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Tiananmen Square protest leader to represent Liu Xiaobo at Nobel laureate meeting
Wuer Kaixi, the former Chinese student leader, will represent Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident, at a meeting of Nobel Peace Prize laureates in Hiroshima next month.
Published: 3:36PM BST 27 Oct 2010
Jailed Chinese dissident and civil rights activist Liu Xiaobo in Beijing, China Photo: EPA
Mr Wuer, 42, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing who once studied with Mr Liu, will read a message on his behalf at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, to be held from November 12-14, Kyodo news agency said.
Mr Liu, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison last December on subversion charges after co-authoring a manifesto calling for political reform in China, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 8 – enraging China's rulers.
His wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest at the couple's Beijing apartment when the award was announced and has been largely unreachable since then, with her phone apparently cut off. Mr Wuer is now based in Taiwan after being refused permission to return to mainland China earlier this year.
The city office of Hiroshima, which will host the meeting, said it could not immediately confirm the report, which quoted officials at the summit's secretariat in Rome. A representative for Myanmar's pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and is now under house arrest in Yangon, may also take part in the summit, Kyodo said.
The Hiroshima summit is expected to be attended by 10 laureates including former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, the secretariat said in a press release last week. The statement said added that Barack Obama, the 2009 winner, had been formally invited to attend the meeting by Hiroshima's mayor and five laureates.
Obama has been requested to reiterate points made during his April 2009 speech in Prague on the necessity of dismantling the world's remaining nuclear arsenals, the press release said. The summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners has been held almost every year since its inauguration in Rome in 1999. Hiroshima, which has rebuilt since its devastation by a nuclear bomb in World War II, will be the first Japanese city to host the summit.
