75 Facts About Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo was a Chinese literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China.

Liu Xiaobo was arrested numerous times, and was described as China's most prominent dissident and the country's most famous political prisoner.

Liu Xiaobo eventually became a visiting scholar at several international universities.

Liu Xiaobo returned to China to support the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and was imprisoned for the first time from 1989 to 1991, again from 1995 to 1996 and yet again from 1996 to 1999 for his involvement on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power.

Liu Xiaobo served as the President of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, from 2003 to 2007.

Liu Xiaobo was the president of Minzhu Zhongguo magazine starting in the mid-1990s.

On 8 December 2008, Liu Xiaobo was detained due to his participation with the Charter 08 manifesto.

Liu Xiaobo was formally arrested on 23 June 2009 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power".

Liu Xiaobo was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009 and sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.

Liu Xiaobo was the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China.

Liu Xiaobo was the third person to have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi.

Liu Xiaobo was the second person to have been denied the right to have a representative collect the Nobel Prize for him as well as the second to die in custody, with the first being Ossietzky, who died in Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg after being detained in a Nazi concentration camp.

Liu Xiaobo was born on 28 December 1955 in Changchun, Jilin province, to a family of intellectuals.

Liu Xiaobo's father, Liu Xiaobo Ling, was born in 1931 in Huaide County, Jilin.

Liu Xiaobo was the third-born in a family of five boys.

In 1969, during the Down to the Countryside Movement, Liu Xiaobo's father took him to Horqin Right Front Banner, Inner Mongolia.

Liu Xiaobo's father was a professor who remained loyal to the Communist Party.

In 1977, Liu Xiaobo was admitted to the Department of Chinese Literature at Jilin University, where he founded a poetry group known as "The Innocent Hearts" with six schoolmates.

In 1986, Liu Xiaobo started his doctoral study program and published his literary critiques in various magazines.

Liu Xiaobo became renowned as a "dark horse" for his radical opinions and scathing comments on the official doctrines and establishments.

Liu Xiaobo soon became a visiting scholar at several universities, including Columbia University, the University of Oslo, and the University of Hawaii.

Liu Xiaobo was later named one of the "four junzis of Tiananmen Square" for persuading students to leave the square and thus saving hundreds of lives.

Liu Xiaobo strongly criticized Chinese intellectuals' "traditional attitude of searching for rationalism and harmony as a slave mentality" just as it was criticized by radical left-wing literary critic Lu Hsun during the New Culture Movement.

Liu Xiaobo echoed the New Cultural Movement's call for wholesale westernization and the rejection of Chinese traditional culture.

Liu Xiaobo regarded it most unfortunate that his monolingualism bound him to the Chinese cultural sphere.

Liu Xiaobo admitted in 2006 in another interview with Open Magazine that his 1988 response of "300 years of colonialism" was extemporaneous, although he did not intend to retract it, because it represented "an extreme expression of his longheld belief".

On 27 April 1989, Liu Xiaobo returned to Beijing and immediately became an active supporter of the movement.

Liu Xiaobo requested that both the government and the students abandon the ideology of class struggle and adopt a new political culture of dialogue and compromise.

Liu Xiaobo's publications were banned, including his fourth book, Going Naked Toward God, which was then in press.

In January 1991,19 months after his arrest, Liu Xiaobo was convicted of "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement" but he was exempted from criminal punishment due to his "major meritorious action" for preventing what could have been a bloody confrontation in Tiananmen Square.

Liu Xiaobo resumed his writing, mostly on human rights and political issues, but was not allowed to publish them in Mainland China.

In January 1993, Liu Xiaobo was invited to visit Australia and the United States for the interviews in the documentary film The Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Liu Xiaobo was held under residential surveillance in the suburbs of Beijing for nine months.

Liu Xiaobo was released in February 1996 but was arrested again on 8 October for writing an October Tenth Declaration, coauthored by him and another prominent dissident, Wang Xizhe, mainly on the Taiwan issue, that advocated a peaceful reunification in order to oppose the Chinese Communist Party's forceful threats against the island.

Liu Xiaobo was ordered to serve three years of reeducation through labor "for disturbing public order" for that statement.

In 1996, while he was still imprisoned in the labor camp, Liu Xiaobo married Liu Xiaobo Xia, who herself was not a prisoner.

In 2000, while in Taiwan, Liu Xiaobo published the book A Nation That Lies to Conscience, a 400-page political criticism.

In 2003, when Liu Xiaobo started writing a human rights report on China at his home, his computer, letters and documents were all confiscated by the government.

In January 2005, following the death of former Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, who had shown sympathy towards the student demonstrations in 1989, Liu Xiaobo was immediately put under house arrest for two weeks before he learned about the death of Zhao.

Liu Xiaobo's writing is considered subversive by the Chinese Communist Party, and his name is censored.

Liu Xiaobo called for multi-party elections and free markets, advocated the values of freedom, supported separation of powers and urged the governments to be accountable for its wrongdoings.

Liu Xiaobo actively participated in the writing of Charter 08 and signed it along with more than three hundred Chinese citizens.

Two days before the official release of Charter 08, late on the evening of 8 December 2008, Liu Xiaobo was taken into custody by the police, as was Zhang Zuhua, another scholar and Charter 08 signatory.

Liu Xiaobo was tried at Beijing No 1 Intermediate Court on 23 December 2009.

Liu Xiaobo's wife was not permitted to observe the hearing, although his brother-in-law was present.

Liu Xiaobo wrote a statement, entitled "I have no enemies", intending for it to be read at his trial.

The essay was later read in the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, which Liu Xiaobo was unable to attend due to his imprisonment.

On 25 December 2009, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights by the Beijing No 2 Intermediate Court on charges of "inciting subversion of state power".

Liu Xiaobo argued that his verdict violated both the Chinese constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations.

Liu Xiaobo argued that charges against him of 'spreading rumors, slandering and in other ways inciting the subversion of the government and overturning the socialist system' were contrived, as he did not fabricate or create false information, nor did he besmirch the good name and character of others by merely expressing a point of view, a value judgment.

However, Liu Xiaobo was advocating for the incremental and peaceful adoption of a democratic system with individual rights.

Liu Xiaobo's detention was condemned worldwide by both human rights organizations and foreign countries.

On 18 January 2010, Liu Xiaobo was nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize by Vaclav Havel, the 14th Dalai Lama, Andre Glucksmann, Vartan Gregorian, Mike Moore, Karel Schwarzenberg, Desmond Tutu and Grigory Yavlinsky.

China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ma Zhaoxu stated that awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo would be "totally wrong".

On 6 October 2010, the non-governmental organization Freedom Now, which serves as an international counsel to Liu Xiaobo as retained by his family, publicly released a letter from 30 members of the US Congress to President Barack Obama, urging him to directly raise both Liu's case and that of fellow imprisoned dissident Gao Zhisheng to Chinese President Hu Jintao at the G-20 Summit in November 2010.

The Republic of China's President Ma Ying-jiu congratulated Liu Xiaobo on winning the Nobel Prize and requested that the Chinese authorities improve their impression in the eyes of the world by respecting human rights, but did not call for his release from prison.

On 15 October 2010, the China News Service indicated that in 2008 Liu Xiaobo had received a financial endowment from the National Endowment for Democracy, which is "a Washington-based nonprofit funded largely by the US Congress".

The "Freedom for Liu Xiaobo" appeal was supported by more than 700 writers from around the world, among them Nobel Prize laureates John M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Herta Muller and Elfriede Jelinek, as well as Breyten Breytenbach, Eliot Weinberger, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Mario Vargas Llosa, Wolf Biermann and Dave Eggers.

On 19 November 2013, his wife, Liu Xia, who was placed under house arrest shortly after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, filed an appeal for Liu Xiaobo's retrial.

Liu Xiaobo said, "The prize should belong to all who signed Charter 08 and were jailed due to their support".

Liu Xiaobo Xia informed her husband of his award during a visit to Jinzhou Prison on 9 October 2010, one day after the official announcement.

Liu Xiaobo reported that Liu wept and dedicated the award to those who suffered as a result of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, saying: "The award is first and foremost for the Tiananmen martyrs" After Mrs Liu returned home, she was put under house arrest and was watched by armed guards.

Liu Xiaobo Xia wrote an open letter to 143 prominent figures, encouraging them to attend the award ceremony in Oslo.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry denounced the award to Liu Xiaobo, saying that it "runs completely counter to the principle of the award and it is a desecration of the Peace Prize".

On 26 June 2017, it was reported that Liu Xiaobo had been granted medical parole after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in late May 2017.

The foreign doctors said that Liu Xiaobo had indicated that he wanted to be sent abroad for treatment.

Liu Xiaobo died on 13 July 2017 in Shenyang's First Hospital of China Medical University from liver cancer.

Whilst Liu Xiaobo's death was widely reported in the Western media, it was mentioned only in the most perfunctory manner in the press inside mainland China.

Censors deleted images or emojis of candles, or a simple "RIP"; searches on Sina Weibo regarding Liu's health returned the message: "According to relevant laws and policies, results for 'Liu Xiaobo' cannot be displayed".

All the questions international journalists have been asking about Liu Xiaobo failed to appear in official transcripts of news briefings by the Chinese foreign ministry.

Liu Xiaobo was for decades a central voice for human rights and China's further development.

Reiss-Andersen said Liu Xiaobo will remain "a powerful symbol for all who fight for freedom, democracy and a better world".

Liu Xiaobo further stated that "Liu Xiaobo should have been allowed to choose his own medical treatment overseas" and called for the Chinese authorities "to lift all restrictions" on Liu's widow.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that "Mr Liu Xiaobo dedicated his life to the betterment of his country and humankind, and to the pursuit of justice and liberty," and urged Beijing to free Liu Xiaobo's widow.

Liu Xiaobo was the true embodiment of the democratic, non-violent ideals he so ardently advocated.