By CHRIS BUCKLEY and AUSTIN
RAMZYJUNE 26, 2017
BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, the jailed
Chinese dissident who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his writings promoting
democracy, has been given medical parole to be treated for late-stage cancer,
his lawyers and the prison authorities said on Monday.
Mr. Liu, who had been imprisoned
in northeast China, was found in late May to have advanced liver cancer and was
hospitalized soon after, said one of the lawyers, Shang Baojun, citing Mr.
Liu’s relatives. Mr. Shang said the outlook for Mr. Liu appeared grim.
“It seems to be very serious,
very serious,” he said. “If it was an early stage of cancer, then that would be
easier to treat. But at this late stage, the treatment seems much more
difficult.”
In a video released by Radio Free
Asia, Mr. Liu’s distraught wife, Liu Xia, told a friend that his doctors “can’t
do surgery, can’t do radiation therapy, can’t do chemotherapy,” apparently
referring to his advanced cancer.
Mr. Liu, 61, was hospitalized in
Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, Mr. Shang said, as did his other
lawyer, Mo Shaoping. The Liaoning Prison Administrative Bureau confirmed on its
website that Mr. Liu had cancer and recently received medical parole.
“Liu Xiaobo is receiving
treatment according to a medical plan,” the prison bureau said. It said a team
of eight cancer specialists had advised on his treatment. The English-language
website of Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, also reported the
administration’s statement.
News of Mr. Liu’s apparently
terminal illness drew immediate and passionate calls from supporters and human
rights groups for him to be freed.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee
said it was “delighted” to learn that Mr. Liu was out of prison but “strongly
regrets” that it took serious illness for that to happen. It called on the
Chinese authorities to release him without conditions, saying he had a standing
offer to travel to Oslo to receive his prize.
“The Chinese government’s
culpability for wrongfully imprisoning Liu Xiaobo is deepened by the fact that
they released him only when he became gravely ill,” Sophie Richardson, the
China director at Human Rights Watch, said in an emailed statement. “The
government should immediately allow Liu Xiaobo and his wife, Liu Xia, to seek
proper treatment wherever they wish.”
Patrick Poon, a China researcher
at Amnesty International, said the government should ensure that Mr. Liu
received adequate medical care and access to relatives. “The authorities must
also stop their shameful and illegal house arrest of Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu
Xia,” Mr. Poon said, “and ensure that she is able to receive visitors, travel
freely and reunite with Liu Xiaobo.”
The American State Department
also urged the Chinese authorities to give Mr. Liu “freedom of movement and
access to medical care of his choosing.”
Friends of Ms. Liu, a poet and
artist who is being held at her Beijing apartment, say that the extreme
isolation has worn on her and that she has depression and heart disease.
Mr. Mo, the lawyer, said that “in
principle,” Mr. Liu could receive visits from family members, but he added that
he was uncertain whether his wife was with him.
The news of Mr. Liu’s condition
could create an additional worry for President Xi Jinping, who is focused on a
congress in the autumn that is all but sure to appoint him for a second term as
Communist Party leader and to promote a new generation of senior officials.
In his first five years in power,
Mr. Xi has pursued an intense crackdown on dissent. But even in hospital
confinement, Mr. Liu could serve as a new rallying point for China’s
beleaguered rights activists, angered that his cancer was not detected until it
was seemingly too late to save him.
“I wish this was fake news. Liu
Xiaobo is the pride of the Chinese people,” said Bao Tong, a former senior aide
to Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader who was ousted during the 1989
pro-democracy demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square.
Mr. Bao said he wanted to know
whether Mr. Liu’s cancer had been diagnosed in an earlier stage, when it might
have been more treatable.
Repeated calls to the No. 1
Hospital of the China Medical University in Shenyang, where the lawyers said
Mr. Liu was receiving treatment, went unanswered or encountered a busy signal.
Mr. Liu, a lecturer at Beijing
Normal University, was a prominent figure during the student-led protests that
swept Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989. He was famous for fiery
speeches and helped start a hunger strike days before the protest in Tiananmen
Square was crushed by the military. He negotiated a peaceful retreat from the
square and is credited with saving many lives.
After the crackdown, Mr. Liu was
jailed for 21 months, the first of several prison terms he served for his
pro-democracy organizing.
In 2008, he helped write a
petition calling for widespread political liberalization in China. That
document, Charter 08, was initially signed by hundreds of scholars and
activists. The police arrested Mr. Liu, and a year later, he was convicted of
“inciting subversion of state power” and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize for what the committee called “his long and nonviolent struggle for
fundamental human rights in China.”
Mr. Liu was represented at the
Nobel ceremony in Oslo by an empty chair. He was the first Nobel Peace Prize
recipient to not attend the ceremony or be represented by family since the 1935
prize, when Hitler barred the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who was being
held in a concentration camp, and his supporters from accepting the award. Mr.
von Ossietzky, whose health had degraded after years of abuse, died in 1938 of
tuberculosis.
In Mr. Liu’s absence, his
statement from his 2009 trial, titled “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement,”
was read as his Nobel lecture.
“Hatred can rot away at a
person’s intelligence and conscience,” he wrote. “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. That is why I hope to be able to transcend my personal experiences
as I look upon our nation’s development and social change, to counter the
regime’s hostility with utmost good will, and to dispel hatred with love.”
Chinese prisons are allowed to
grant medical parole to inmates who are seriously ill or near death. Mr. Shang,
the lawyer, said last year that Mr. Liu’s failing health could have qualified
him for medical parole even then. But Mr. Liu refused to admit guilt as a
condition for release, Mr. Shang said.
Mr. Liu’s father, Liu Ling, died
in 2011 after developing liver cancer, Hong Kong newspapers reported at the
time, citing a relative. The United States National Cancer Institute says that
patients with advanced and end-stage liver cancer can receive treatment to ease
the symptoms, but that “treatments are not likely to cure the cancer.”
The Chinese government will
probably censor information about Mr. Liu’s illness to ensure that it does not
cause wider political ripples, said Liang Xiaojun, a human rights lawyer in
Beijing. No reports about his cancer and hospitalization appeared in the
Chinese-language state-run news media, and many Chinese, especially younger
people, have little or no understanding of Mr. Liu and his role in the 1989
protests.
“I think there will be a big
reaction in the democracy movement,” Mr. Liang said. “But the government will
probably shut down news about this, or dilute it, so it won’t have too much
impact domestically.”
Chris Buckley reported from
Beijing, and Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong.
