Beijing:
The wife of the imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo says she hopes to travel to Norway to collect the Nobel Peace Prize on his behalf, though for now she can only leave her Beijing home under police escort.
China, meanwhile, called the award an attack on the country and an attempt to change its political system, and retaliated by canceling another set of meetings with the Norwegian government.
In brief interviews by phone on Tuesday, Liu Xia said her husband has started receiving better food since the Oslo-based Nobel committee announced the award last Friday -- honoring his more than two decades of advocacy of human rights and peaceful democratic change that started with the demonstrations at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his writings, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of "his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China."
Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China's best known dissident, is currently serving an 11-year term on subversion charges.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a "blasphemy" to the Peace Prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. "Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law," it said in a statement.
Mr. Liu is the first Chinese citizen to win the Peace Prize and one of three laureates to have received it while in prison.
In their statement in Olso announcing the prize, the committee noted that China, now the world's second-biggest economy, should be commended for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and for broadening the scope of political participation. But they chastised the government for ignoring freedoms guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution.
"In practice, these freedoms have proved to be distinctly curtailed for China's citizens," the statement said, adding, "China's new status must entail increased responsibility."
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.
His most recent arrest in December of 2008 came a day before a reformist manifesto he helped craft began circulating on the Internet. The petition, entitled Charter '08, demanded that China's rulers embrace human rights, judicial independence and the kind of political reform that would ultimately end the Communist Party's monopoly on power.
"For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom," his wife, Liu Xia, said earlier this week.