Liu Xiaobo Wins Nobel Peace Prize - WSJ.com

Associated Press - In this Oct. 23, 2009 file photo, pro-democracy activists hold pictures of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

BEIJING—The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to Liu Xiaobo, a jailed Chinese democracy activist, in a move certain to infuriate China's government by re-focusing international attention on its controversial human rights record.

The Nobel Committee's decision to give the prize to Mr. Liu—a former literature professor who was most recently jailed for 11 years in December—is the latest sign that after several years of prioritizing commercial ties, Western countries are growing increasingly frustrated with Beijing's treatment of dissent.

The decision also comes amid broader tensions between China and other major countries over areas such as trade and territorial disputes as Beijing becomes a bigger, more assertive force on the international stage.

Mr. Liu was convicted on charges of "state subversion" more than a year after his detention as lead author of Charter 08, a manifesto issued by Chinese intellectuals and activists calling for free speech and multiparty elections.

In what was widely interpreted as an intentional rebuke to foreign critics, Chinese authorities announced his sentence on Christmas Day.

The veteran activist, who also helped lead student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989, became the favorite for the prize after he was backed by international supporters including Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident turned President who helped pen the 1977 manifesto Charter 77, which inspired Charter 08.

He is the first Chinese dissident to be awarded the prize, although it did go to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, in 1989, after the Chinese government crushed the Tiananmen Square protests.

Mr. Liu's wife, Liu Xia, told The Wall Street Journal: "He would be very surprised as he never imagined receiving such a prize. He just felt he had a responsibility to fight for the rights of the people who have no voice."

She said she was permitted to visit her husband once a month in his prison in Jinzhou, a city in the northeastern province of Liaoning, where she said he was sharing a cell with five other inmates and allowed to exercise twice a day.

When she last visited him, on Sept. 7, he seemed in good physical and psychological condition, she said. She added that local officials came to her home Thursday to ask her to go to Jinzhou to see her husband again, but she decided to stay in Beijing to be among friends when the Nobel decision was made.

"I hope this will allow him to come home a little earlier," she said. "I'm sure it won't happen immediately, but maybe it will help his case a little," since foreign countries might put more pressure on the Chinese government, she said.

There was no immediate reaction from China's government, but it has repeatedly warned the five-member Nobel Committee against giving the prize to a Chinese dissident.

Geir Lundestad, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said last month that he had been told by China's Deputy Foreign Minister, Fu Ying, in June that awarding the prize to a Chinese dissident would affect relations between Oslo and Beijing.

Ms. Fu has denied exerting such diplomatic pressure, but a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said last month that Mr. Liu's actions were "diametrically opposed to the aims of the Nobel prize."

Wen Jiabao, China's premier, also defended his government's record on human rights—especially freedom of speech—in an interview ahead of a visit to Europe this week.

"I believe freedom of speech is indispensable for any country," Mr. Wen told CNN, adding that China had about 400 million Internet users and 800 million mobile-phone subscribers. "They can access the Internet to express their views, including critical views. I often say that we should not only let people have the freedom of speech; we, more important, must create conditions to let them criticize the work of the government," he said.

The award is a setback for China's efforts to burnish its reputation in the two decades since the 1989 crackdown.

China has invested billions of dollars and enormous energy in recent years on efforts to improve its image as a modern international power—from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to a new international satellite news channel launched this year to Confucian Institutes that teach Chinese language and culture in schools overseas.

China's human rights record had slipped lower on the international agenda in recent years, as the Obama administration and other Western governments focused on commercial relations with Beijing.

In February 2009, soon after taking office, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on a trip to China that Washington continued to press the Chinese government on human rights but that "our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate-change crisis and the security crisis."

Since then, the attention of the U.S. and others has grown, as China's government has stepped up already substantial controls over the Internet and issued a series of harsh sentences to dissidents and foreign citizens.

Just days after Mr. Liu's sentence, Beijing infuriated the British government by executing a British national for drug smuggling, despite repeated appeals for clemency on mental-health grounds.

In July, a Chinese court sentenced an American geologist to eight years in prison for trying to buy data about the Chinese oil industry, spurning a personal appeal from U.S. President Barack Obama. Write to Jeremy Page at jeremy.page@wsj.com

Good for you, Sweden and Nobel Prize Committee! ... Monte