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China detains Nobel Peace Prize winner's wife: U.S. rights group
Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia pose in this undated photo released by his family on October 3, 2010. Credit: Reuters/Handout
By Susan Heavey
WASHINGTON | Sun Oct 10, 2010 12:59pm EDT
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chinese authorities are detaining the wife of jailed Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Price laureate Liu Xiaobo at her Beijing apartment, a U.S. human rights group said on Sunday. In a statement, Freedom Now said that Liu Xia has not been charged with a crime but has not been allowed to leave her home or use her mobile telephone after visiting her husband in jail to tell him about his award.
When he heard the news, Liu Xiaobo cried and said the Nobel "award is for the Tiananmen martyrs," according to the Washington-based group, which said it represents the Chinese dissident. The group works worldwide for the release prisoners of conscience and provides free legal counsel.
Freedom Now lawyer and spokeswoman Beth Schwanke said one of the group's human rights specialists, Yang Jianli, obtained news of Liu Xia's detention from a source in China they could not name over fears that the informant would also be detained. "Liu Xia is under enormous pressure," said Jianli, who the group said is currently in Taiwan.
Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for two decades of non-violent struggle over human rights, infuriating China, which called the award "an obscenity. The prize shines a spotlight on human rights in China at a time when it is starting to play a leading role on the global stage as a result of its growing economic might.
Liu has been in and out of jail since 1989, when he joined student protesters on a hunger strike days before the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. He was jailed for 11 years in December for subversion of state power. Liu Xia said on Friday she was being taken to visit her husband in jail but that police were preventing her from talking to reporters.
(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Anthony Boadle)
China state press say dissident Nobel shows West's fear
Monday October 11, 2010
China state press say dissident Nobel shows West's fear
By Chris Buckley
BEIJING (Reuters) - The Nobel Peace Prize for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo showed the West cannot stomach the idea of China's rise, state-run newspapers said on Monday, adding to the government's furious condemnation of the award. <table align="right" border="0" width="20%"><tbody><tr><td>
</td></tr><tr><td>Protesters drink champagne as they celebrate jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize during a demonstration outside the China liaison office in Hong Kong October 8, 2010. (REUTERS/Bobby Yip)
</td></tr></tbody></table> Beijing called Friday's award to Liu an "obscenity".Some state-controlled newspapers said it showed a prejudiced West afraid of China's rising wealth and power.
"The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to 'dissident' Liu Xiaobo was nothing more than another expression of this prejudice, and behind it lies an extraordinary terror of China's rise and the Chinese model," said the Global Times, a popular Chinese-language tabloid that has led the media charge against the Nobel decision.
If Liu's calls for a multi-party democracy in China were followed, a commentary in the paper said: "China's fate would perhaps be no better than the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the country probably would have quickly collapsed".
Liu, 54, has been a thorn in the government's side since 1989 when he joined student protesters on a hunger strike days before the army crushed the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement, and has been in and out of jail ever since for his campaigning for freedom of speech and political liberalisation.
His lawyer, Shang Baojun, told Reuters that he had been unable to contact Liu's wife, Liu Xia."I don't have any direct news," said Shang. "She's probably at home with communications cut off, under surveillance -- she's called it house arrest," he said, citing messages circulated on the Internet.On Friday, the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, a policy-setting council that usually meets once a year, gathers for a meeting, adding to the net of security across Beijing.
Many signers of the "Charter 08" petition which called for sweeping political reforms have either been locked away, put under house arrest or otherwise harassed, perhaps the most famous of whom is Liu, jailed last Christmas day for 11 years.The Ta Kung Pao, a Beijing-run Hong Kong-based newspaper, dismissed the award for Liu as "black humour" that showed the Nobel Peace Prize lacked seriousness."This kind of Nobel Peace Prize is no better than scrap paper," it said.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China's jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has asked his wife to collect the award in Oslo, she said on Tuesday, as the Chinese government pressed the case that it is the victim of Western prejudice and plotting. <table align="right" border="0" width="20%"><tbody><tr><td>
</td></tr><tr><td>Protesters drink champagne as they celebrate jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize during a demonstration outside the China liaison office in Hong Kong October 8, 2010. (REUTERS/Bobby Yip)
</td></tr></tbody></table> China has been infuriated by the prize, which in 1989 was given to the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who is also reviled by Beijing.
He has already congratulated Liu."Xiaobo told me he hopes I can go to Norway to receive the prize for him," Liu Xia said by telephone from her home in western Beijing, where she is under virtual house arrest."I think it will be very difficult," she added, when asked if she thought the government would allow her to go.
Liu Xia said the government had not yet explicitly told her she would not be allowed to go to Norway. The prize will be formally bestowed on Dec. 10 in Oslo.China has condemned Norway's government, which has no say over the prize, and Oslo's fisheries ministry said on Tuesday the Chinese had cancelled a second meeting with a Norwegian minister.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said awarding the prize to Liu, who is serving 11 years in jail on subversion charges, would not shake China's one-party political system."Some politicians in some countries have seized on this chance to speak ill of China. This shows a lack of respect for China's judicial system, and it also leads one to suspect their true motives," Ma told a regular news conference."If anyone wants to adopt this method as a way to alter China's political system, to stand in the way of the forward advance of the Chinese people, then plainly they have miscalculated," said Ma.
HOME CONSUMPTION
But China's loud criticism of foreign governments over the prize was mainly for home consumption said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher who specialises in China for Human Rights Watch, an international group critical of Beijing's rights restrictions."Beijing's strong words are essentially theatrics directed at a domestic audience, with the Chinese government trying to cast the prize as another instance of the West trying to keep down China," Bequelin said in emailed comments.
"Portraying what is essentially a symbolic gesture of support to China's civil society as an attack against China by the West is a tried and tested technique of the Chinese government to deflect criticism and appeal to nationalist sentiment," he said.Liu Xia, who said she was only being allowed out to see her parents and buy food, and only then in a police car, said she was not surprised by Beijing's tone."The government always says this," she said.
Her husband, who she was allowed to see at his prison in northeastern China over the weekend, was taking the news solemnly and with a grave sense of responsibility, Liu Xia said."He said this prize should go to all the victims of June 4," she said, referring to the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square, a movement Liu was deeply involved in. "He felt sad, quite upset. He cried. He felt it was hard to deal with."
Diplomats from the European Union as well as Australia and Switzerland unsuccessfully tried to visit Liu's wife in her apartment on Monday but were blocked.The U.S. Embassy urged China to lift any restrictions on Liu Xia and earlier President Barack Obama called for Liu's release.Asked about Obama's comments, Ma said: "We oppose anyone using this matter to stir up a fuss and oppose anyone interfering in China's internal affairs".
China's ruling Communist Party has long reacted angrily to pressure over its restrictions on political and legal rights of citizens, and the Nobel Prize for the prominent dissident has prompted vehement media comment in Beijing.The Global Times, a popular tabloid run by Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, said in a commentary on Tuesday that the Nobel committee members, who "live in luxury", had no right to pass judgment on China's legal system."This is not a dispute about democracy, but an incitement for 'dissidents' to break Chinese law," it wrote. (Editing by Alex Richardson)
