TO CHINA’s authorities, Liu Xiaobo is a common criminal who was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power”. In fact Mr Liu is no more common than he was a criminal.
TO CHINA’s authorities, Liu Xiaobo is a common criminal who was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power”. In fact Mr Liu is no more common than he was a criminal. The only previous Nobel peace laureate to face death upon release from prison was Carl von Ossietzky, who was awarded the prize in 1935 while in a Nazi concentration camp. He succumbed to consumption shortly afterwards. China’s equivalent of the Gestapo might not appreciate this parallel.
In a narrow sense of the term, however, Mr Liu is tragically all too common. He is the best-known of many hundreds of prisoners of conscience in China—people serving time for their political or religious beliefs. Mr Liu’s terrible fate is a reminder of how many share it.
Secrecy, says Nicholas Bequelin of Amnesty International, an NGO, is paramount in China’s handling of dissidents: the government often treats details of their arrest and jailing as classified. But the Congressional-Executive Committee on China (CECC) , a branch of the American government, has kept track of those prisoners whose names have entered the public domain, usually because their arrest has been announced.
The CECC’s database, based on work by Dui Hua, an NGO in San Francisco and the Tibet Information Network in London, had almost 8,500 names in October 2016. Of those, more than 1,400 people were still in prison. That gives a glimpse of the scale of repression. The real numbers are many times larger. In Xinjiang and Tibet, provinces in China’s far west, tens of thousands are thought to have been arrested over the past decade. Still, the CECC’s database is based on hard information. It suggests that over the past 30 years there have been four successive approaches to putting people away for peaceful dissent (see chart) .
The Tiananmen surge
In the 1980s, before the protests, the CECC’s database records few political prisoners, who at that time were usually accused of being “counter-revolutionaries”. That may be because many arrests of such people were kept secret. After the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, far more cases became known—partly because of the scale of the crackdown, but also because families and friends of victims became more willing to risk publicising cases.
