Honors

Chinese Prisoner Wins Nobel Peace Prize

Liu Xiaobo is serving 11 years for dissidence.

China’s most widely renowned dissident won the Nobel peace prize Friday from a cell where he’s serving 11 years in prison. Liu Xiaobo is currently in the midst of his sentence for co-authoring Charter 08, a call for democratic reforms in China. He was arrested at his Beijing home in December 2008 and accused of incitement to subvert state power. Though Chinese officials had warned that awarding Liu the coveted prize would not only contradict the award’s aims but damage relations between China and Norway, which administers the award, people like Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu as well as several Chinese dissidents have backed the decision. Liu was first jailed for his part in the Tiananmen Square student reform movement in 1989, and also served three years at a labor camp in the '90s.