Liu Xia, wife of 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, poses with a photo of her and her husband Photo: AP
Beijing1:49PM GMT 06 Dec 2012
Liu Xia, a 52-year-old poet, artist and former civil servant in Beijing’s tax bureau, has not been charged with any crime.
But in October 2010, two days after her husband was announced as the Nobel Peace prize winner, she was confined to her fifth-floor apartment in Beijing, her telephone and internet were cut and she was isolated from the outside world.
Yesterday, reporters from the Associated Press news agency were able to enter her apartment as her guards apparently stepped out to lunch.
In surprise at her unexpected visitors, Mrs Liu shook uncontrollably and burst into tears. Dressed in a track suit, her first reaction was to put her hands to her head and ask: “How did you manage to come up, how did you manage?”
She appeared frail and confessed she has a back injury that frequently keeps her confined to bed. She added that she spends her time reading and painting and said: “I don’t keep track of the days anymore. That is how it is.”
“We live in such an absurd place,” she said. “It is so absurd. I felt I was a person emotionally prepared to respond to the consequences of Liu Xiaobo winning the prize.
“But after he won the prize, I really never imagined that after he won, I would not be able to leave my home. This is too absurd. I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this,” she said.
Liu Xia reacts emotionally to an unexpected visit by journalists from The Associated Press at her home in Beijing (AP)
Ms Liu said she was allowed to leave the apartment twice a week, accompanied by guards, to buy groceries and visit her parents.
Once a month, she is allowed to visit her husband’s prison 280 miles north of Beijing. She said he had been in good health on her last visit and that he is aware of her confinement.
“I told him: ‘I am going through what you are going through almost.'”
Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia
Ahead of the two-year anniversary of Mr Liu’s prize, 134 Nobel laureates have written a public letter to Xi Jinping, China’s new paramount leader, asking for the writer to be pardoned.
More than 300 Chinese writers, lawyers and intellectuals have also signed a second letter calling for his release.
“We believe thatthe existence of political prisoners does not help China to build its image of a responsible world power,” it said.
However, the Chinese Foreign ministry flatly dismissed the pleas.
“China is a country under the rule of law. Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to imprisonment by China’s judicial authorities for violating the law,” said a spokesman.
Mr Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2009 for helping to draft a manifesto, Charter ’08, calling for political reform. In a statement to the court that sentenced him, Mr Liu wrote that he had “no enemies”.
To his wife, he wrote: “Our love was full of bitterness imposed by outside circumstances, but as I savour its aftertaste, it remains boundless. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning.
Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.”
In October, an unnamed source close to the family told the BBC that Chinese officials were trying to force Mr Liu to go into exile by putting pressure on his wife.
“Liu Xia’s health is not very well. Mentally she suffers a lot because of the loss of personal freedom and the worries about her jailed husband,” the source said.
