As Liu Xiaobo fades, his hopes for reform in China are dying as well
When the Chinese dissident and Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo succumbs to liver cancer, on a day that now seems both inevitable and imminent, the world will not only lose a moral giant. A fierce hope for change, a particular dream of a different China, is also lying on its deathbed in the northern Chinese hospital where Liu’s treatment is being rationed out, by doctors of unknown competence and uncharted loyalties. Poet, intellectual, champion of peaceful protest, little-known inside China because of censorship but a much-lauded name beyond its borders, Liu embodied the fight he led courageously for nearly three decades.
