human rights in China and has already paid a heavy price for his involvement. He was, essentially, convicted for exercising his freedom of speech and should never have been sentenced to jail in the first place. Chinese authorities carry a heavy responsibility if Liu Xiaobo, because of his imprisonment, has been denied necessary medical treatment. The Committee hopes that he will now be released without conditions and offered the best possible treatment for his illness, whether it be in China or abroad.

However, no single piece of information about Liu’s release or his health has been officially published in mainland China. Any information posted to Chinese social media, such as Weibo and WeChat, has been thoroughly and instantly deleted by Chinese censors.

Chinese censors not only deleted information related to Liu in social media, but also struck out relevant information in official transcripts. According to BBC Chinese, at a regular press briefing on June 26, a journalist asked Geng Shuang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, about Liu, but Geng said he knew nothing about it. Yet the brief dialogue was not recorded in the official transcript.

In an interview conducted by AFP, US embassy spokeswoman Mary Beth Polley said: “We call on the Chinese authorities to not only release Mr. Liu but also to allow his wife Ms. Liu Xia out of house arrest.”

On June 27, a journalist again asked the Chinese Foreign Ministry about Liu and China’s reply to the U.S. criticism at the regular press briefing.

According to the BBC, spokesperson Lu Kang replied: “China is a country with rule of law. Everyone is equal before the law. All other countries should respect China’s judicial independence and sovereignty and should not use any so-called individual case to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”

Not surprisingly, Lu’s reply was not recorded in the official transcript either.

Regardless of the harsh censorship, some Chinese netizens still tried their best to transmit the information on social media with their own cipher codes. Other talked vaguely about the importance of “conscience.”

Ironically, the word conscience in Chinese is “liangzhi,” which literally means “good knowledge.”Perhaps the Chinese ancestors who coined the word already knew that “good knowledge” is the precondition for an accurate conscience, and the best way to tar people’s conscience is to block information.

(the diplomat)