Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who embodied the hopes of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement long after the protests were crushed, died in detention on Thursday after a battle with liver cancer, according to a government statement. He was 61 years old.
A Chinese government official said Thursday that China-North Korea trade was worth $2.6 billion in the first half of 2017, up about 10% over the same period last year.
U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in Paris on Thursday morning in a diplomatic move to soften divergence with France over climate change and trade liberalization by seeking common ground on security and fight against terrorism.
In the spring of 1989, Liu Xiaobo was a thirty-four-year-old professor of literature and philosophy at Beijing Normal University with a keen interest in political ideas, who when demonstrations broke out, quickly became a habitué of Tiananmen Square. Having written a doctoral thesis on the topic of aesthetics and human freedom, he was a prolific if acidic writer, a loner and iconoclast who believed that the most worthy role of intellectuals was to “enunciate thoughts that are ahead of their time” and to strive for a vision that is able “to stretch beyond the range of accepted ideas.” He believed that a truly autonomous intellectual must be “adventurous” and “a lonely forerunner” whose true worth would be discovered “only after he has moved on far ahead.” A uniquely independent thinker whose signatures were close-cropped hair, an addiction to cigarettes, and a fondness for aviator glasses, Liu rejected the fundamental premises of one-party rule, which he felt had corrupted the ability of most Chinese to think for themselves. Party rulers, he later said, “bribe us with small favors, threaten us with the lash, entertain us with songs and dances, and use lies to poison our souls.” For those intellectuals who too easily accommodated the party, Liu had little but contempt. “And China’s so-called intelligentsia,” he wrote, “is, for the most part, the dictator’s conspirator and accomplice.”
Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident writer, is dying of liver cancer. He’s been in prison since 2009, his “crime” being the publication of a charter calling for political reform. But he’s not a hero to his countrymen. Most Chinese have only vaguely heard of Liu if they’re aware of him at all; those who know about him, in my experience, speak of him with distaste.
In the late 1960s Mao Zedong, China’s Great Helmsman, encouraged children and adolescents to confront their teachers and parents, root out “cow ghosts and snake spirits,” and otherwise “make revolution.” In practice, this meant closing China’s schools. In the decades since, many have decried a generation’s loss of education.
Taiwan’s military is closely watching as a convoy accompanying mainland China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, sailed into the Taiwan Strait after leaving Hong Kong where it took part in the handover celebrations.
China has dispatched troops to Djibouti in advance of formally establishing the country's first overseas military base.
Recordings of what appear to be phone voice messages left by fugitive Chinese tycoon Guo Wengui requesting information about powerful royal family members in the Middle East and other international public figures have emerged online.
The niece of exiled tycoon Guo Wengui was one of three executives he instructed to use fake documents to obtain loans for his Henan real estate firm, a court in central China heard on Wednesday.
