China urged to free Liu Xiaobo's wife; tributes silenced
Liu's main doctor said he was able to say goodbye to his 56-year-old wife and in his final moments told her to “live wellâ€.
China faced international calls on Friday to free the widow of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo after global condemnation over the Communist regime’s refusal to grant the democracy champion’s dying wish to leave the country.
The US and the European Union urged President Xi Jinping’s government to let Liu’s widow, the poet Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest since 2010, leave the country.
Chinese doctors said she was by her husband’s side when he lost his battle with liver cancer on Thursday at age 61, more than a month after he was transferred from prison to a hospital in the northeastern city of Shenyang.
Liu’s main doctor said he was able to say goodbye to his 56-year-old wife and in his final moments told her to “live well”.
Meanwhile, China’s censors raced to scrub social media networks of candles, RIP and other tributes to Liu as they seek to silence discussion about the prominent dissident's death. A search for news of his death on Chinese search engine Baidu turned up no results and China’s Twitter-like Weibo blocked the use of his name and initials “LXB”. Even the most obscure homages to Liu on Weibo were removed.
China: giving Liu Nobel was blasphemy
Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was a “blasphemy”, China said as it faced a barrage of criticism over the activist’s death.
Foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China had lodged protests with “certain countries” for interfering in its “judicial sovereignty”. “Conferring the prize to such a person goes against the purposes of this award. It’s a blasphemy of the peace prize,” Geng told a regular news briefing.
