The case of Mr. Liu, a political prisoner and Nobel laureate who died on Thursday, illustrates how human rights issues have receded in diplomacy with China.
BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, China’s only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, catapulted to fame in 1989, when the Communist Party’s violent crackdown on protests in Tiananmen Square created an international uproar.
Now, nearly three decades later, Mr. Liu has died of cancer while in state custody, a bedridden and silenced example of Western governments’ inability, or reluctance, to push back against China’s resurgent authoritarians.
Mr. Liu’s fate reflects how human rights issues have receded in Western diplomacy with China. And it shows how Chinese Communist Party leaders, running a strong state bristling with security powers, can disdain foreign pleas, even for a man near death.
“It’s certainly become more difficult, ” said John Kamm, an American businessman and founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, who for decades has quietly lobbied China to free or improve the treatment of political prisoners. He said his attempts to win approval for Mr. Liu to leave China for treatment, as Mr. Liu and his wife requested, got nowhere.
“I tried my best. I did everything I could, ” he said before Mr. Liu died. “Things are pretty difficult right now. It’s hard for me to get the kinds of responses I need.”
These days, major Western governments struggle to get responses from China about prisoners and conditions in Tibet and Xinjiang. Many Western politicians have also become less willing to dwell on human rights problems when other issues — North Korea, trade and investment, terrorism, climate change, cybersecurity — fill their meetings with Chinese officials, said rights advocates and experts.
The United States, Germany and other Western governments did politely prod China to release Mr. Liu from prison and let him go abroad for treatment of his liver cancer, accompanied by his wife, Liu Xia.
A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, issued a statement that “she would like a signal of humanity for Liu Xiaobo and his family, ” while President Trump said nothing publicly about his case, leaving any comment to lower-ranking officials.
Ms. Merkel’s statement was a reflection of how the world order has shifted, with the United States under Mr. Trump departing from its traditional role as the most vocal advocate of human rights.
Still, Mr. Kamm and others said the shift came many years before Mr. Trump entered the White House in January.
“I do not think that the world prior to Jan. 20,2017, was one rife with robust, consistent diplomatic intervention on behalf of peaceful, independent civil society in China, ” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch. “Taken together, particularly over the 2000s and into the 2010s, you have got progressively less interest on foreign governments in really fighting as hard as they ought to have for systemic change in China.”
In Mr. Liu’s case, Chinese officials have dismissed calls by Western governments as meddling.
