Liu Xiaobo (Chinese: 刘晓波) (born 28 December 1955) is a Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist who called for political reforms and the end of communist single-party rule.He is currently incarcerated as a political prisoner in Jinzhou, Liaoning.
I have taken this man because I think he is a great person, and everybody has to know who he is and what he has done:
Liu has served from 2003 to 2007 as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Center. He was also the President of Min Zhu Zhong Guo (Democratic China) magazine since the mid-1990s. On 8 December 2008, Liu was detained because of his participation with the Charter 08 manifesto. He was formally arrested on 23 June 2009 on suspicion of "inciting subversion of state power". He was tried on the same charges on 23 December 2009. and sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment and two years' deprivation of political rights on 25 December 2009.
During his fourth prison term, he was awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for "his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." He is the first Chinese citizen to be awarded a Nobel Prize of any kind while residing in China.Liu is the third person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison or detention, after Germany's Carl von Ossietzky (1935) and Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi (1991). Liu is also the second person (the first being Ossietzky) to be denied the right to have a representative collect the Nobel prize for him.
On January 1991, 19 months since his arrest, Liu Xiaobo was convicted for the offense of "counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement" but exempted from criminal punishment for his "major meritorious action" for having avoided the possible bloody confrontation in Tiananmen Square. After his release, he was divorced and eventually his ex-wife and son immigrated to the US. He resumed his writing, mostly on human rights and political issues though he has not been allowed to publish in Mainland China. In 1992, in Taiwan, he published his first book after his imprisonment, The Monologues of a Doomsday's Survivor, a controversial memoir with his confessions and political criticism on the popular movement in 1989.
