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The Chinese dissident veteran was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday (October 8th). Beijing had nevertheless officially opposed such a reward.
In the spring of 1989, when thousands of students demonstrated in Tian An Men Square against the Chinese communist regime, Liu Xiaobo taught Chinese literature at Columbia University in New York. Graduated from Jilin University in northern China, he had at that time the rare opportunity to leave his country.
But when the situation begins to deteriorate, leaving a glimpse of a tragic end, he makes the opposite route to other dissidents who seek refuge abroad: he returns to Beijing, participates in demonstrations, a student hunger strike and attempted to negotiate an evacuation of Tian An Men Square before the tanks arrived. Honest and whole, Liu Xiaobo will pay him by a year and a half in prison, without ever having been convicted.
Rather critical of the traditional Chinese values that impose respect and obedience to power, it publishes numerous articles denouncing the system of single party and calls for democratic reforms. Between 1996 and 1999, he was arrested again for his convictions and for demanding the release of the people still imprisoned for having participated in the « movement of 4 June » 1989. He published with some thirty intellectuals the « Charter 2008 » lost his post at the Beijing Normal University and became a founder of the independent Center Pen China, a group of writers. Although most of his works are not published in China, they find publishers in the former English colony of Hong Kong.
One of the characteristics of Liu Xiaobo, married to Liu Xia, without children, is always to have publicly acknowledged the progress that China has witnessed since the economic opening in the late 1970s. But the improvement of the standard of living, guaranteed to have to eat and to dress themselves are not in his eyes sufficient. According to Liu Xiaobo, the Communist Party will have to open up and leave spaces of freedom wider.
Thus, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations, he published, together with some thirty other intellectuals, the « Charter 2008 », inspired by the « Charter 77 » of Czechoslovak dissidents by Vaclav Havel at the time of the USSR. This text calls for respect for human rights and freedom of expression and the establishment of elections for a « free, democratic and constitutional country ».
It will be signed by 300 Chinese intellectuals who will be « invited to drink tea », in other words interrogated by the public security. This will earn him, on Christmas Day 2009, a very heavy sentence to eleven years in prison for « subversion of the power of the State ».
Since then, the multiple demands for liberation launched by the United States or Europe have always been denied by Beijing. Nobel Peace Prize 2010, he embodies a courageous Chinese dissent which does not want to overthrow the regime, but add a fundamental dimension: democracy.
Nobel Peace Prize: the last ten winners
Here is the list of the last ten winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, whose 2010 edition was awarded to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
2010 : Liu Xiaobo (China)
2009 : Barack Obama (United States of America)
2008 : Martti Ahtisaari (Finland)
2007 : Al Gore (United States) and the UN climate panel (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Giec)
2006 : Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh) and the Grameen Bank
2005 : International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its Director Mohamed ElBaradei (Egypt)
2004 : Wangari Maathai (Kenya)
2003 : Shirin Ebadi (Iran)
2002 : Jimmy Carter (United States of America)
2001 : United Nations (UN) and its Secretary General Kofi Annan (Ghana)
A Congolese may also be laureate, it is enough to invest there, that it is on the side of the government or the civil society
