Liu Xiaobo

Based on Wikipedia: Liu Xiaobo

On a December morning in 2010, an empty chair sat on the stage of Oslo City Hall. The Nobel Committee had awarded its Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, but the laureate could not attend. He was serving an eleven-year sentence in a Chinese prison for the crime of writing words.

The empty chair became one of the most powerful images in Nobel history. Only twice before had a peace laureate been imprisoned when receiving the honor: the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, held by the Nazis, and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991, under house arrest by her country's military junta. Liu joined this grim fraternity as China's most famous political prisoner, a man whose trajectory from radical literary critic to symbol of peaceful resistance illuminates the fraught relationship between intellectuals and power in modern China.

The Dark Horse of Chinese Literature

Liu Xiaobo was born on December 28, 1955, in Changchun, a northeastern Chinese city in Jilin province. His father was a literature professor at Northeast Normal University who remained loyal to the Communist Party even through its most turbulent years. Liu was the third of five boys in the family, and his childhood coincided with one of history's strangest social experiments.

When Liu was thirteen, Mao Zedong launched the Down to the Countryside Movement, a campaign that forcibly relocated millions of young urban Chinese to rural areas. The official rationale was that educated youth needed to learn from peasants. The actual effect was to devastate a generation's education while dispersing potential troublemakers away from cities. Liu's father took him to Inner Mongolia, to a region called Horqin Right Front Banner, where the teenager experienced the harsh realities of rural life under Maoism.

After finishing middle school in 1974, Liu was sent to work on a farm in Jilin. These years of manual labor and ideological indoctrination left deep marks. He would later recognize how thoroughly Maoist thinking had shaped his early consciousness, describing it as a poison that might take a lifetime to purge.

The restoration of university entrance examinations in 1977, after they had been suspended during the Cultural Revolution, opened a path out. Liu gained admission to Jilin University's Department of Chinese Literature, where he founded a poetry group with six classmates called "The Innocent Hearts." The name suggested both youthful idealism and a yearning for authenticity after years of ideological performance.

He graduated in 1982 and moved to Beijing Normal University for graduate study, receiving his master's degree in literature in 1984. That same year he married Tao Li; their son Liu Tao was born in 1985. But it was his doctoral work, beginning in 1986, that transformed him from promising student into intellectual provocateur.

Chinese literary circles nicknamed him the "dark horse." His critiques were radical, his opinions scathing, his targets nothing less than official doctrine and established authority. He attacked Confucianism with the fervor of a convert to modernity. He challenged rising intellectual stars. His first book, published in 1987, was titled "Criticism of the Choice: Dialogs with Li Zehou," and it became a nonfiction bestseller by taking direct aim at one of China's most influential philosophers.

The "Liu Xiaobo Shock" or "Liu Xiaobo Phenomenon" became shorthand for his effect on Chinese intellectual life. Here was someone willing to say publicly what others only whispered privately, someone whose criticism seemed to spare nothing and no one.

The Call for Three Hundred Years

In 1988, Liu gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine called Liberation Monthly that would haunt him for decades. When asked what China needed to truly transform itself, he gave an answer that still provokes debate: "Three hundred years of colonialism."

His reasoning was brutally simple. Hong Kong, after a century of British colonial rule, had developed into a modern society with rule of law and civil liberties. China was vastly larger and more complex. Therefore, Liu argued, it would take at least three hundred years of Western colonial administration to achieve similar transformation. He even expressed doubt that three centuries would be enough.

In the same interview, he called the Chinese people "wimpy, spineless, and fucked-up." He criticized a popular documentary called "River Elegy" for not going far enough in condemning Chinese culture. He declared that modernization simply meant westernization, and that choosing a human life meant choosing a Western way of life.

These statements require context. Liu was not advocating that Western powers should invade and subjugate China. He was expressing, in deliberately provocative terms, a profound despair about Chinese political culture and an idealized view of Western civilization that he himself would later repudiate. The year was 1988. Liu was thirty-two years old, drunk on radical ideas, and speaking to a Hong Kong audience with the confidence of someone who had never experienced the West firsthand.

That was about to change.

The Education of a Radical

In 1988, Liu received his doctorate and became a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. He also visited the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Hawaii. For the first time, he was experiencing Western civilization not as an abstraction or an ideology, but as a lived reality with its own contradictions and failures.

The transformation crystallized during a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Surrounded by artifacts from civilizations across human history, Liu experienced what he later called an epiphany. He recognized the shallowness of his own learning, the hubris of his certainties, and most importantly, the inadequacy of Western civilization as a universal solution to human problems.

He confessed that his idealization of the West had been rooted in nationalism all along, a desire to use Western ideas as weapons against Chinese tradition. This had blinded him to Western flaws while inflating his own sense of importance as a potential savior of his country. His own metaphor was devastating: he had been like a paraplegic laughing at a quadriplegic.

Liu emerged from this crisis with a more sophisticated intellectual framework. He would conduct two critiques simultaneously: using Western civilization as a tool to critique China, while using his own creativity and judgment to critique the West. Neither tradition would be exempt from scrutiny. Neither would be accepted wholesale.

This evolution, from simple iconoclast to complex thinker, was interrupted by events at home.

The Square

In April 1989, students began gathering in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. What started as mourning for the reformist leader Hu Yaobang grew into the largest pro-democracy protests in Chinese history. Students demanded dialogue with the government, freedom of the press, and an end to official corruption. At its peak, more than a million people filled the square and surrounding streets.

Liu was in the United States when the protests began. He could have stayed. American universities would have been happy to host a prominent Chinese dissident. His career as a visiting scholar could have continued indefinitely in comfortable exile.

He chose to return.

In Beijing, Liu joined what became known as the "four junzis of Tiananmen Square." The term junzi comes from Confucian philosophy, meaning a person of noble character, a gentleman in the ethical rather than social sense. The four junzis launched a hunger strike in support of the students, bringing intellectual credibility and media attention to the movement.

More importantly, as the situation deteriorated, Liu helped broker a peaceful exit for students remaining in the square. When the military moved in on the night of June 3rd and the morning of June 4th, killing hundreds or possibly thousands of protesters in the surrounding streets, the students in the square itself were able to leave. The four junzis had negotiated their safe passage.

For this, Liu was arrested. His first imprisonment lasted from 1989 to 1991. All of his books were banned in China. His marriage to Tao Li ended. The promising literary career was over. A different kind of career was just beginning.

The Repeat Offender

Between 1989 and 2008, Liu was imprisoned three times. The charges varied in wording but never in substance: he kept writing things the government didn't want written, and he kept refusing to stop.

After his release in 1991, he continued publishing essays critical of the government. He was arrested again in 1995 and held until 1996. Almost immediately after his release, he was arrested yet again and held in a form of extrajudicial detention called "reeducation through labor" from 1996 to 1999. No trial was necessary for this punishment; administrative authorities could simply order it.

During these years, Liu developed his thinking about Chinese nationalism. He observed how the Communist Party, having abandoned communist ideology as a source of legitimacy after Tiananmen, increasingly relied on nationalist sentiment to maintain popular support. This "ultra-nationalism," as Liu called it, had evolved from the defensive patriotism of a country that had genuinely suffered from foreign imperialism into something more aggressive and dangerous.

The older nationalism, Liu wrote, had been marked by mixed feelings of inferiority, envy, complaint, and blame toward the West. The new version was filled with blind self-confidence, empty boasts, and pent-up hatred. It had become, in his view, a euphemism for worship of violence in service of autocratic goals.

Despite his own earlier call for colonialism, which nationalist critics gleefully used against him, Liu never retreated from his fundamental critique. In a 2006 interview, he acknowledged that his "three hundred years" comment had been extemporaneous and extreme, but he declined to retract it because it represented, however crudely, his genuine belief that Chinese political culture needed radical transformation through exposure to liberal democratic values.

The Institutional Years

The period from 1999 to 2008 was Liu's most productive as an organizer. He served as president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center from 2003 to 2007. PEN International, founded in London in 1921, is a worldwide association of writers that advocates for freedom of expression. The Chinese center, necessarily operating under constant pressure, connected Chinese writers with their counterparts around the world and drew international attention to censorship and persecution.

Liu also led a magazine called Minzhu Zhongguo, which translates to Democratic China. Starting in the mid-1990s, this publication provided a platform for discussion of political reform at a time when such discussion was increasingly dangerous within China itself.

He married again. His second wife, Liu Xia, was a poet and artist. Their relationship would become another dimension of his story, as she faced her own persecution for the crime of being married to him.

Throughout these years, Liu refined his understanding of what democratic transition might require. In a remarkable letter to his friend Liao Yiwu in 2000, he reflected on why China had not produced its own Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who had led his country's peaceful revolution against communism in 1989.

China needed a "righteous giant," Liu wrote, someone willing to sacrifice selflessly so that others could have the right to be selfish. Passive freedom, meaning freedom from arbitrary oppression, required active resistance from at least some individuals. Such figures arose by chance: Gandhi was by chance, Havel was by chance, and two thousand years ago, a peasant's boy born in a manger was even more by chance.

Human progress, Liu argued, depended on these chance individuals. Collective conscience was unreliable. Great individual conscience was necessary to consolidate the weak masses. The appeal of a role model was infinite. A symbol could rouse an abundance of moral resources.

A very important reason for the silence and amnesia after June Fourth, he concluded, was that China had not produced such a figure. No one had stepped forward.

Charter 08

On December 10, 2008, the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document called Charter 08 was published online. Its name deliberately echoed Charter 77, the Czechoslovak manifesto that had launched the dissident movement Havel led to eventual victory.

The document called for constitutional reform, separation of powers, legislative democracy, an independent judiciary, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, protection of private property, and other rights that most developed democracies take for granted. It was not a revolutionary manifesto calling for the violent overthrow of the government. It was a reform proposal, couched in reasonable language, asking China to honor commitments it had already theoretically made by signing international human rights treaties.

More than two thousand Chinese citizens initially signed Charter 08. By 2009, the number had grown to over ten thousand, including many prominent intellectuals, lawyers, and writers. Liu Xiaobo was one of its primary drafters.

Two days before the document's release, on December 8, 2008, police detained Liu. He would never be free again.

The Trial

Liu was formally arrested on June 23, 2009, on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power." His trial took place on December 23, 2009, and lasted approximately two hours. The verdict was delivered two days later, on Christmas Day: guilty. The sentence was eleven years' imprisonment plus two years' deprivation of political rights.

The prosecution's evidence consisted of six articles Liu had written and the text of Charter 08. In other words, he was convicted for writing. The specific crime was that his words might cause people to think critically about one-party rule.

During the trial, Liu read a statement he had prepared. Titled "I Have No Enemies," it would become his most famous piece of writing, eventually read aloud at the Nobel ceremony he could not attend.

The mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress towards freedom and democracy.

He declared that he harbored no hatred, not even toward the police who had arrested him, the prosecutors who had charged him, or the judges who would sentence him. Hatred was corrosive. It destroyed the hater as much as the hated. If China was to have a democratic future, it would need to be built on reconciliation rather than revenge.

This was a remarkable position for someone facing a decade in prison for the crime of expressing opinions. It reflected Liu's long evolution from the angry young radical who had mocked Chinese culture in 1988 to a mature thinker who understood that the means of struggle shape the ends achieved.

The Empty Chair

On October 8, 2010, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that Liu Xiaobo had won the Peace Prize "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."

The Chinese government was furious. It called the award a desecration of the Nobel Prize and an interference in Chinese internal affairs. It pressured other countries not to attend the award ceremony. It placed Liu's wife, Liu Xia, under house arrest, even though she had never been charged with any crime. It blocked internet searches for Liu's name within China.

Liu became the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China. He was also the first ethnically Chinese person of any citizenship to win the Peace Prize specifically. These distinctions said something uncomfortable about the gap between China's rising global power and its treatment of its own citizens.

On December 10, 2010, the Nobel ceremony took place in Oslo. Liu's seat remained empty. No family member was permitted to travel to accept the award on his behalf. The prize money, approximately 1.4 million dollars, was placed in trust. Liu's medal and diploma were displayed on the empty chair.

The chairman of the Nobel Committee read Liu's statement "I Have No Enemies" aloud. A recording was later made available, allowing people around the world to hear the words that had helped put Liu in prison.

The Controversial Views

Liu's Nobel Prize made him an international symbol of peaceful resistance to authoritarianism. It also brought renewed attention to aspects of his thinking that sat uncomfortably with liberal Western admirers.

Liu had been a strong supporter of American military interventions abroad. He endorsed the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. He supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He praised these conflicts as "best examples of how war should be conducted in a modern civilization" and predicted, incorrectly, that "a free, democratic and peaceful Iraq will emerge."

Even as the Iraq War descended into chaos, with thousands dead and no weapons of mass destruction found, Liu refused to waver. In 2004, he wrote that regardless of the savagery of terrorists, the instability of Iraq, or the contempt of patriotic Chinese youth toward American supporters like himself, his support for the invasion would not change. He remained, he said, full of belief in the final victory of what he called the "Freedom Alliance."

He also made sweeping statements about Islam. He wrote that a culture and religious system capable of producing Islamic fundamentalism "must be inherently intolerant and bloodthirsty." This kind of civilizational essentialism, attributing fixed characteristics to entire religions comprising over a billion people, contradicted the nuanced thinking Liu brought to other subjects.

These views reflected a common pattern among dissidents from authoritarian states: a tendency to idealize the countries opposing their own government. If China's system was bad, then America's must be good. If China censored and imprisoned, then American military force must be liberating. The enemy of my enemy becomes not just an ally but a model.

Liu's early call for colonialism and his later support for American wars were connected by this logic. Both reflected a conviction that Western, particularly American, intervention in the affairs of other societies could produce positive transformation. His own epiphany at the Metropolitan Museum had taught him that Western civilization could not save humanity in an overall sense. Yet his political positions often implied otherwise.

The Final Years

Liu served his sentence in Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning province, in northeastern China. Information about his condition emerged only occasionally, filtered through the rare visits his wife was permitted.

His wife Liu Xia suffered terribly. Although never charged with any crime, she was kept under house arrest for years. She was not permitted to work or to see friends. Her own poetry and art, never political, was suppressed simply because of who she had married. She developed severe depression.

In May 2017, Liu was diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer. The disease had apparently gone undetected for a long time, or perhaps had been detected but not treated. On June 26, 2017, he was granted medical parole and transferred to a hospital in Shenyang.

International appeals flooded in. Governments and human rights organizations asked China to permit Liu to travel abroad for treatment. The Nobel Committee made a public plea. Chinese authorities refused, saying Liu was too ill to travel, though they eventually allowed two foreign doctors to examine him briefly.

Liu Xiaobo died on July 13, 2017. He was sixty-one years old. He had spent nearly nine of his final eleven years in prison.

His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, denying his family a grave to visit. The government apparently feared that a burial site would become a place of pilgrimage, a physical location where his memory could be honored and his ideas discussed.

The Meaning of an Empty Chair

Liu Xiaobo wanted to be the righteous giant he had written about in his letter to Liao Yiwu. He wanted to step forward, to serve as the symbol that could consolidate the weak masses and rouse an abundance of moral resources. In some ways, he succeeded. His empty chair in Oslo became one of the most memorable images of the struggle for human rights in the twenty-first century.

But Liu also embodied the contradictions of his generation of Chinese intellectuals. He swung from radical westernization to more balanced critique but never fully resolved the tension. He called for peaceful resistance while supporting foreign wars. He rejected Chinese tradition but remained quintessentially Chinese in his willingness to sacrifice everything for his principles.

His story illuminates why Chinese dissidents, intellectuals, and middle-class families continue to leave their country, seeking in Tokyo, Vancouver, Sydney, or Los Angeles the freedoms they cannot exercise at home. The system Liu challenged remains in place, stronger than ever in some respects. The Charter 08 reforms have not been implemented. The one-party state continues.

Yet Liu's words survive. His essays are read in Chinese communities around the world. His statement "I Have No Enemies" circulates despite censorship. His example demonstrates that even in a system designed to produce silence, some voices refuse to be silenced.

The chair in Oslo was empty. But the absence spoke louder than any presence could have. Sometimes the most powerful statement is the one that cannot be made, the prize that cannot be accepted, the freedom that cannot be exercised. Liu Xiaobo understood this. He had written about the need for a martyr, someone whose sacrifice would reveal the true nature of the system. In the end, he became what he had called for.

Whether China will eventually undergo the transformation Liu hoped for remains unknown. What can be said is that when historians write about the struggle for human rights in twenty-first century China, an empty chair will appear in their account. And somewhere behind that empty chair, there will be the words of a man who spent his life writing things that powerful people did not want written, and who paid the ultimate price for refusing to stop.