Chapter 1: The Pressure from Above
hotel. Security staff from the Beijing Film Academy, where Cui is a professor, arrived and escorted her back to the academy before the dinner ended. The Independent Chinese PEN Centre’s legal consultant, Teng Biao, told The Guardian that police had prevented him from meeting journalists and had warned him not to talk about the award or attend a celebration banquet. The Independent Chinese PEN Centre’s deputy secretary general, Jiang Danwen, was among at least 10 members to have been “taken for tea”—a Chinese euphemism for being taken for questioning by police—and similarly warned. Two members were placed under house arrest and one, Zhao Changqing, was detained in that first weekend. Jiang Danwen said police had warned him not to comment on the prize and were constantly parked outside his Shanghai home. Internet writer Guo Xianliang was arrested for “inciting subversion of state power” on 28 October for handing out leaflets about Liu’s Nobel. Suspecting that the Independent Chinese PEN Centre’s webmaster and Network Committee Coordinator Ye Du was behind it, the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau summoned him for questioning for “disturbing public order.” Ye Du was questioned for four hours and his home was raided by police who confiscated two computers and information from PEN’s annual international congress, which had taken place in Tokyo in September. A video clip of Liu Xia reading a letter from Liu Xiaobo and a video about the Independent Chinese PEN Centre that included clips of Liu Xiaobo speaking about freedom of expression in China in 2006 were among the material seized.
a plane back to Frankfurt. His baggage, which included two manuscripts about underground and exile literature, was confiscated and not returned. Many other Independent Chinese PEN Centre members inside China were harassed and put under house arrest in the month following the Nobel announcement, including Board Member Jiang Qisheng and former Vice President Yu Jie, whose telephones were cut off for at least two weeks. Throughout this month, Liu Xia only managed to communicate from her increasingly restrictive house arrest once. With her telephone and Internet lines cut, she posted this message to her Twitter account via a second mobile phone on 16 October: One of the policemen watching me said that it was his wife’s birthday and that he wanted to go shopping for her. But his orders were that he had to stay with me, so would I like to accompany him to the shopping mall? Sure, I thought, and went. When we got to the mall, I noticed all kinds of strange people photographing me from various angles. I realized it had all been a trick. The authorities wanted photographs to prove that Liu Xia is free and happily shopping at malls.16
The Independent Chinese PEN Centre’s website, hosted on a server based in the United States, went offline on November 4, and is believed to have been the target of a cyber-attack.
This would be the last the world would hear directly from Liu Xia for more than two years. This second mobile phone, too, was then cut off, according to those who later tried to reach her. When pressed, the Chinese government has continued to deny that Liu Xia is living under any form of confinement or house arrest, and suggested that those who wanted to talk to her could do so. But reporters and diplomats who have attempted to visit her are stopped at the gates of her apartment complex and denied access, and she remains completely incommunicado.17
That same day, exiled poet Bei Ling, a co-founder of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre who had written about Liu Xiaobo in a Wall Street Journal editorial15, arrived at Beijing International Airport on a flight from Frankfurt for a brief stopover on his way to Taipei, where he was invited to participate in a discussion at Dongwu University and stay as a writer in residence. Upon his arrival he was met by 20 police officers as soon as he disembarked and was taken to an empty room at the airport, where he says he was questioned for two hours and told that a high-level government official had ordered that he not be permitted to travel to Taiwan. He was instead roughly handled and put on
As the 10 December 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony approached, the authorities moved aggressively to censor international coverage of the event in China. China-based correspondents for the BBC, CNN, and the Norwegian broadcaster NRK all reported that their websites were being blocked, and CNN and BBC television broadcasts routinely went black during news items about the Nobel, only to reappear when these segments were over.18 Pressed about the censorship during a news conference, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu denied knowledge of the blocks on the websites, insisting that “the Internet is open in China, and is regulated in accordance with law.”
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