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Top 10 Fascinating Facts about Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo, (1955-2017) was born in Changchun, Jilin province, Shenyang, Liaoning province, China.

Chinese literary critic, professor, and human rights activist who called for democratic reforms and the end of one-party rule in China.

He is a Nobel laurette.

Liu graduated from Jilin University in 1982 and he continued his studies at Beijing Normal University, earning a PhD in 1988.

By then Liu had already established himself as a prolific and erudite critic, rising to prominence in 1986 with a stinging examination of modern Chinese literature.

He undertook a lecture tour of Norway and the United States in 1988–89, returning to Beijing as the pro-democracy movement in that city began to gather strength.

His role in the Tiananmen Squarepeaceful protests earned him imprisonment in 1989.

His criticism of  China’s policies toward Taiwan and Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama sent him to a Re-education Labor camp.

Liu died from complications of liver cancer while serving time for “inciting subversion”.

Here are the top 10 fascinating facts about Liu Xiaobo.

1. Liu Xiabo is a  Nobel Laurette

Image by Voice of America from

 “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Human Rights Watch honoured him with the 2010 Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism for his fearless commitment to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly in China.

China’s government denied  Liu or any member of his family permission to attend the ceremony.

In his absence, Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann read a statement that Liu had made to a Chinese court the previous year.

It read, in part, “I have no enemies and no hatred. Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience. Enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation, incite cruel mortal struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a nation’s progress toward freedom and democracy.”

2. Liu Xiaobo was the First Nobel Recipient to die in State Custody since 1935

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His peaceful activism and biting criticism of one-party rule meant he had spent almost a quarter of his life behind bars.

The prison authority granted Liu medical parole to seek treatment for terminal liver cancer.

He remained under armed guard during his subsequent hospitalization and in July 2017.

Liu became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in state custody since 1935 recipient Carl von Ossietzky who died under surveillance after years confined to Nazi concentration camps.

China faced a barrage of international criticism for its treatment of the Nobel laureate and democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo, who died at the age of 61 on Thursday.

News of Liu’s death sparked an immediate outpouring of international mourning and condemnation.

The former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, paid tribute to “a courageous fighter for civil rights and freedom of opinion”.

3. Liu Xiaobo Advisor Tiananmen Square

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In the days leading up to Tiananmen Square, Liu served as an adviser to the student protesters and he joined protest leaders in a weeklong hunger strike.

When the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement began in 1989, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in the US.

He flew back in April of that year to take part in the protests that grew into the biggest challenge to China’s one-party communist government since it came to power in 1949.

But the protests came to a bloody end on 4 June as authorities ordered in troops to quash the demonstrations.

Mr. Liu’s successful negotiations with troops saved the lives of a few hundred protesters.

He turned down an asylum offer from Australia, choosing instead to remain in China.

He was later arrested and jailed for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement”.

After his release from prison in 1991, Mr. Liu campaigned for those imprisoned for their roles in the Tiananmen movement, which saw him re-arrested and sentenced to three years in a labour camp.

4.  Liu Xiaobo Drafted “Charter 08”

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In 2008 Liu helped draft “Charter 08,” a 19-point program that called for greater political freedoms in China and concluded with the signatures of more than 300 academics and intellectuals.

The document called for a series of reforms in China, including a new constitution and legislative democracy, and respect for human rights.

“A ‘modernisation’ bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature and destroys human dignity,” it said.

The charter appeared to be the last straw for the government.  Liu Xiaobo’s home was raided and the police took him away 2 days before its launch.

5. Liu Xiaobo and Wife Wedded in Prison

Liu Xia is a Chinese poet, painter and photo art designer. Image by Voice of America from

In 1996, while still in prison, he married Liu Xia, a poet and artist for whom he later described his love as “boundless”.

Liu Xia is a Chinese painter, poet, and photographer. As her husband was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Liu Xia was under house arrest. 

She remained under house arrest until 10 July 2018, when she was allowed to travel to Germany for medical treatment.

For more than half of his marriage to Liu Xia, he was been imprisoned, and till he died of cancer.

They fought to be allowed to marry each other. But when the government in Beijing finally backed down, permitting one of its unrelenting critics to marry his love, problems remained.

The camera that was supposed to take the couple’s official marriage picture wouldn’t work. Chinese marriage certificates aren’t valid unless they contain an official portrait snapped at the scene.

So, Liu Xiaobo and his would-be wife, Liu Xia, improvised. They found single photos of themselves and stuck them side by side. The makeshift photo was stamped and finally, they were married.

Throughout their intense romance, the Chinese government was a relentless and interfering third wheel, the uninvited partner providing a constant backdrop to their interactions.

6. Liu Xiaobo was buried at Sea by China Government

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China’s ocean burial of Liu Xiaobo backfired. Beijing aimed to deny the dissident’s supporters a focal point.

Beijing deliberately denied Liu an onshore resting place in order to stop his grave from becoming a “lightning rod” for anti-Communist party protests.  

However, Beijing inadvertently transformed two-thirds of the world’s surface into a vast aquatic protest zone, after the ashes of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo were cast into the sea.

On the seventh day following his death which is a highly symbolic day of mourning in Chinese tradition. Supporters of the democracy campaigner held a series of global memorials.

Many of those protests were held beside or in the sea, an allusion to Liu’s controversial ocean burial which supporters saw as a deliberate attempt to deny them a place of pilgrimage.

The government not only destroyed his body physically but wanted to erase him from the collective memory.

7. A Decade and a Half of Liu Xiaobo’s Life was Spent in Prison

For three decades, under surveillance much of the time, in and out of detention, he would pursue his argument with the Chinese state in book after book, using as a weapon his words, his insight and a capacity to generate sometimes grudging respect.

Xiaobo was arrested several times, the first in 1989 for supporting pro-democracy students during the Democracy Movement. He was jailed for 21 months.

In June 1989, Xiaobo along with a few others went on a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to protest against martial law and appeal for peaceful negotiations between the government and the protesting students.

Xiaobo was imprisoned again from 1996 to 99 for criticising China’s policies toward Taiwan and Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

His longest sentence of 11 years came in 2009 for his involvement in drafting Charter 08 that called for Chinese political reforms towards democracy.

8. Charter 08 was signed by more than 10,000 supporters

Charter 08 was issued to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

According to a translation of the charter published in The New York Review of Books, the document stated, “The Chinese people, who have endured human rights disasters and uncountable struggles across these same years, now include many who see clearly that freedom, equality and human rights are universal values of humankind and that democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.”

It also called into question the Chinese government’s approach to “modernisation” and called it “disastrous”.

The charter was perceived by many activists as the most important pro-democracy effort since the Tiananmen Square protests,

The charter reminded all the ability of Chinese citizens to be able to elect their government.

After Liu Xiaobo’s arrest, nearly all of the 300 original signatories of Charter 08 are interrogated in a push to gather evidence against him and crackdown on free expression in China.

9. Liu Xiaobo Believed in Non-Violent Activism

Photo by VOA Haiyan from

“Take out a rib and use it as a torch.” Socrates had used these words, but Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo had practised them throughout his life.

Liu Xiaobo was someone who used his rib as a torch to light the darkness of China after the June 4 massacre -Tiananmen Square crackdown.

At the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in Oslo, Thorbj?rn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, emphasized the centrality of nonviolence to Liu’s thought and work.

Liu was opposed to any physical struggle against the authorities on the part of the students; he tried to find a peaceful solution to the tension between the students and the government.

Liu said that “The greatness of non-violent resistance is that even as man is faced with forceful tyranny and the resulting suffering, the victim responds to hate with love, to prejudice with tolerance, to arrogance with humility, to humiliation with dignity, and to violence with reason.”

10.  Liu Xiaobo is a Martyr

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Given its roots as a revolutionary movement, the communist party understands very well the power of charismatic martyrs like Liu, which is why it takes him and his message so seriously.

The Chinese government lashed out angrily at western media for their coverage of Liu and his untimely death.

The Communist Party fears people like Liu, non-violent idealism and willingness to die for their beliefs pose a potent threat to one-party rule.

This is how Liu himself put it in 2006: “Although the regime of the post-Mao era is still a dictatorship, it is no longer fanatical but rather a rational dictatorship that has become increasingly adept at calculating its interests.”

In calculating those interests, the regime has decided that it was safer to turn Liu into a martyr than to allow his ideas to spread unchallenged.

Speaking to BBC Chinese in 2005, he described reforming China as a “long and tortuous process” founded on the efforts of the people.

In contemporary Chinese history, Liu Xiaobo worked greatly for individual freedom and social equality.

He struggled for a long time for human rights, democracy and rule of law in China.

Liu Xiaobo symbolized the Chinese scholar community’s recognition of the unequal and unjust situation at home.