Liu Xia, wife of imprisoned Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo, cries in a car outside Huairou Detention Centre, outside Beijing, where her brother Liu Hui has been jailed. Credit:AP Mr Liu was later awarded the Nobel peace prize by a committee in Norway, but was unable to attend the ceremony because of his imprisonment. Mr Liu's wife, Liu Xia, the older sister of Liu Hui, has been kept under house arrest and has had no contact with the outside world, except for a brief encounter with Associated Press reporters who managed to sneak past guards in December to visit her. Ms Liu was seen on Sunday being driven away from the courthouse in Huairou, north-east of Beijing, where the verdict of her brother had been announced. "I absolutely cannot accept this," she told reporters from the passenger seat of the car, according to Reuters. "This is simply persecution."

Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo. Credit:AFP She added that "this is completely an illegal verdict" and that she had "completely lost hope" in the government. The verdict against Liu Hui came as President Xi Jinping, the new leader of the Communist Party, and President Barack Obama wrapped up a two-day summit meeting in California. The Chinese authorities had made a couple of small concessions on human rights in the period before the meeting, notably giving passports to the mother and older brother of Chen Guangcheng, the rights advocate who fled to the United States last year, and allowing a Chinese-American engineer, Hu Zhicheng, to leave China after five years of being held against his will after a business dispute. But the Liu Hui case shows that China remains intolerant of political dissent and, as many human rights groups say, a major abuser of its power over innocent citizens who seek to exercise freedom of speech.

Last week, around the 24th anniversary of the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre, there were reports of detentions and harassment of Chinese rights advocates and liberal journalists by security agents. Liu Hui's lawyers have maintained his innocence. Chinese officials accuse Mr Liu, the manager of a real estate company in Shenzhen, of working with a colleague to steal 3 million renminbi, or nearly $500,000, from a man named Zhang Bing through a complicated fraud scheme. Liu Xia, the sister, was quickly ushered away from the scene after her brief comments to journalists. She is presumably still being kept under house arrest in her apartment in Beijing, and has not been charged or accused of any crime. As of December, when the AP reporters visited her, she was being allowed to see her husband once a month.

"We live in such an absurd place," she told the AP. "It is so absurd. "I felt I was a person emotionally prepared to respond to the consequences of Liu Xiaobo winning the prize. But after he won the prize, I really never imagined that after he won, I would not be able to leave my home. "This is too absurd. I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this." In Beijing, a more prominent corruption trial, that of Liu Zhijun, the former railways minister, began on Sunday. He faces an array of charges that centre on abuse of power. Liu Zhijun is one of the most powerful politicians to be brought down on corruption charges in recent years.

Under his rule, the Railroad Ministry expanded its construction of an ambitious high-speed train network, but graft was reportedly rampant and there was one deadly accident that caused many Chinese to question the pace of growth of the high-speed system. There was no immediate verdict announced in the trial of Liu Zhijun, but one could come within weeks. Another anticipated corruption trial is that of Bo Xilai, the former party chief of Chongqing and Politburo member whose wife was found guilty in a show trial last year of murdering a British businessman. Party insiders have said at various times that Mr Bo has been resisting interrogators as they try to build a case against him. Mr Bo had been widely seen as a Communist Party aristocrat who hoped to challenge Mr Xi for supremacy within the party.

New York Times

