When the police came for Liu Xiaobo on a December night nearly two years ago, they didn't tell the dissident author why he was being taken away again. The line in the detention order for his “suspected crime” was left blank.
But Liu and the dozen officers who crowded into his dark Beijing apartment knew the reason. He was hours from releasing Charter 08, the China democracy movement's most comprehensive call yet for peaceful reform. The document would be viewed by the ruling Communist Party as a direct challenge to its 60-year monopoly on political power.
Liu, who over the past two decades had endured stints in prison and re-education camp, looked at the blank detention notice and lost his temper.
“At that moment, I knew the day I was expecting had finally come,” his wife, Liu Xia, said recently as she recounted the night of 8 December 2008. Thinking of the Beijing winter, she said she brought him a down coat and cigarettes. The police took the cigarettes away.
Liu was sentenced last Christmas Day to 11 years in prison for subversion. The 54-year old literary critic is now a favourite to win the Nobel Peace Prize — in what would be a major embarrassment to the Chinese government.
He is the best shot the country's dissident movement has had in winning the prestigious award since it began pushing for democratic change after China's authoritarian leaders launched economic, but not political, reforms three decades ago.
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