Norway said yesterday that China has called off a meeting with the Norwegian fisheries minister just days after Beijing warned that the Nobel Peace Prize award to a jailed Chinese dissident would harm relations between the countries.
The move was announced a day after Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波), the imprisoned democracy campaigner, was allowed a brief, tearful meeting with his wife, during which he dedicated the award to the “lost souls” of the 1989 military crackdown on student demonstrators.
Liu, 54, is in the second year of an 11-year prison term for inciting subversion.
Beijing had reacted angrily to Friday’s announcement honoring Liu, calling him a criminal and warning Norway’s government that relations would suffer, even though the Nobel committee is an independent organization.
The Norwegian Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs Lisbeth Berg-Hansen arrived in China yesterday for a weeklong visit to the World Expo in Shanghai, said Magnus Hodne, the Norwegian ministry’s spokesman.
She was supposed to meet with China’s vice minister for fisheries tomorrow, but the Chinese canceled the meeting, Hodne said, adding he did not know the reason.
Liu told his wife, Liu Xia (劉霞), that he dedicated his Nobel “to all of those who died on June 4, 1989,” Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper reported, citing a message from Liu Xia after she visited her husband in prison.
Via her Twitter account, Liu Xia said she had been placed under house arrest at her Beijing home both before and after travelling to the prison in northeastern China where her husband is held to inform him of his prize.
“Brothers, I have returned home. On the eighth they placed me under house arrest. I don’t know when I will be able to see anyone,” the Sunday night Twitter posting said.
“My mobile phone has been broken and I cannot call or receive calls. I saw Xiaobo and told him on the ninth at the prison that he won the prize. I will let you know more later. Everyone, please help me [re]tweet. Thanks,” she said.
European diplomats were prevented from visiting her yesterday. Liu Xia has been told that if she wants to leave her home she must be escorted in a police car, the New York-based group Human Rights in China said.
Simon Sharpe, the first secretary of political affairs of the EU delegation in China, said he wanted to see Liu Xia at her home in Beijing to personally deliver a letter of congratulations on the peace award from the president of the European Commission.
Sharpe was accompanied by diplomats from about 10 embassies, including Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy and Australia.
Three uniformed guards at the main gate of Liu’s apartment complex prevented the group from entering, saying someone from inside the building had to come out and fetch them. However, since Liu Xia’s phones aren’t working, that was impossible.
Sharpe read out a message from European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso that said the decision to award Liu the peace prize was “a strong message of support to all those around the world who sometimes with great personal sacrifice are struggling for freedom and human rights.”
In other developments, state-controlled Chinese newspapers said yesterday that the prize to Liu showed a prejudiced West afraid of China’s rising wealth and standing.
“The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to ‘dissident’ Liu Xiaobo was nothing more than another expression of this prejudice, and behind it lies an extraordinary terror of China’s rise and the Chinese model,” the Global Times said.
If Liu’s calls for a multi-party democracy in China were followed, a commentary in the paper said: “China’s fate would perhaps be no better than the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the country probably would have quickly collapsed.”
The China Daily said the award was “part of the plot to contain China,” and it exposed “the deep and wide ideological rift between this country and the West.”
The Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, criticized China’s irate response yesterday. He told Kyodo News during a stopover at Tokyo’s Narita Airport that the Chinese government does “not appreciate different opinions at all.”
He also said building an open and transparent society was “the only way to save all people of China” but that some “hardliners” inside the leadership were stuck in an “old way of thinking.”
Four UN human rights experts — Frank La Rue, El Hadji Malick Sow, Margaret Sekaggya and Gabriela Knaul, who examine issues ranging from breaches of the right to free speech to arbitrary detention — also called on China to release Liu and “all persons detained for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression.”
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