Liu Xiaobo, the literary critic and political essayist, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
The last time I saw Liu Xiaobo before he went to prison, we met at a teahouse on the north side of Beijing during one of his brief holidays from house arrest. It was a few days before Christmas, 2007; he had been in and out of various kinds of confinement for years, beginning with a twenty-one-month hitch in jail for his participation in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. But, over time, he’d stopped drawing a sharp distinction between the various levels of punishment. “When I was in prison, I was kept in a small pen with a wall. Since leaving prison, I’m simply kept in a bigger pen that has no wall,” he said when I called him in November, 2005, at the apartment he shared with his wife, Liu Xia; at the time, police were stationed outside their door to prevent him from going out.
Liu had always been a classic type of the Chinese intellectual class—lean as a greyhound, bespectacled, with a wry sense of humor—but on this December day he looked even gaunter than usual: his belt looked it like was wrapped nearly twice around his waist, and his winter coat drooped. Unlike some Chinese scholars popular in the West, he exuded no aroma of privilege: he had no dual appointments at universities abroad, no obvious awareness that he could be the toast of New York or Berlin, no Davos-worthy polish. Nor did he have the posture of a firebrand. Instead, he struck a technical and unhurried tone as he explained why he had co-authored an open letter that summer, urging Chinese leaders to do more on human rights. He described it not as an act of provocation, but one of duty.
“I think my open letter is quite mild,” he told me. “Western countries are asking the Chinese government to fulfill its promises to improve the human-rights situation, but if there’s no voice from inside the country, then the government will say, ’It’s only a request from abroad; the domestic population doesn’t demand it.’ I want to show that it’s not only the hope of the international community, but also the hope of the Chinese people to improve their human-rights situation.”
Photograph: Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images
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In the context of the time, Liu exuded qualities of both a relic and a visionary: dissent was especially costly in China in the months before the Olympics in Beijing. The prevailing mood among liberal intellectuals was that the government would be acutely sensitive to criticism while the world was watching. To focus on all the ways that China’s political openness had failed to keep pace with the economic gains on display in Beijing would be to tempt a fierce government response, and some chose to lie low.
But Liu argued that silence was a disservice to his country, and, moreover, he was optimistic: “If the Olympic Games go well, and the international community has good things to say about it, the current regime might become more confident. When dealing with international issues, it might become milder, more flexible, and more open,” he told me. His role, as he saw it, was to keep writing and arguing. “Regardless of whether it works or not, I will persist in asking the government to fulfill its promises and improve the human-rights situation.”
A year later, Liu was detained, in December, 2008, a day before a manifesto that he co-authored, titled Charter 08, began to circulate online. He spent the following year in custody—first in secret, then acknowledged—before he was sentenced on Christmas Day, 2009, to eleven years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.” (When Liu’s name surfaced as a top contender for the Nobel, the Chinese government said he was unworthy. “This person was sentenced to jail because he violated Chinese law,” a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said last week.)
Being a dissident in China is more complex than outsiders imagine. There are the pressures you would expect from police and from one’s employer or one’s parents. But in many cases there is an added layer of skepticism from other Chinese intellectuals who might think you’ve sought confrontation instead of practical gains, that you’ve played into foreign expectations of a dissident. That can be no less exhausting. But Liu has never wavered, and with few exceptions, Liu’s peers have long admired him for his fanatical insistence on moderation.
Through it all, he has remained all but unknown to the average Chinese citizen. It is tempting to see that as evidence that his fellow citizens don’t care about the issues that he stands for. But his low profile probably says far more about the appetites of Chinese censors than it does about the desires of average citizens. The Chinese people are, of course, focussed on improving their lives after generations in poverty, but imagining that this means they are uninterested in protecting their rights overlooks the many ways that even the least privileged Chinese citizens have begun to use the courts, the state-petition system, and the Internet to pursue their own interests. Liu Xiaobo might look, to some, like an outlier, but he has more in common with his countrymen than he did even a few years ago. Liu Xiaobo is, in every possible way, Chinese, and his fellow citizens have much to celebrate.
