A day after Liu Xia returned home after informing her imprisoned husband and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, of his honour, she has been placed under house arrest in Beijing by the Chinese authorities, according to a reported posting by her on Twitter.
Visitors to her home and reporters in Beijing were barred by plainclothes security personnel from entering her apartment complex on Sunday and Monday. Ms. Liu also remained unreachable by phone, with her friends saying the authorities had turned off her mobile phone connection.
Ms. Liu posted a message on Twitter that she had been put under house arrest after she returned home on Saturday.
“Brothers, I have come back,” she wrote, according to a translation posted by the Hong Kong-based China Media Project (CMP). “I was put under house arrest on the eighth. I do not know when I can see everybody. My mobile phone has been messed with, so I cannot receive phone calls. I saw Xiaobo. The prison told him on the ninth the news about his winning the prize. The rest I will share with time.”
The CMP reported several Twitter users, and other intellectuals, had also faced detention and questioning by the police in recent days, and had been prevented from visiting Ms. Liu. There were also several accounts of gatherings in Beijing and Shanghai to mark Mr. Liu's award being disrupted. In Beijing, a gathering of more than a dozen bloggers and activists was broken up by police on Friday evening. Fourteen of those present were detained on Saturday, and it was unclear on Monday whether they had all been released. In Shanghai, Shi Feike, a journalist, was detained by police for several hours just as he planned to meet others in Shanghai's People Square.
Fan Yafeng, a legal activist and church leader in Beijing, reported that a police car had appeared in front of his Beijing home in the university district and his Internet connection had been switched off. He was also unreachable by phone over the weekend.
He told The Hindu in a recent interview, before the announcement of the award, that he believed the emergence of prominent figures like Mr. Liu “was changing the face of China's society”. “We have mature leaders now, lawyers, scholars and intellectuals,” he said. “This is as important as [having] the right environment, and a crucial ingredient for any civil society that is trying to find its voice.”
Most Chinese, however, remained unaware this week of Mr. Liu's Nobel Peace Prize. Media across China have been issued orders by the Central Propaganda Department to not report the news.
On Monday, some newspapers carried editorials criticising the decision. The Chinese-language Global Times newspaper, which is run by the Communist Party, hit out at the “prejudice” of the West behind the award.
“The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to ‘dissident' Liu Xiaobo was nothing more than another expression of this prejudice, and behind it lies an extraordinary terror of China's rise and the Chinese model,” it said. On Mr. Liu's calls for political reforms and elections, the paper said: “China's fate would perhaps be no better than the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the country probably would have quickly collapsed.”
