Beijing scrambles to hush up Liu’s Nobel

Restaurant raid: Chinese police arrest an activist at a victory dinner for Liu Xiaobo in Beijing

Beijing went to great lengths at the weekend to hush up news that Liu Xiaobo, a jailed Chinese dissident, had won the Nobel Peace Prize, detaining activists, imposing a media blackout, and putting his wife under “de facto house arrest”.

Enraged by the Nobel committee’s decision to award the prize to Mr Liu, jailed for 11 years for subversion, Beijing used its control of the state and of cyberspace to strike back, suppressing comment, jubilation and criticism online, blocking internet searches and text messages using his name, and instructing media to carry only the government’s stinging denunciation of the Nobel committee’s decision.

Beijing police also detained 17 pro-democracy lawyers, bloggers and other activists who had gathered at a Beijing restaurant on Friday night to celebrate Mr Liu’s win.

Most were released after about 24 hours in detention, though many remained under house arrest.

Mr Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, said through a posting on Twitter that she had been put under house arrest on October 8. Police took her to Mr Liu’s prison to inform him of his prize on Sunday, though she now is under “de facto house arrest”, according to Yang Jianli, a member of Mr Liu’s US-based legal team.

Mr Liu was arrested for writing articles critical of the government and for his role in organising Charter 08, a pro-democracy petition.

A former literature professor, he spent 18 months in jail for his role in organising the Tiananmen Square protests.

The fact of Mr Liu’s imprisonment is not well known in his homeland, and efforts to crack down on online discussion of his prize could, ironically, pique interest domestically in who he is and why he is in jail.

Beijing’s media and police crackdown may heighten criticism overseas of the same authoritarian tactics which provoked the Nobel committee to award the prize to Mr Liu in the first place. The Nobel committee said Mr Liu’s prison sentence was the most obvious example of Beijing’s failure to deliver on promises of freedom of speech, association and demonstration contained in the Chinese constitution.

At the weekend, Beijing dismissed such criticisms as culturally hegemonistic: Global Times, an English language newspaper published by the Official People’s Daily, accused the Nobel committee of “arrogance and prejudice against a country that has made the most remarkable economic and social progress” in the past 30 years, adding the award is “loaded with western ideology”.

Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo