Liu Xia has a world-famous husband. The husband was jailed in 2008, and Liu Xia was also placed under house arrest in 2010 by Chinese authorities to keep her voice from passing out.

Liu Xia, Chinese poet, painter and photographer, her husband is China's first Nobel Peace Prize winner, the well-known pro-democracy movement personage. 13th this month, Liu Xiaobo died in Shenyang hospital after multiple organ failure.


Photo: A screenshot of Liu Xia from Fax society

Liu Xia's two acquaintances in the 1980 's were a literary circle. In the 80 's, the arts people embraced the openness and partial political loosening brought about by economic reforms. Liu Xia resolutely resigned from the IRS work, devote himself to writing poetry and artistic creation. At this point, Liu Xiaobo received his doctorate in literature and was dissatisfied with the political censorship and social framework.

The two men gradually became intimate after their first marriage ended and Liu Xiaobo was released from prison. Liu Xiaobo, who insists on his political views and later served his sentence in the labour camp, formally married in 1996.

Married life 12, not long, in 2008, Liu Xiaobo participated in the drafting of the 08 charter, proposed China's democratization process, improve human rights situation, and advocated the establishment of the Federal Republic of China to solve cross-strait and ethnic issues.


Image source: Chen Xiaoping Twitter

The same year, Liu Xiaobo was arrested by the authorities two days before the charter was officially published. After a year in detention, the Beijing government sentenced him to "inciting subversion of state power" on December 25, 2009, and must serve 11 years in prison.

But the coronation from the West followed, and in October 2010 the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. After the news, Chinese authorities put Liu Xia under house arrest so far, restricting her contact with the outside world.

Chinese government is not afraid of Liu Xiaobo

Is Liu Xia likely to be more frightening to the Chinese government than he is?

There are too many people in the history of ideals and convictions to become partners together, when one (often the husband) becomes the martyr of political persecution, regardless of what the previous wife, who carried the family at the same time, often carry the political vision of the two people.

The departure of the human martyrs to the community to bring vibration, energy gathered in the survivors, angry grievances can push the huge mobilization. In democracies, anger can take the form of a political party rotation, a dictatorship, or a dam that breaks through a totalitarian dike.


Image source: AP

Even though Liu's previous activities have not been involved in politics, the Chinese authorities seem to be not allowed to risk, they know that women's tenacity and ability to mobilize the energy of emotions are invincible, they fear, afraid of face. Even if he is not guilty, Liu Xia will be placed under house arrest to prevent her from contacting the outside world.

The police patrol her house, monitor her communications, deprive her of freedom of movement, a few years later, Liu Xia diagnosed with severe depression.

In the past seven years, Liu Xia had only visited her parents or visited Liaoning province to leave her Beijing apartment. Liu Xia's father died last year, only a few months after his father's death, Liu Xia received the news. The mother of Liu Xia also left the world earlier this year.

Liu Xia's two people have no children, after the death of her parents, the power of her life was often relied upon to wait for a visit, to wait for him to deliver his books, to wait for Liu Xiaobo out of prison, and to wait for two people to spend the future, even if the world was still more absurd than Kafka's novels.

As a person deprived of the meaning of life, the subject of this political persecution has never been the only one of Liu Xiaobo.

In the history of political persecution, their language has been lost.

Just as Taiwan has experienced white terror, the survivors and wives who are persecuted by political persecution often have to endure the slander and exclusion of the society after their husbands have been jailed, to carry their families, to raise their children and to survive in traumatic experiences.

People who study the White terror find them and conduct oral histories of the old, but sometimes forget that the subject of persecution is not only executed with the sentenced themselves, but that their families, as prisoners outside the prison, are in no better position than their husbands or fathers in prison. (Note i)

The silence, horror, anxiety, trauma and loss caused by the unlawful atrocities of the authorities are a cage of endless time.

However, history has traditionally lost their language and neglected their historical records and concerns as the subject of persecution. The disappearance of Liu Xia is not only embodied in the authorities ' control over its actions, but also in the Chinese media's concealment of its wounds. Monitor her, mute her, is to a person as the main body of the negation.

In the media reappearance of the two sides, few people reproduce the history of the family members of the political persecutors. Hou Hsiao-Hsien was one of the few who wanted to complete the narrative from a female perspective.

Hou Hsiao-hsien, a good man and a good girl, described her husband's persecution by the Kuomintang government through the static of the heroine, Jiang Jasper. In the film, women not only bear the narrative responsibility, but also become the protagonist in the film and history.


Photo Source: "Good Man Good Girl" stills

The film will be devoted to Chiang Jasper, who is considered a spy, after interrogation, war and imprisonment, the loss of a child and her husband, and when she received her husband's body and suicide note, she silently burned the gold paper for him, and finally he could not refrain from crying bitterly for her dead husband, her miserable fate, and all those who had lived through the white Terror. (Note II)

No one has succeeded in contacting Liu Xia since his death

The scenes in Hou Hsiao-hsien's film "Good Men and women" remind of the Chinese authorities ' release of Liu Xia's photos.

The authorities released a sad image of the widowed Liu Xia on 15th at a private funeral, and then she and her relatives were on board the ship to scatter his ashes into the sea image. But these photos were released by the Chinese government.


Image source: Getty Images

"We are very worried that we have seen the funeral photos of the authorities, she looks frail and painful and looks like the saddest person in the world," said Hu Jia, an activist living in Beijing and a friend of Liu Xia's couple. 」

Sophie Richardson, head of Human Rights Watch's China department, said: "Richardson there is no greater priority than the rescue of Liu Xia, which has been placed under house arrest for years without reason, through a number of media, multiple-language images, and broadcasts of what she does as the authorities expect, while not allowing her to speak on her own. That's a mandatory shot. 」

According to the New York Times, the AFP correspondent in Beijing, in Beijing on the evening of 16th, went to Liu Xia and his residence in Beijing in the hope of finding his whereabouts. But at the elevators in their home, a uniformed security guard, and a plainclothes, unidentified man at the door. Agence France-Presse reporters tried to ring the doorbell, but the two men were driven, failed to find Liu Xia.

After the burial at the sea, there was no indication that Beijing had released Liu Xia and she was still unaccounted for. Patrick Poon, a Chinese researcher at Amnesty International, said that the 56-Year-old Liu Xia, who suffered from depression and had a heart attack, Pan Jiawei with friends "very strange". Human Rights Watch (Human Rights Watch) said the rescue of Liu Xia was urgent.

The United States and the European Union have called on Chinese President Xi Jinping's communist government to release Liu Xia and let her go abroad, but the Chinese government is still responding to an internal affair that foreign countries cannot interfere with.

In 2017, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to more than 3 years, and in July the Chinese authorities declared that he was medical parole at the end of liver cancer, but refused to let him go abroad for medical treatment. Liu Xiaobo soon died in China, leaving the year he was 61 years old, 56 years old, and both were in prime.

Liu Xiaobo left the shackles of the body, but as a prisoner of the prison, and with many more silenced women, their prison period continued.


圖片來源:美聯社