By: Daniel McElroy
After nearly eight years under house arrest, poet and photographer Liu Xia has finally been allowed to leave China for Germany.
When her late husband, the prominent dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010, Liu Xia was arbitrarily confined to house arrest. Throughout her husband’s imprisonment, sickness, and finally death she was held virtually incommunicado in her Beijing apartment—according to activists, Chinese authorities feared she might have become a figurehead of protest against her husband’s high profile imprisonment. She was never charged with any crime. Following Liu Xiaobo’s death in July 2017, Liu was photographed scattering his ashes at sea and then disappeared for a period of several months, raising concerns about her well being and global attention for the injustice she faced.
Liu openly struggled with depression during her detention, and repeatedly sought permission to leave China so she might seek treatment for her mental health. She threatened to kill herself earlier this year and friends in Germany feared for her after a poem about the intense hopelessness she faced surfaced in December 2017: “Too solitary / I have not the right to speech / To speak loudly / I live like a plant / I lie like a corpse,” Liu wrote. This was the first communication heard from Liu after her “disappearance” earlier that year.
Liu’s change of fortune appears to be mostly a result of intense lobbying on behalf of the German government one week ahead of an annual summit meeting between China and the EU in Beijing in July 2018. Her release came on July 10, 2018, just three days before the one-year anniversary of Liu Xiaobo’s death, which was expected to bring increased attention to her confinement.
While Liu Xia is now physically safe and receiving treatment for her depression in Berlin, her circumstances have not improved entirely: Liu’s brother, Liu Hui, remains in prison in China and she fears appearing publicly or speaking to media until he is free. Liu Hui has been imprisoned on fraud charges since being convicted in a property dispute in 2013, though it is a case many activists believe to be state retribution against the family. A family friend of Liu suggested that her brother may be the last bargaining chip that Chinese authorities have against her, in a tactic that appears to be used increasingly to silence Chinese dissidents abroad.