(CNN) — The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a leading Chinese dissident who is serving an 11-year prison term.
Liu was sentenced in 2009 for inciting subversion of state power. He’s the co-author of Charter 08, a call for political reform and human rights, and was an adviser to the student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
“From my personal angle, I feel in a dictatory society if you want to be a person with dignity, if you want to be a honest person, fight for human-rights improvement, fight for free speech, being … [in prison] is part of what you are undertaking, and there is nothing to complain,” Liu Xiaobo told CNN in 2007, while he was between a series of house arrests.
“Since you chose to do this, you must have a preparation for being in prison,” he said. “Entering the prison you must face these things peacefully, not complain [about] others. I even don’t complain [about those] … who arrested me, because this is their inevitable action. I can also not let them arrest me if I chose other way.”
It was unclear whether Liu Xiaobo had learned of his prize from prison in northern China.
“Winning this prize doesn’t necessarily help Liu Xiaobo to get out of jail sooner,” his lawyer, Shang Baojun, said in September. “Winning the prize won’t surely help to reduce his sentence.”
“On the contrary, if he gets the award, the authority will have to show their attitude. It might be the more international support you have, the stricter they will become towards you. But this is very difficult to guess.”
His sentencing prompted a groundswell of support for him from former Peace Prize laureates and perennial contenders.
Vaclav Havel, the hero of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 Velvet Revolution [who never won the Nobel Prize], retired South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu [who did, in 1984] and the Dalai Lama [1989] were among a group of intellectuals who publicly urged the Nobel Committee to give the prize to Liu shortly after he was sentenced.
American writer Kwame Anthony Appiah, the head of the American PEN center, a literary and human rights organization, nominated Liu in January, he said.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said it would be “totally wrong” for “such a person” to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and that the comment was later scrubbed from the official transcript of the briefing.
The Irish bookmaking Paddy Power had already paid out on bets for Liu to win the prize, it announced Wednesday after a surge in betting led it to suspect that information had leaked.
“It is people’s affirmation of his 20 years’ work,” Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, told CNN in September in response to his nomination.
“It means many people in the world believe that China needs change in its political system and people’s freedom of speech,” she said in Chinese.
Of his condition in prison, she said:
“He is doing OK spiritually and physically. The hospital has been giving him stomach pills. His stomach is not very good. They also said he might have some problem with his liver, hepatitis B maybe. I worried about it. He reads runs and writes every day. He runs one hour every day.”
“There is nothing else we can do. The judicial procedure is to the end already,” she said.
“I know that some friends wish Liu Xiaobo to win this award more urgently than himself,” she added. “They believe it is an opportunity for China to change.”
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