Liu Xiaobo: From He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named to He-Who-Cannot-Be-Defeated

On July 13, three weeks after being released from Liaoning’s prison on medical parole with a liver cancer diagnosis, Liu Xiaobo – the first and so far the only Chinese citizen to have won the Nobel Peace Prize as well as a leading human rights defender – died of multiple organ failure while under guard in a Chinese hospital.

Two days later, on July 15, after a simple funeral attended by limited family members and friends plus numerous guards, Liu was cremated, and his ashes were scattered into the sea so that he would have no tomb left on the earth.

The news of Liu’s quick death, like thunder on the plains, rumbled across the internet; the follow-up news, including his hastily arranged funeral and the sea burial, has dominated news since. Almost unanimously, criticism against the Chinese government prevails.

Although China might never admit it, Liu’s death has become the government’s worst political nightmare since the Tiananmen incident. Domestically, the government has to fiercely crack down on netizens’ constant outpouring of grief; internationally, Beijing is facing overwhelming condemnation from international organizations and foreign governments. Admitted or not, the image of China as a responsible rising global leader – which the Chinese government has been trying so hard to build for years – has been seriously tarred, and might never be repaired.

A Domestic Censorship Battle

Especially after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China,” Liu Xiaobo was a man whose name could not be mentioned in China. In public media and on private social networks, Liu Xiaobo became He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named.

Except for very limited public information, which has been distorted by the Chinese government, any Chinese netizen who boldly discusses Liu online could end up with their accounts deleted, at best, or themselves detained by the police, at worst. Also, because of the Great Firewall – the technology that blocks most Chinese netizens from the global internet – fewer people have had a chance to hear about Liu. Gradually, his name seemed to be erased.

However, Liu’s death brought his name back to life.

The resurrection actually began before Liu’s death. On June 26, the Liaoning provincial prison administration revealed that Liu, diagnosed with liver cancer, had been sent to hospital for treatment. The news, like a tiny spark, began to slowly spread on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, and Wechat, a Chinese blending of Facebook and WhatsApp. When Liu’s death was confirmed by the government, the spark ignited.

Outpourings of grief by Chinese netizens raged against the efforts of China’s censors.

Within seconds, screenshots of the news on Liu’s death – a typical way for Chinese netizens to shun automatic, text-based censorship – were posted on Weibo and Wechat. Within minutes, the screenshots were deleted. But the second wave of grief and anger came quickly. Without mentioning Liu’s name directly, Liu’s quotes, photos of him and his wife, a sentence such as “the man who cannot be named died today,” or a simple emoji of a candle burned across China’s social media sites.

Anyone who happened to be online at that moment would have found that Weibo had no other discussions but of Liu. They would have seen the censors madly deleting posts. But the more the censors deleted, the more questions about Liu were asked.

The tug of war soon became a night of enlightenment for many Chinese who had never heard of Liu. The censors later had to block the candle emoji, the Chinese characters for candle, the letters RIP, the initials LXB,  the dates “1955-2017” (the years of Liu’s birth and death), the phrase “fear nothing,” and anything that could be interpreted as a reference to Liu.

What was most absurd, and somewhat surreal, was that the censors even blocked any description of the day’s weather. That night Beijing and some other northern areas were experiencing a rare rainstorm together with lightning, thunder, and hail. In Chinese superstition, such rare weather always meant the lord of heaven was furious at the human world. So people connected the weather with Liu’s death.

When the Chinese censors finally realized the creativity of netizens was impossible to conquer, they decided to simply deactivate people’s accounts and stopped timelines from updating after midnight. This final measure ended the censorship battle between the government and the netizens.

The next day, people found a large number of Weibo accounts were either banned from posting or had completely disappeared, a batch of electronic casualties.

A United International Community

If the Chinese government could still somehow grip the throat of the domestic public and silence talk of Liu, the international community remains beyond its control.

International condemnation of the Chinese government in the wake of Liu’s death has been overwhelming. Many entities that seldom speak with a unified voice have expressed the same attitude toward the death of Liu Xiaobo.

A number of foreign political leaders – such as U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop – representing their governments, expressed condolences following Liu’s death and urged China to release his widow, Liu Xia. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz renewed his push for legislation, which he first proposed in 2014, to rename the street outside the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC after Liu Xiaobo.

One after another international organizations – some of which have been called anti-China by Beijing, but not all – simultaneously issued statements on Liu Xiaobo, either to support Liu’s steadfast efforts to promote democracy or to condemn Chinese government cruelty. To name just a few, these international organizations included the office of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, the International Tibet Network, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Reporters Without Borders, Human Rights in China, PEN International, Amnesty International, and the most globally known and respected, the Nobel Committee.

 A Broken Public Image

Faced with the unstoppable mobilization of the global community, the Chinese government chose, nevertheless, to reject all criticism.

On July 14, as the first official comment on Liu’s death, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said in a regular press briefing, “China is a country under the rule of law. The handling of Liu Xiaobo's case belongs to China's internal affairs, and foreign countries are in no position to make improper remarks.”

Ironically, Geng’s words were scrubbed in the official transcript so that no Chinese readers could find any trace on the Foreign Ministry’s website that they’d been uttered.

As an anomaly, the Global Times, China’s most hawkish government-run newspaper, is the only Chinese press that has been able to consistently comment on Liu, not only in English but also in Chinese. Although it’s commonly believed that the Global Times usually doesn’t represent the Chinese government, it is certain that its editorials regarding Liu have at least been run with the government’s acquiescence.

As worldwide criticism continues to smolder, the Global Times’ wording has become more fierce, and even indecent.

On July 14, the Global Times called Liu Xiaobo “a victim led astray by West”; on July 15, it said “deification of Liu Xiaobo cannot negate his crimes”; on July 16, it started to attack Western media and dissidents exiled overseas, claiming “dissidents waste lives as China prospers”; on July 20, the Global Times bluntly demanded that the “wayward Nobel Peace Prize should just be canceled.”

It’s noteworthy that some of the wording in Chinese is more brutal than the English-language versions. For example, in the English version, dissidents are called “losers,” while in the Chinese version, these dissidents are lambasted as “scumbags.”

The paper’s increasingly harsh counterattack against the international public didn’t save face for the Chinese government, but made it look worse.

However, this actually could be the most terrifying part of the story. As Steve Tsang of the Chatham House put it:

[W]hat is really important isn’t so much that the party is tightening its control – that is happening anyway. What is more important is that the party is not that worried about how the Liu Xiaobo case affects international opinion. If that’s the case, what lessons should countries looking to trade with China but concerned about human rights abuses take from Liu’s case?