Liu Xia (intellectual)

Biography

Liu was formerly a civil servant in the Beijing tax bureau, and met her husband Liu Xiaobo while part of the Beijing literary scene in the 1980s. She married Liu Xiaobo while he was imprisoned in China in a labor re-education camp in 1996.

Ms. Liu prefers to lead the solitary life of an intellectual. However, being the wife of an oft-imprisoned activist, she has been forced to act as his proxy in the public arena. She has been described as her husband's "most important link to the outside world." Because she is the wife of one of China's most prominent human rights advocates, she also personally experiences pressures from Chinese authorities for publicly voicing opinions. Since his arrest, she has lived under constant surveillance. From the time of their marriage, during his several terms in prison, she has continued to speak out, although somewhat reluctantly, on issues of human rights both on her own and on his behalf. Despite the pressures, she attempts to retain a life of normality.

Liu Xiaobo's last sentence of 11 years was imposed after he helped write the political manifesto written in 2008 called Charter 08. Liu Xia begged her husband to not participate in drafting the document. After initially heeding her pleas, he went forward anyway, immersing himself for three years drafting and re-drafting the document, which he later persuaded more than 300 prominent workers, Chinese Communist Party members, and intellectuals, to sign. The document was later "signed" by 10,000 users on the Internet.

After it was announced that her husband had won the Nobel Peace Prize while he was imprisoned for an 11-year term for calling for multiparty elections in China, Liu Xia commented that “For all these years, Liu Xiaobo has persevered in telling the truth about China and because of this, for the fourth time, he has lost his personal freedom." She also said that she would visit him in jail and "give him a big hug". After visiting him, however, she was placed under house arrest and her mobile number deactivated.

In May 2011, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) made a statement declaring that "The deprivation of liberty of Liu Xia, being in contravention to articles 9, 10 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is arbitrary, and falls within categories II and III of the categories applicable to the cases submitted to the Working Group" and called for an immediate end to the house arrest.

In late 2012, Liu Xia spoke briefly with journalists from The Associated Press who managed to visit her apartment.

A video was later uploaded to Youtube showing another brief, unauthorized visit on 28 December 2012 in which Liu Xia and several persons converse briefly in her home.

On 23 April 2013, she was allowed out to see her brother's trial. Many feel that the trial was politically motivated. They said that the purported dispute had been resolved, but was brought back into court for some reason. Some assert that this trial is therefore an act of attempted intimidation by the government in order to silence Liu Xia even further. During her brief stint out of her house, where she is allowed no internet, no phone, and few visitors, she found a welcoming crowd waiting for her. She shouted to them, "Tell everybody that I'm not free"; "I love you. I miss you."; and she blew kisses.

On 19 November 2013, she filed an appeal for Liu Xiaobo's retrial. A move that's been called "extraordinary" because the action could refocus the world's attention on China's human rights record. According to her attorney, Mo Shaoping, Liu Xia visited her husband in Jinzhou Prison in Liaoning and gained his approval before filing this motion. (See List of prisons in Liaoning.) In December 2013, a friend of her, Hu told BBC that three years of house arrest had thrown Liu into deep depression and a health professional had been prescribing anti-depressants medication for her.

The Silent Strength of Liu Xia is a collection of 25 black-and-white photographs Liu Xia produced between 1996 and 1999 while her husband served his second stint in a labor re-education camp. It is the only exhibition of Liu Xia's photographic work in the United States. French scholar Guy Sorman, a longtime friend of Liu Xia and her husband, transported the prints out of China and curated the exhibition at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University.

In 2015, a bilingual collection of Liu Xia's poetry, Empty Chairs, was published by Graywolf Press. The poems in the collection span from 1983 to 2013. After her husband's death on July 13th, 2017, no one knew her whereabouts for six months, despite the Chinese government openly stated that she was "free". On 2 September 2017, she has been reported to have returned to her Beijing home. Frank Lu Siqing, the founder of the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy successfully spoke to Liu Xia on the phone for half an hour after calling her at her home in Beijing, South China Morning Post reports.