China bars Norwegian diplomat from meeting Nobel laureate’s wife

BEIJING - Chinese police have prevented a Norwegian diplomat from meeting Liu Xia, the wife of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, she said Wednesday.

“Yesterday a Norwegian diplomat came to offer me support but was blocked outside the main gate,” Liu Xia said in a message posted on the microblogging website Twitter, while she remained under house arrest at her Beijing apartment.

She protested the Chinese government’s imposition of house arrest and said her “worried” mother had visited her Wednesday after her new mobile phone was cut off.

“The new mobile phone I just started using today (Tuesday) has been cut off again. They really are hooligans!” Liu Xia told DPA in a brief email message late Tuesday.

“Because I didn’t phone my family yesterday, today my 77-year-old mother came to see me. She’s worried,” she said via Twitter Wednesday.

“I’m very sorry. Thanks to my parents and family, who have always loved Xiaobo as much as they love me,” she said.

“I strongly protest the government’s illegal house arrest of me,” Liu Xia said.

China has cancelled at least two meetings with Norwegian officials following the announcement of the Nobel peace prize for Liu Xiaobo in Oslo Friday.

Foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu told reporters Tuesday that the award had already damaged diplomatic relations with Norway.

Ma declined to answer a question on whether China might allow Liu Xia to travel to Oslo for the Nobel award ceremony in December.

“I don’t know this person (Liu Xia),” Ma claimed.

Liu Xia has remained under house arrest since police brought her back from the northeastern city of Jinzhou, where her husband is serving an 11-year prison sentence for subversion.

Liu and her supporters said the police had taken her to meet Liu Xiaobo in prison Saturday.

Liu Xia told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post Tuesday, quoting her husband’s brother, that Liu Xiaobo had begun to receive improved prison food in specially cooked meals Monday.

The Washington-based human rights group Freedom Now said Liu Xiaobo had cried when he met his wife and said the prize was “for the Tiananmen martyrs”, referring to the 1989 democracy movement, which ended after a military crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Liu Xiaobo, a prominent writer and one of China’s leading dissidents, was arrested in December 2008 for his part in writing the Charter ‘08 for democratic reform.

China reacted angrily to the Nobel award and state media have reported little more than the foreign ministry’s earlier criticism of the award as “serious disrespect”.

It has kept many other dissidents and rights activists under house arrest or other forms of detention since Friday to prevent them from publicly celebrating the award.