Back in Prison – Liu Xiaobo Short Bio

Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波), president of the Chinese Independent Pen Center, once a lecturer at Beijing Normal  University,  and political commentator, has been sentenced to eleven years in  jail for “inciting subversion of state power” (煽动颠覆国家政权). Liu co-published the Charter 08 (零八宪章). He was arrested on December 8, 2008, before the charter’s formal release. The police had ended the “investigation phase” earlier this month. Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court announced the sentence today. Xinhua News Agency quoted a statement by the court that Liu’s legal rights had been fully guaranteed during the proceedings.

More than twenty years ago, shortly before the Tian An Men massacre on June 4, 1989, Liu returned from a visiting scholarship at Columbia University and took part in a hungerstrike in solidarity with the students’ movement, according to CNA. He was jailed for “counter-revolutionary crimes” (反革命罪), and released from prison in January 1991.

He refused to leave his country after his release from prison, campaigned for a re-evaluation of the official version of the “June-4 incident”, and was imprisoned again from May 18, 1995 to January 1996.

Also according to CNA, Liu was held in a labor camp in Dalian from October 8, 1996 to October 10, 1999, after authoring Anti-Corruption Proposals Addressed to the Third Plenary Session of the Eighth National People’s Congress, and Bloody Lessons from the Process of the Promotion of Democracy and the Rule of Law – an Appeal on June-4’s Sixth Anniversary (「汲取血的教訓推進民主與法治進程–「六四」6週年呼籲書」).

Now he is back in prison.

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Related:
“One day, he’ll be thought of as a very good citizen”, BBC News, Dec 25, 2009
Charter 08 Seminar held in Shandong Province, Dec 8, 2009

Tags: academic, accountability, Charter 08, China, Communist Party of China, democracy, development, government, history, human rights, rule of law