Beijing, Oct. 8: Mr 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 on Friday 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.
Mr Liu is the first Chinese citizen to win the Peace Prize and one of three laureates to have received it while in prison.
Given that he has no access to a telephone, it was unlikely that Mr Liu would immediately learn of the news, his wife, Ms Liu Xia, 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.
“If not for the work of Mr Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Mr Gao Yu, a veteran journalist who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.
Mr Liu’s most recent arrest in December 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.
Given his detention, it is unclear how Mr Liu would take possession of the prize.