China to allow Nobel winner’s widow to leave country

The widow of the first Nobel peace laureate to die in captivity since Nazi Germany will be ­allowed to leave China.

Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia in Beijing in 2002. Picture: AFP

The widow of the first Nobel peace laureate to die in captivity since Nazi Germany will be ­allowed to leave China.

Photographer and artist Liu Xia has been held under house­ ­arrest since her husband Liu Xiaobo was jailed for state subversion a decade ago.

Journalist Gao Yu, a friend of the Liu family who is herself under house arrest for leaking state secrets, has posted online that the authorities had agreed to release Ms Liu, as long as she did not create any issues for them in the meantime.

News of her release comes six months after Liu’s death from liver cancer at the age of 61 while still in detention at a hospital in northest Shenyang.

Liu Xia, 56, is believed to be in the couple’s Beijing apartment.

Before her husband died, she said she wished to leave China if he were released for treatment overseas. She had been allowed to visit him monthly in jail in the country’s northeast, and was by his side when he died.

Her only contact with the outside world since her husband’s death on July 13 has been a one-minute video posted on YouTube — a platform banned in China — a month later, in which she speaks directly to the camera.

“I am outside recuperating. Everyone, please grant me time to mourn, time for my heart to heal, and one day I will be able to face you all in a healthy state,” she says. It was unclear whether she made the statement freely, or was required to do so by the Chinese authorities.

An exhibition of Liu’s photographs opens today in Boulogne-Billancourt, in France.

Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel in 2010, was the first laureate to die in custody since German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, the 1935 recipient, who died under a Gestapo guard in hospital after three years confined to Nazi concentration camps.