China closing the box on freedom for Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo

Protesters wear masks of jailed Chinese Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo.

China’s most famous political prisoner, Liu Xiaobo, was likely never going to be allowed to live as a free man in his own country again after he enraged the rulers of the party-state by being awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2010.

More than a year before the prize, he already had been jailed for 11 years, on Christmas Day 2009, for “inciting the subversion of the state” by helping publish online a manifesto for a social democratic rather than a Communist Party-dominated future for China.

Rejecting China’s customary expectation that defendants plead guilty, Liu said the charges defied the country’s own constitution and the UN’s declaration of human rights. He wrote a statement, titled I Have No Enemies, but was barred from speaking in his own defence at the trial, which lasted a mere three hours.

This week, his lawyer Shang Baojun — who has not had regular access to him — discovered and swiftly revealed that Liu, now 61, is suffering from advanced liver ­cancer. Shang learned that Liu had been sent belatedly to Shenyang hospital, in the far northeast of the country near where he has been jailed, but would-be visitors have since been told by the hospital that he is not there.

It is not known when the ­disease was diagnosed or whether he received treatment in jail in Jinzhou in the Liaoning province, where he has been held in solitary confinement.

His wife, Liu Xia, 56, a painter, poet and photographer — they married in 1996 — was placed under house arrest as soon as her husband won the Nobel and is not allowed any form of communication with the outside world, ­including by phone or by internet, though she occasionally contrives to get a brief message out. It is ­believed she is suffering from ­severe depression.

She has not been charged with any offence. She has been permitted to continue brief visits to her husband and to talk to him through a barred window — with their conversations frequently ­interrupted by guards — but not to give him any letters. It is believed that Liu Xia now may be with her husband, but that has been ­impossible to confirm.

Her younger brother, Liu Hui, who was helping support her ­financially and also had helped pass on letters to her husband via his lawyers, was sentenced to an 11-year prison term four years ago for alleged “financial fraud”.

In April, by which time it ­appears she knew how ill her ­husband already was, Liu Xia handwrote a note stating that they both wished for him to be able to seek treatment abroad, adding: “I am sick of my life, this grotesque life. I want to tear the version of myself who lives this grotesque life to ­pieces. I long to escape.”

Human rights groups around the world and the Nobel peace prize committee have urged ­Beijing to ensure Liu Xiaobo receives the best treatment possible, including by letting him go overseas. Mary Beth Polley, spokeswoman for the US embassy in Beijing, said the US “calls on the Chinese authorities to not only ­release Mr Liu but also to allow his wife out of house arrest”.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman responded negatively: “All other countries should respect China’s judicial independence and sovereignty, and should not use any so-called individual case to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”

Liu, China’s pre-eminent contemporary philosopher, also a poet and a literature professor, wrote his doctoral thesis on aesthetic and human freedom. He then taught at the universities of Hawaii, Oslo and Columbia, as well as at Chinese universities.

He was jailed three times, ­essentially for his writings but also after 1989 for his involvement in the Tiananmen Square events, ­before eventually receiving his 11-year sentence in 2009.

In 2010, soon after his jailing, he wrote: “I know the basic principles of political change, that orderly and controllable social change is better than one which is chaotic and out of control. The order of a bad government is better than the chaos of anarchy. So I oppose systems of government that are dictatorships or monopolies. This is not ‘inciting subversion of state power’. Opposition is not equivalent to subversion.”

If he does succumb to cancer, he would be the second Nobel peace prize winner to die while serving a prison sentence in his own country.

The first was Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist who was convicted of high treason in 1931 for publishing details of Germany’s war preparations. He was awarded the prize in 1935 and died in 1938 while still in custody, chiefly from tuberculosis.

In awarding the peace prize to Liu, the Nobel committee said “China is in breach of several international agreements to which it is a signatory, as well as of its own provisions concerning political rights. Article 35 of China’s constitution lays down that ‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration’. In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly ­curtailed for China’s citizens.” It added: “Liu has become the foremost symbol of this wide-ranging struggle for human rights in China.”

But today his name is not allowed to be mentioned by mass media in China, and social media posts about him are swiftly deleted by the websites’ scrutineers or by the government’s internet police.

When I met Liu nine years ago in a teahouse in northern Beijing, for what may well have been his final interview before his arrest, he was physically spare, wryly fatalistic, the epitome of the Chinese gentleman scholar, dressed neatly but in a well-worn light brown jacket and grey slacks, anxious about his wife’s own anxiety about him, looking around to check whether he was being followed.

He was composed, weighing his words with care, insisting that he had no intention of taking up any of the many offers from eminent overseas universities, made partly for the sake of his personal safety.

He had lived in Australia from January to May 1993, and remained fond of the country and his friends there.

But he insisted that his life’s cause was to help mould a better future for China, and that meant living there: “This is my country.”

After our long talk over tea, we walked some way together. He ­appeared reluctant to farewell me, and kept up his commentary on China’s life and times until I ­managed to flag down a taxi.

He smiled, nodded from the kerb and gave a little wave.

Political activity, he had told me, “traditionally takes place ­inside a dark box in China. Everything is a state secret, even a ­leader’s health.”

Liu himself was then placed ­inside such a box, where his own health too has been kept secret, and has been taken from him, with his freedom.