AT BEIJING’S Number One Intermediate People’s Court in December 2009, Liu Xiaobo, who was about to be sentenced to 11 years in jail for incitement to subvert state power, said in his closing argument that hatred could “poison the spirit of an entire people”. The circumstances of his death on July 13th in a hospital in the north-eastern city of Shenyang exemplified both the poisonous spirit of the government against which Mr Liu had spoken out, and the bravery and restraint that he hoped would transcend his imprisonment and which helped win him the Nobel peace prize in 2010.

In late May Mr Liu, a university lecturer in Beijing who had risen to prominence during the Tiananmen Square protests, was found to have late-stage liver cancer. He was transferred from his prison cell to the First Hospital of China Medical University. His treatment there showed the calculated and petty cruelty that China’s government sometimes metes out to peaceful dissenters like Mr Liu.

His wife, Liu Xia, who has been under house arrest during most of his imprisonment, was permitted to see him. But she and other relatives were ordered not to talk about him in public. The authorities posted guards round his bedside and outside his room on the 23rd floor of the hospital.

According to Mr Liu’s lawyer, the government refused his client’s request for medical treatment in Germany or America, claiming he was too ill to travel. Two foreign doctors who visited him on July 8th thought differently. Video and audio tapes of the medical consultation were promptly leaked—apparently by the security services against the doctors’ wishes—and splashed all over China’s state-run media. Their aim, apparently, was to show off the quality of care that Mr Liu had been receiving in China—the hospital put out an online bulletin claiming he could not have got better treatment anywhere. The government even referred to Mr Liu as an ordinary criminal. (It has often scoffed at his peace prize—accusing the Nobel committee of awarding it at the West’s behest simply in order to retaliate against the Chinese Communist Party for jailing one of its opponents.)

Special treatment, of sorts

Yet at the same time the government made clear that Mr Liu was not at all ordinary. The invitation to the American and German doctors showed that. So did the unprecedented flurry of medical bulletins; the hospital put out more than a dozen of them between July 6th and his death. One on July 11th said that Mr Liu was suffering from multiple organ failure and septic shock. The doctors said they wanted to place a plastic tube down his windpipe but that the family had refused to allow the procedure.

As such gruesome scenes unfolded around his bed, China and the rest of the world began to debate his significance and legacy. The government rejected the idea that any other country should even show an interest. “The matter is China’s internal affair,” said a foreign-ministry spokesman, huffily. “No country has the right to interfere.” European diplomats in Beijing had pressed the government to let Mr Liu go abroad on medical grounds. The Norwegian Nobel committee had gone further, saying that Mr Liu “should never have been sentenced to jail in the first place”. It said the government would bear a “heavy responsibility” if Mr Liu had been denied necessary medical treatment.

Within China Mr Liu’s name is blocked on internet search-engines and social-media sites. If there has been any surge of sympathy for him, it has been suppressed. Most expressions of support from Chinese people have therefore come from abroad, including from Mr Liu’s friends such as Cai Chu, who edits a website about democracy in China. Mr Cai tweeted that “we live as a free person or die as a free spirit: that has been Liu’s life pursuit.” But Ai Weiwei, a dissident artist who spends much of his time in Beijing, took a more downbeat view, calling Mr Liu “a rather moderate advocate of reforms”. Some of the late dissident’s friends and supporters in China tried to organise a petition to have him released and to visit him in hospital. They were turned away. Around 100 plain-clothes policemen were deployed around the facility to break up attempts to demonstrate or hold vigils.

When he made his statement to the court in 2009 (which was stopped by the judge halfway through) Mr Liu said: “I hope I will be the last victim of China’s long record of treating words as crimes.” Alas, that seems very unlikely.