Hong Kong, Hong Kong - People join the protest to the Chinese Liaison Office in Sai Wan, Hong Kong to mourn the death of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. People hold candle under heavy rain mourning the death of Liu Xiaobo and also demanding China government to release Lau's wife Liu Xia. PAimages/Chan Long Hei/Pacific Press via ZUMA Wire. All rights reserved.Liu Xiaobo’s death last week was a painful reminder of the dire state of personal freedoms in China. The dissident was imprisoned for nearly a decade. His crime: a view of a democratic China, a goal to be achieved peacefully. He died in custody, his dream yet to be realized. At 61, he suffered multiple organ failure allegedly caused by liver cancer. He had been denied permission to travel for medical treatment overseas.
Liu’s appeal for a more democratic China can be traced back to the Beijing 1989 protests. He joined the movement in Tiananmen Square, which resulted in a two-year jail sentence. But the government could never silence him. His calling to change the status quo remained as strong as ever as he continued to voice his concerns over the state of repression in the country. The regime tried to keep him at bay by detaining and sentencing him to 11 years in prison. Yet even there, his struggle was not forgotten. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2010.
This time of mourning should give us pause to reflect on China’s protection of personal freedoms. Regrettably, the data confirms a bleak reality. A glimpse at the Varieties of Democracy Institute data below reveals that civil liberties in the country fare poorly when compared with the rest of the East Asia region. Most concerning, while this aspect of democracy mainly improved in the rest of the region between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, over the same period it deteriorated in China, and has remained the same ever since.
