Liu Xiaobo is an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate who has been repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his writings. In October 2010 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of "his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
Mr. Liu, perhaps China's best known dissident, was given an 11-year prison sentence on subversion charges in December 2009, after urging Chinese leaders to embrace democratic reforms, a sentence that was widely regarded as unusually harsh.
He is the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and one of three laureates to have received it while in prison. In awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee delivered an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing's authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China's economic rise.
A HOSTILE RESPONSEThe Chinese government came up with a less than magnanimous response to the Committee's decision, waging a strident offensive to rebrand the prize as a Western ploy to undermine the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power. It warned foreign governments to stay away from the December ceremony, and placed dozens of Chinese dissidents and intellectuals under various forms of detention or surveillance.
China's reaction was so comprehensively hostile that the Nobel committee, for the first time in the postwar era, said that the central part of the peace prize ceremony -- the bestowing of a medal and $1.5 million in cash -- would be postponed, given that neither Mr. Liu nor any of his family members were likely to attend.
By the week of the ceremony in early December 2010, nineteen governments had said their ambassadors would not attend, reflecting the strong pressure exerted by Beijing to boycott the event.
At the same time, China announced that it would create its own prize for peace, named for the ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, and award it for the first time on the day before the Nobel ceremony. The choice of recipient offered a stark counterpoint as well: a Taiwanese politician who opened doors to the mainland.
BACKGROUNDThe Nobel is seen as an enormous boost for China's beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Two days after the prize was announced, Mr. Liu's wife, Liu Xia, met with him at the prison in northeastern China where he is serving his sentence, but she was escorted back to Beijing and placed under house arrest, a human rights group said.
Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles at the ready.
Mr. Liu was seized by security officials in December 2008 as he and other intellectuals prepared to issue "Charter 08", a lengthy manifesto that called on China's Communist Party to uphold individual rights and relinquish its monopoly on power. Modeled on Charter 77, the manifesto drafted by Czechoslovakian rights advocates three decades earlier, Charter 08 eventually garnered some 10,000 signatures before government censors pulled it from the Internet.
After being held for more than a year in secret detention and later in jail, Mr. Liu was found guilty by a Beijing court of "inciting subversion of state power." Mr. Liu previously spent 21 months in detention for taking part in the 1989 pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. And in 1996, after demanding clemency for those still imprisoned for their roles in the demonstrations, he was sent to a labor camp for three years.
Mr. Liu's subversion charges were based on six articles he wrote that were published on the Internet outside of China.