After Liu was convicted of inciting subversion of state power, supporters questioned whether he deserved to be in jail at all. He was charged over his co-authorship of Charter 08, which called on Beijing to respect human rights and the rule of law and introduce democratic reforms. But the authorities singled him out from many other intellectuals who signed it. It would not have helped that he had been jailed three times previously over human rights advocacy since taking part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Among rights campaigners who have won the peace prize, only Liu and late Soviet nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov were physically prevented by their governments from going to Oslo to accept it. Now that China and Norway have normalised relations frozen for six years over Liu’s prize, some of the rhetoric at the time conveys the strength of feelings then. Beijing described Liu as a criminal, and the award as an “obscenity” and a “Western conspiracy to destabilise the country”. China felt it was being denied credit in human rights terms for eradicating poverty, that its critics were misguided and their ideas ahead of the times in the mainland. Moreover, China insists on non-interference by foreign countries in its legal and judicial systems.