http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/world-news/prisoner-liu-could-become-first-chinese-nobel-peace-prize-winner-1.1058948http://www.heraldscotland.com/polopoly_fs/liu-xiaobo-supporters-1.1058949!image/3084613913.JPG_gen/derivatives/landscape_620/3084613913.JPG‘When people say I should give up or smoke less, I say, ‘What can be more harmful than the Communist Party?’,” Liu Xia says, drawing on a cigarette at a teahouse near her Beijing apartment. “Compared with the Communist Party, cigarettes are a good thing for me!” Liu jokes during our discussion of her enforced separation of almost two years from her husband, the jailed dissident writer Liu Xiaobo.
Liu, 54, was sentenced to 11 years for subversion on Christmas Day last year. He was the main organiser of the Charter 08 for democratic reform, which was signed by 300 writers, lawyers and activists, and modelled on the Charter 77 produced by Czech dissidents.
The former Beijing Normal University literature lecturer lost his job and was detained for nearly two years for defending students who joined the 1989 democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Liu, a renowned literary critic and philosophical essayist, had also urged an investigation into the brutal military crackdown on the protesters.
Such views have inspired a growing number of Chinese writers, lawyers and other activists to risk state punishment by publicly calling for improved human rights and democratic reform.Charter 08 demands sweeping changes to create a “free, democratic and constitutional state”, and urges the release of all political prisoners.
The original 303 signatories – joined later by thousands of others – set out their ideals for transforming China into a liberal democracy and lament a lack of “freedom, equality and human rights”.
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