Liu Xiaobo’s death holds a message for China

LIU XIAOBO, who died on July 13th, was hardly a household name in the West. Yet of those in China who have called for democracy, resisting the Communist Party’s ruthless efforts to prevent it from ever taking hold, Mr Liu’s name stands out. His dignified, calm and persistent calls for freedom for China’s people made Mr Liu one of the global giants of moral dissent, who belongs with Andrei Sakharov and Nelson Mandela—and like them was a prisoner of conscience and a winner of the Nobel peace prize.Mr Liu died in a hospital bed in north-eastern China from liver cancer (see ). The suffering endured by Mr Liu, his family and friends was compounded by his miserable circumstances. Mr Liu, an academic and author specialising in literature and philosophy, was eight years into an 11-year sentence for subversion (see our obituary). His crime was to write a petition calling for democracy, a cause he had been championing for decades—he was prominent in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Though in a civilian hospital, he was still kept as a prisoner. The government refused his and his family’s requests that he be allowed to seek treatment abroad. It posted guards around his ward, deployed its army of internet censors to rub out any expression of sympathy for him, and ordered his family to be silent. The Communist Party wants the world to forget Mr Liu and what he stood for. There is a danger that it will.