Beijing (AsiaNews) - A trembling and tearful Liu Xia, wife of jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, talks in a video about her two-year house arrest and her husband's 11-year sentence. Surprised at receiving unexpected visitors into her home and with a shaking voice, Liu gave her first interview in 26 months of segregation and isolation to journalists from the Associated Press who visited her flat whilst the guards who watch it were apparently out to lunch.
Confined to her duplex flat with no internet or outside phone line, she is only allowed weekly trips to buy groceries. Once a month, she is taken to see her husband in prison. "It is so absurd," she said. "I felt I was a person emotionally prepared to respond to the consequences of Liu Xiaobo winning the prize. But . . . I really never imagined that after he won, I would not be able to leave my home. This is too absurd. I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this."
Liu Xiaobo was convicted in 2009 of inciting subversion against the state because he co-authored Charter 08, a political manifesto that urges China to respect human rights and adopt a democratic form of government if it wants to spare the country its current moral, environmental and social disasters.
When he received the Nobel Prize, Liu was already in prison since December 2008. At the award ceremony on 10 December 2010, an empty chair stood in his pace.
The Chinese government warned dissidents and Liu family friends against travelling to Oslo and refused to provide them with passports. It also threatened economic reprisals against Norway.
Recently, more than 100 Nobel Prize winners have written to China's new leader, Xi Jinping, asking him to free Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, responded to the letter by saying that "Liu Xiaobo was lawfully sentenced to a fixed-term imprisonment by the judicial organ because he committed an offence against Chinese law". Moreover, "The Chinese government opposes outsiders handling matters in any way that would interfere in its judicial sovereignty and internal matters."
By contrast, Hong Lei praised writer Mo Yan, 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, who is in Stockholm to pick up his prize.
Criticised for being a party member and for his timid defence of human rights, a day after he was awarded the Nobel, he said that he hoped to see Liu Xiaobo freed.
However, yesterday on his arrival in Sweden, he refused to join the appeal for Liu's release. He also defended China's censorship of literature.
Through an interpreter, he said that censorship should not stand in the way of truth; only defamation, or rumours, "should be censored". Comparing literary censorship to airport controls, he said "these checks are necessary."