One year ago today, the dissident writer and activist Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, which has made for an awkward anniversary in China. For years Chinese authorities coveted the Nobel Prize as a measure of international respect. They even coined a term for their obsession—the national “Nobel complex”—and each year Chinese scholars debated the ins and outs of their chances with the precision of long-suffering Cubs fans; “How far are we from a Nobel Prize?” was the title of a science program on Chinese state television some years ago.
But this year, the state media evidently found itself too busy for such trifling matters as the Nobel. Xinhua brushed off this year’s Peace Prize with three sentences on the winners: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman. And yet, like a poker addict returning to the table for one more hand, the state media couldn’t help but tick off some other Nobel news in recent weeks: “Chinese scientist presented ‘America’s Nobel’ ” Xinhua reported, after pharmacologist Tu Youyou became the latest winner of the Lasker Award; the news service noted that “28 Lasker laureates have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize, and 80 since 1945.” A week later, People’s Daily took notice when “Chinese entrepreneur Huang Ming won the 2011 Right Livelihood Award, also known as Alternative Nobel Prize.” In fact, look back a few months and it seems that no Nobel news was too minor to mention: the “4th Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting on Economic Sciences opens” or “Israeli Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry visits China.” (It also found time to mention that the Dalai Lama, a previous Nobel Peace Prize winner, was being used as “a cat’s paw by some Westerners with mean motives.”)
The strangest thing about this moment is that China’s Nobel complex is generally a very good thing—a reflection of its deep-seated determination to distinguish itself and be recognized for its accomplishments. But in the year since Liu was awarded the Peace Prize, the Communist Party’s embarrassment has metastasized into something unprecedented. When the Nobel committee prepared to award him the prize, its members anticipated that China would denounce them and probably punish Norway diplomatically. Nobody, however, expected that one year later, Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, would be the family’s second prisoner. She lives today in Beijing under a nearly unique form of house arrest, with no telephone, Internet connection, or contact with anyone outside her home other than her mother. Liu Xia has never been charged with a crime. Her last known contact with the outside world was in February, when she chatted online with a friend and “said that she was feeling miserable, was unable to go out and that her whole family was being held hostage,” according to a statement by Amnesty International. After the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention asked about Liu Xia, the government replied that she was subject to “no legal enforcement measure”—a phrasing that is so splendidly true.
Her husband, who is now fifty-five, remains in a cell in the northeastern city of Jinzhou, where he is serving an eleven-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” A few weeks ago, he was permitted to visit the city of Dalian to attend a memorial service for his father.
If Chinese authorities had brushed aside last year’s awarding of the Nobel Prize to Liu as a difference of opinion—the normal hurly burly of diplomacy—then reporters might not be writing about this anniversary today. In 1936, the German government prevented writer Carl von Ossietzky from going to collect the prize. But even that has been surpassed. During the past year, China has earned a Nobel distinction of a certain kind: an unprecedented effort by a national government to isolate and punish the family of a laureate.
