LIU XIAOBO

 

LIU XIAOBO

Liu Xiaobo has been one of the major human rights activists of contemporary China, as well as a writer, a scholar and a professor. He was born in Changchun, a town located in the northern Chinese province of Jilin, in 1955.

When he was a child, he experienced the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution enacted by the father of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, and he was forced to move to a commune in Mongolia with his family. After a decade of social and political instability under Maoism, in 1976 he was part of the first generation of students to go to university after 10 years of closure. He studied Chinese literature, and after graduating at the Beijing Normal University he moved to the United States and became a professor at the Columbia University in New York. Here he met Perry Link, a Chinese literature expert who will help him to spread his ideas during his prison’s years. Liu represented that prominent group of Chinese intellectuals whose ideals were based on democracy, human rights and above all freedom of expression. In fact, between 2003 and 2007 he has been the director of the non-profit organization known as Independent Chinese Pen Centre, of which the main objective was to promote Chinese writers’ freedom of expression. This is what he has struggled to achieve for his entire life, and after his death in 2017 he became the symbol of human rights in China.

His contribute to Tiananmen Square protests

“The massacre in 1989 left me a profound impression” this is how Liu Xiaobo expressed his concerns about the democratic protests broken out in Tiananmen Square on the 4th of June 1989 during a BBC interview. In the spring of that year, the dissident decided to take a flight back to Beijing in order to take part in the peaceful demonstrations against the one-party regime, and he supported the student’s requests of democracy. During the crackdown of the 4th of June, he convinced some protesters to abandon the camp before the escalation of violence perpetrated by the army and negotiated with the troops to allow a peaceful exit, saving many lives.

Because of his activism, he was arrested and detained for 19 months with the accusation of “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement”, and then sent for three years in a labour camp because of his campaign for those detained after the Tiananmen protests. During his detention in a laogai, he married Liu Xia, a poetess and artist, who uses her art to spread messages of freedom.

In the following years, he was forbidden to publish his own drafts, and those books already made public were withdrawn from the Chinese market. Although manyattempts of repression by the Chinese government, he never stopped spreading his hope for democracy and freedom. In 2008, in honour of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights he created and promoted Charta 08, a document signed by over 330 Chinese scholars. It represented the manifesto of democracy, and the main requests were democratic elections and the end of the one- party rule, the freedom of expression, association, religion, as well as the protection of the 55 ethnic minorities living in the country. He strongly criticized contemporary China political institutions; he argued that all those rights cited by the 35th article of Chinese constitution were not complied, and he called for the creation of a commission ad hoc to protect human dignity. Because of Charta 08, he was accused of incitement to undermining national order and sentenced to 11 years in jail.

Nobel Peace Prize
In 2010, he was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his “long and non - violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. He wasn’t able to participate to the ceremony and was represented by an empty chair, while his manifesto, Charta 08, has been read by Liv Ulmann. The Nobel committee described him as the foremost symbol of the struggle for human rights in China. He died on the 13th of July 2017, after being hospitalized for a terminal liver cancer; thus, he became the first Nobel Prize laureate to have died in prison, without his own freedom.

“Today we mourn the death of the human rights' champion, Liu Xiaobo. He has inspired millions of people in China and globally with his courage and dignity”

Patrick Poon, China Researcher at Amnesty International

Author: Trainee at Institute for Cultural Relations Policy Carolina Montorfano