Liu Xiaobo

BEIJING — After more than two years of house arrest and government-imposed silence, the wife of China's imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo spoke Thursday to reporters who had sneaked in to see her during an apparent lunch break by the guards watching her apartment. In her first interview since 2010, Liu Xia described her husband's imprisonment and her house arrest to journalists from the Associated Press as Kafkaesque. "I really never imagined that after he won I would not be able to leave my home," she...

BEIJING — After more than two years of house arrest and government-imposed silence, the wife of China's imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo spoke Thursday to reporters who had sneaked in to see her during an apparent lunch break by the guards watching her apartment. In her first interview since 2010, Liu Xia described her husband's imprisonment and her house arrest to journalists from the Associated Press as Kafkaesque. "I really never imagined that after he won I would not be able to leave my home," she...

Editor's note: When a group led by former Czech president Vaclev Havel went to the Chinese Embassy in Prague this week to deliver an open letter in support of the recently sentenced human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, officials would not open the door. The Post reprints the letter below. His Excellency Hu Jintao President of the People's Republic of China State Council Beijing 100032 P.R. China Prague, Jan. 6, 2010 Your Excellency, On Dec. 23, the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People's Court --...

I have known Chen Guangcheng for almost a decade. We met as participants in the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program in 2003. It brought us both to the United States but also brought us together in our common interests and mission for China. After our return to China, I put Chen in touch with a number of lawyers and intellectuals involved in human rights work and introduced him to veteran activist Liu Xiaobo . Back then, the three of us still enjoyed a certain degree of freedom.

BEIJING — Ai Weiwei, one of China's most prominent artists and an outspoken critic of the communist regime, was taken from Beijing's airport by security agents Sunday as he was about to board a flight to Hong Kong. Police later raided his studio. Ai is the most high-profile activist to have been detained in a government crackdown in which dozens of bloggers, human rights lawyers and writers have been swept up. The arrests seem related to the government's concern that activists in China want to launch a...

The world looks to Nobel Peace laureates for depth of vision in human affairs, and their moral stature seems all the greater when they are persecuted by government. We have honored the views of such people as Andrei Sakharov , Lech Walesa and Aung Sang Suu Kyi . Liu Xiaobo , winner of the 2010 Peace Prize, is in a prison in Liaoning, China, for "incitement of subversion of state power. " No one outside the prison has heard from him since Oct. 10, 2010, when his wife was allowed to visit and to pass along his wishes for the...

Regarding the April 7 Style article "The times they are a-censored" : How tragic that an icon of the 1960s rearranged his set list to appease an authoritarian government — especially at the time said government has imprisoned a renowned artist (Ai Weiwei) and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate (Liu Xiaobo). It's bad enough that Western businesses and political leaders have kowtowed to the Chinese for decades to stimulate commerce and exploit the country's large and cowed labor pool, but to see Bob Dylan...

WELL, THAT was quick. The "state subversion" trial of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo ended just three hours after it began Wednesday, with a verdict -- almost certainly "guilty" -- expected from the Beijing court on Friday. The maximum penalty is 15 years in prison. China has been flexing its newfound economic preeminence on the world stage of late. But back home, its ruling Communist Party remains desperately afraid of dissent and hooked on old-fashioned repression. Mr. Liu is a veteran dissident first jailed for his role in the 1989 Tiananmen uprising.

As conveyed in your Dec. 25 article "Chinese dissident sentenced to 11 years on 'subversion' charges," Liu Xiaobo's harsh sentence came as a surprise to many observers. But not to me. In October, my mother, Cao Junping, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Shandong province. The same day, my aunt was sentenced to nine years. Unlike Liu, they are not high-profile dissidents. They are simply two older women who practice Falun Gong. They meditate in their free time and try to follow a moral philosophy centered on the...

BEIJING -- My husband, Liu Xiaobo, was one of the primary drafters of a document known as Charter 08. Modeled after the Charter 77 petition created in the former Czechoslovakia, Charter 08 calls for comprehensive political reforms in China, including the establishment of a democratic government and the protection of universally recognized human rights. It was signed and issued by more than 300 Chinese citizens on Dec. 10, 2008, the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and to date it has been signed online...

PRESIDENT OBAMA and Vice President Biden took care to mention human rights during their meetings on Tuesday with China's incoming leader, Xi Jinping. The president devoted one vaguely worded sentence to the subject during his greeting of Mr. Xi at the Oval Office; Mr. Biden stretched that to three during a toast at the State Department, in which he observed that "conditions in China have deteriorated. " Mr. Xi, who has appeared to have adopted the script of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, during a tightly controlled tour, offered...

Chinese dissident writers exiled to the West today get a very different response than Soviet writers received not so long ago. In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger advised President Ford not to meet with writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, warning in a memorandum that doing so would offend the Soviet Union. Now, similar views are held not only by pragmatic politicians but also by multinational corporations with large investments in China as well as universities and foundations with inextricable links to China.

A best-selling Chinese author released one of his most scathing and personal works Wednesday: a nine-page statement detailing his alleged torture by Chinese officials and his decision to flee to the United States with his wife and young son. In his first extensive public comments since leaving China last week, prominent Christian dissident Yu Jie, 38, described his friendship and work with imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, his...

CHINA'S COMMUNIST RULERS are ringing out December in a flurry of paranoia and repression, a fitting coda to a year of steadily decreasing tolerance for open dissent and discussion. On Friday, authorities sentenced Chen Wei to nine years in prison . Mr. Chen's "crime was heinous, and influence vile," the judge declared. And what was his crime? Writing essays. Because he advocated democracy — and has done so since he was first imprisoned for his role in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 — a judge...

VACLAV HAVEL was, in some respects, an unlikely revolutionary. He wasn't much of an orator or particularly charismatic: He was shy, sometimes diffident, prone to speaking in philosophical abstractions or with an air of irony natural to a Central European intellectual. He was drawn to absurdist artists like Frank Zappa, and his own plays could be hard to follow. When he was not in prison, he lived in a huge apartment block with the name Havel chiseled over the entrance — the legacy of his bourgeois family.

VICE PRESIDENT Biden has emphatically backed away from his apparent endorsement of China's one-child policy. But he made another statement during his recent trip to China, on human rights, that also caught our eye. The one-child remark was off the cuff. Mr. Biden was answering questions from an audience at Sichuan University in Chengdu on Sunday, and the subject was entitlement spending. "Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I'm not second-guessing — of one child per family," the vice president...

BEIJING -- China's leading dissident, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Friday after a court found the 53-year-old literary scholar guilty of "inciting subversion to state power" through his writings and role in Charter 08, a petition advocating human rights, free speech and an end to one-party rule. The sentencing sent a signal that the Chinese Communist Party will continue to stifle domestic political critics, especially those who seek to organize their fellow Chinese.

I have known Chen Guangcheng for almost a decade. We met as participants in the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program in 2003. It brought us both to the United States but also brought us together in our common interests and mission for China. After our return to China, I put Chen in touch with a number of lawyers and intellectuals involved in human rights work and introduced him to veteran activist Liu Xiaobo . Back then, the three of us still enjoyed a certain degree of...

The world looks to Nobel Peace laureates for depth of vision in human affairs, and their moral stature seems all the greater when they are persecuted by government. We have honored the views of such people as Andrei Sakharov , Lech Walesa and Aung Sang Suu Kyi . Liu Xiaobo , winner of the 2010 Peace Prize, is in a prison in Liaoning, China, for "incitement of subversion of state power. " No one outside the prison has heard from him since Oct. 10, 2010, when his wife was allowed to visit and to pass along his wishes for the Nobel ceremony in...

Regarding the April 7 Style article "The times they are a-censored" : How tragic that an icon of the 1960s rearranged his set list to appease an authoritarian government — especially at the time said government has imprisoned a renowned artist (Ai Weiwei) and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate (Liu Xiaobo). It's bad enough that Western businesses and political leaders have kowtowed to the Chinese for decades to stimulate commerce and exploit the country's large and cowed labor pool, but to see Bob Dylan...