He is China's number one dissident, described in the press here as a criminal, for others a hero of Chinese democracy. Either way, Liu Xiaobo's collapsing body is at the heart of a struggle to control the message over the meaning of his fast approaching death.

China's dying Nobel Peace Prize winner is at the centre of an information war.

The country's state-run media say Liu Xiaobo's cancer "mustn't be politicised" as they publish leaked recordings of him under surveillance while in jail and now in hospital.

International human rights groups say they are dismayed he is still being held under guard to the very end and the German government says China's security forces are running the treatment of this terminally ill patient rather than doctors.

The truth is that the Chinese government knows this all looks bad.

Not since Nazi Germany has a Nobel Peace Prize winner died while in custody and that is exactly what is unfolding here.

Following a diagnosis of terminal, late-stage liver cancer, Chinese officials moved him from prison to hospital to see out his remaining days under guard but with better medical care.

Nobody is doubting the genuine effort of the Chinese doctors who have tried to help Liu Xiaobo nor their professional capability.

But the German government says they are not running the show around Liu Xiaobo's bed at Shenyang's First Hospital of China Medical University. That has been the job of China's state security forces.

And it has been a show.

According to a statement from the German Embassy, when one of the country's doctors came to help, audio and video surveillance of this meeting was recorded despite prior written German requests that no such recordings be made.

Then this material was selectively leaked to Chinese state media in order to get out the message that his treatment had been humane.

Liu Xiaobo has been held since soon after the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

He was given an eleven-year jail term for "inciting subversion of state power" after he and others co-authored a manifesto called "Charter '08" advocating a sweeping democratic overhaul of China's system of government.

One of the most risky things you could possibly do in China is promote any form of organising around the overthrow of Communist Party monopoly power.

While in custody in 2010 he won the Nobel Peace Prize which was awarded to an empty chair in his absence.

In recent times Liu Xiaobo's health has been deteriorating. Since his cancer diagnosis, Western governments and human rights groups have called for him to be allowed to go overseas for better treatment.

Chinese officials have responded that he is too unwell to travel yet two foreign doctors, after visiting the hospital, contradicted this diagnosis.

As a compromise, China has allowed two international specialists to come and see him in Shenyang.

After their initial visit, Dr Joseph Herman from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dr Markus Büchler, chairman of Heidelberg University's Surgery Department, released a statement:

"Liu Xiaobo and his family have requested that the remainder of his care be provided in Germany or the United States.

"While a degree of risk always exists in the movement of any patient, both physicians believe Mr. Liu can be safely transported with appropriate medical evacuation care and support.

"However, the medical evacuation would have to take place as quickly as possible. The University of Heidelberg and MD Anderson have each agreed to accept Mr. Liu for treatment."

The Chinese government has not agreed to allow this to happen.

Instead it has been releasing footage of Liu Xiaobo appearing to say on camera that Chinese doctors have treated him well and that some of his symptoms pre-date his incarceration.

The clip of surveillance footage with the foreign team of doctors achieves the same effect.

Liu Xiaobo is shown lying in bed with a small crowd of medical staff and others around him.

Dr Büchler is seen speaking to Liu Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia, who is standing at the bottom of his bed with her back to the camera.

"It's very, very good that the doctors from China have asked us to come and help," he says in English. "So they are very committed to the treatment of your husband. They want us to help and I think this is a very nice gesture."

Liu Xia does not reply and must appear distressed because the American doctor says "Are you OK?" as he reaches out to comfort her.

When asked about requests that China's most influential dissident be allowed to travel overseas for medical help the response from the Chinese government has been that this is an internal matter for this country and that others should simply mind their own business.

At the regular foreign ministry press briefing on Monday, eight of the 17 questions to the spokesperson were about Liu Xiaobo but, when the official transcript of the press conference appeared on the ministry's website, all questions relating to Liu had been removed.

This is standard procedure for the authorities here when it comes to sensitive subjects. Promote your own line (foreign doctors praising their Chinese counterparts), and shut down all discussion which contradicts it (foreign doctors saying he can travel overseas or German government saying surgeons not in charge of his care).

As an exercise I have been asking "ordinary" Chinese people in recent days about Liu Xiaobo.

My questions were met with a blank expression - er, who?

People do not even seem to know that China has had a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

When Western journalists visited the hospital in Shenyang and asked the nurses on duty where Liu Xiaobo was, they not only could not find his name on the database but appeared to have never heard of him, along the lines of "Sorry could you spell that name again? Why have so many people have been asking about this man? Who is he?"

For the Chinese government this represents mission accomplished.

As for the country's reputation overseas they will just plan to ride this one out like they have with other unpleasant subjects.</s>BEIJING -- Chinese doctors worked urgently Monday to save critically ill Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, as the government hardened its position against growing pleas to allow China's best-known political prisoner to leave for treatment overseas.

A stark update issued by Liu's hospital said he was suffering from poor kidney function and bleeding in the liver from metastasizing tumors. It heightened pressure on Beijing, which has resisted appeals from several nations to let Liu and his family go.

A foreign ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, asked other countries at a daily news briefing "to respect China's national sovereignty and refrain from interfering in its domestic affairs due to an individual case." On Monday, the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Beijing for a "signal of humanity for Liu Xiaobo and his family."

Liu's health has been the subject of international attention after news emerged in late June that the dissident had been transferred to a Chinese hospital because of late-stage liver cancer. Supporters and Western governments urged China to allow Liu to choose where he wanted to be treated and to release him. Beijing has so far resisted, citing Liu's fragile health and arguing that he is receiving the best possible care in China.

Liu was convicted in 2009 of inciting subversion for his role in the "Charter 08" movement calling for political reform. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year later while in prison.

Two foreign doctors who were permitted to visit Liu this past weekend said Sunday that they deemed Liu strong enough to be evacuated, apparently contradicting Chinese expert opinion.

Chinese leaders face two unpalatable choices, analysts say. If China sends Liu abroad, he could speak out against Beijing in his remaining days and become a worldwide media icon. If Beijing maintains the status quo -- keeping him under close guard in China -- his death in custody would tarnish the Communist Party's image.

"If a Nobel Peace Prize laureate dies in detention, it would batter China's image but only be a short-term political hit," said Mo Zhixu, a dissident writer who is friends with Liu. "If he leaves and makes political statements, it would be a unifying force for the world and rejuvenate a political reform movement in China that's reached a low -- maybe even start a new wave."

Liu's plight has already drawn public protests in the southern Chinese city of Hong Kong. On Monday, dozens of people waved banners and chanted slogans as they staged a sit-in protest outside the Chinese government's representative office, urging Beijing to allow Liu to be treated overseas.

The Chinese facility treating Liu says it is providing him with the best possible care and that Liu is too ill to be moved. It issued an update Monday that appeared to highlight his deteriorating condition.

The First Hospital of China Medical University said Liu is also suffering from low blood pressure and that an MRI scan revealed growing cancer lesions.

"The national experts group's view is that the patient is in critical condition," the statement said. Doctors treating Liu were in an "active rescue" mode, it added, saying they were trying to fight infections, correct Liu's blood pressure and purify his blood.

A video clip leaked on Monday appeared to show one of the foreign experts who visited Liu, Markus Buechler of Heidelberg University, addressing Liu's wife, Liu Xia, to tell her that Chinese doctors were doing their utmost to help Liu and were "very committed to his treatment."

The German Embassy in Beijing expressed "deep concern" that the recording was leaked to Chinese state media outlets against the wishes of the German side.

"It seems that security organs are steering the process, not medical experts," the embassy said.

Information for this article was contributed by Geir Moulson and Josie Wong of The Associated Press.</s>Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident writer, is dying of liver cancer. He’s been in prison since 2009, his “crime” being the publication of a charter calling for political reform. But he’s not a hero to his countrymen. Most Chinese have only vaguely heard of Liu if they’re aware of him at all; those who know about him, in my experience, speak of him with distaste. “He should be grateful that the government is giving him medical care for free!” one acquaintance posted online.

There was a time when I was shocked by the disdain middle-class Chinese, even those with relatively liberal views, showed toward dissidents. The first impulse always seems to be to find a way to blame them. All the agency was placed on the victims, not on the people who arrested, tortured, and imprisoned them; the system was just the system, after all.

In time, though, I came to see it as a psychological survival measure, an authoritarian-adapted version of something that prevails everywhere; the just-world hypothesis. That’s the belief, consciously or otherwise, that when things go wrong for people there must be a sensible reason behind it. He got cancer because he didn’t pray enough. She got raped because she went to a neighborhood where she should have known better. He should have been more deferential to that police officer.

People believe in a just world as a psychic defense mechanism against the obvious and monstrous injustice of the universe. In reality, none of us are God’s favorite children, and at any moment disease, accident, or disaster could snatch everything we love away from us. But we pretend that we are not spiders hanging by a thread over the fire, and look for ways to justify the suffering of others to maintain our own blithe conviction that we’ll be OK.

In China, it’s not just an unjust universe that people need to explain away, but an even more immediate unjust government. This isn’t the argument that a few Chinese intellectuals make — that China has to put stability and the social order above justice and freedom. (Even then, they tend to frame it in abstract terms, not in the realities of broken fingers and imprisoned journalists.) It’s an attempt to turn an unpalatable event into a psychologically acceptable narrative — not so much to deny the injustice, as to shrug it away as the fault of the victim. It turns the state into a force of nature, not a moral actor; going up against it is as foolish and pointless as waving an umbrella in a thunderstorm.

Many Chinese, like other residents of authoritarian states, don’t want to confront what officialdom could do to them at any moment. When the government crushes people, then, it must be the victim’s fault. They should have known what would happen. They shouldn’t have been so arrogant. They should have realized who they were up against.

That’s why the government has always been relatively comfortable with talking about Liu and others who directly and forthrightly challenge the system. Indeed, Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize saw a concerted blast of Chinese media coverage (after a week of silence where the system processed the news). People like Liu are potential object lessons; cross the line and we will destroy you — and it’ll be your own fault.

The government gives the impression, and much of the public seems to believe, the lines in question are clearly drawn. The problem is they’re often invisible until you accidentally blunder across them. My friend Jimmy’s uncle didn’t know that his construction company was bidding against a mafia run by local officials and gangsters — until they kidnapped him, took him to the top of an unfinished building, chopped off his legs and left him to bleed to death, while their official counterparts arrested his brother on false charges.

The vast bulk of the damage done by the Chinese state is to people who did nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And these are by far the most dangerous injustices, from the government’s perspective. If the public is ever stirred from its apathy, it will be because of ordinary victims, not outspoken dissidents. That’s why the many prosaic encounters with the Chinese government that result in tragedy are permitted only a mayfly lifespan in the Chinese media; a brief burst of attention in the aftermath, followed by a swift closure of discussion of the topic.

Political persecution, on the other hand, is given a proud public place. When the government decided to crush China’s flickering, hopeful online life in 2013, prominent blogger Charles Xue was made to confess to his crimes as a Weibo activist on live television. Talking with an intelligent and liberal colleague after the televised confession, she seemed unfazed by the crudity and echoes of the Cultural Revolution. “He must have had warnings,” she said.

Or take Falun Gong. In the initial stages of persecution, there was a lot of public sympathy for the group; why were the police harassing nice Mrs. Liu, who did tai chi in the park? But when Falun Gong’s leaders pushed the group toward direct confrontation with the state, surrounding the central palace of Zhongnanhai, where the leadership resides, and setting themselves on fire in protest, that sympathy evaporated.

It’s tempting to see some deeper cultural current in this. The doctrine of karma has a long history in China; the idea that your fate has ultimately been determined by past sins, if not present ones. (When British football coach Glenn Hoddle was sacked for saying that disability was the fault of previous existences, he was expressing a perfectly common — if loathsome — religious view.) But it’s not as if Christianity doesn’t have its own perverse theologies of suffering, from original sin and the fallen world to the sociopathic smugness of the modern U.S. prosperity gospel.

Westerners in China aren’t immune to it either. I remember conversations in the expat world when Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist, was arrested, deprived of his medicine, and forced to confess on live television. He’d been too intemperate. He’d crossed a line he should have known about. Surely the same thing couldn’t happen to us, who stayed within limits we were sure would be respected? (In fairness, Dahlin was given to playing Bob Dylan loudly in the small hours of the morning, which in a just world surely would be severely punished.)

In Liu’s case, his past writings were dragged out to use against him. He’d written that it would take “300 years of colonialism” for China to become as civilized as Hong Kong, been an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war on terror, and sometimes been willfully blind about the West’s failings. That was dragged out as an excuse by many Chinese intellectuals — and some Western apologists. At no point did they explain how intemperate speech or naivety justified decades of persecution and imprisonment — it was enough to point the finger, to come up with an excuse, and to sleep comfortably at night.

One of the strangest ways that people talked about Liu and other dissidents like the ebullient Ai Weiwei, I found, was as though their actions were really some kind of cunning career move, made to get them attention or money from the West. Editorials in the state-operated Global Times described the democrats as “having made a failed bet.” In part, this was because of government propaganda that did everything it could to link internal dissent to the ever-present “foreign forces.”

But it was also a way of reducing everything to the same cynicism with which the rest of Chinese society operates. Pretend that taking on the system was done for Western gold, rather than principle, and you could justify the compromises and corruption that you took part in every day. It was especially prevalent among those who had been young and once idealistic in the 1980s. They’d compromised, so why the hell couldn’t those stiff-necked bastards? Everybody else — or at least, the people in their class: urban, educated professionals — had done so well in the years afterward, after all.

One day, I hope, Liu will be remembered as one of many martyrs over the centuries for a better, fairer, kinder China. But that’s a long way off. Right now, when he dies, most of his compatriots will shrug. What, after all, did he expect was going to happen?</s>Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident writer, is dying of liver cancer. He's been in prison since 2009, his "crime" being the publication of a charter calling for political reform. But he's not a hero to his countrymen. Most Chinese have only vaguely heard of Liu if they're aware of him at all; those who know about him, in my experience, speak of him with distaste. "He should be grateful that the government is giving him medical care for free!" one acquaintance posted online.

There was a time when I was shocked by the disdain middle-class Chinese, even those with relatively liberal views, showed toward dissidents. The first impulse always seems to be to find a way to blame them. All the agency was placed on the victims, not on the people who arrested, tortured, and imprisoned them; the system was just the system, after all.

In time, though, I came to see it as a psychological survival measure, an authoritarian-adapted version of something that prevails everywhere; the just-world hypothesis. That's the belief, consciously or otherwise, that when things go wrong for people there must be a sensible reason behind it. He got cancer because he didn't pray enough. She got raped because she went to a neighborhood where she should have known better. He should have been more deferential to that police officer.

People believe in a just world as a psychic defense mechanism against the obvious and monstrous injustice of the universe. In reality, none of us are God's favorite children, and at any moment disease, accident, or disaster could snatch everything we love away from us. But we pretend that we are not spiders hanging by a thread over the fire, and look for ways to justify the suffering of others to maintain our own blithe conviction that we'll be OK.

In China, it's not just an unjust universe that people need to explain away, but an even more immediate unjust government. This isn't the argument that a few Chinese intellectuals make - that China has to put stability and the social order above justice and freedom. (Even then, they tend to frame it in abstract terms, not in the realities of broken fingers and imprisoned journalists.) It's an attempt to turn an unpalatable event into a psychologically acceptable narrative - not so much to deny the injustice, as to shrug it away as the fault of the victim. It turns the state into a force of nature, not a moral actor; going up against it is as foolish and pointless as waving an umbrella in a thunderstorm.

Many Chinese, like other residents of authoritarian states, don't want to confront what officialdom could do to them at any moment. When the government crushes people, then, it must be the victim's fault. They should have known what would happen. They shouldn't have been so arrogant. They should have realized who they were up against.

That's why the government has always been relatively comfortable with talking about Liu and others who directly and forthrightly challenge the system. Indeed, Liu's Nobel Peace Prize saw a concerted blast of Chinese media coverage (after a week of silence where the system processed the news). People like Liu are potential object lessons; cross the line and we will destroy you - and it'll be your own fault.

The government gives the impression, and much of the public seems to believe, the lines in question are clearly drawn. The problem is they're often invisible until you accidentally blunder across them. My friend Jimmy's uncle didn't know that his construction company was bidding against a mafia run by local officials and gangsters - until they kidnapped him, took him to the top of an unfinished building, chopped off his legs and left him to bleed to death, while their official counterparts arrested his brother on false charges.

The vast bulk of the damage done by the Chinese state is to people who did nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And these are by far the most dangerous injustices, from the government's perspective. If the public is ever stirred from its apathy, it will be because of ordinary victims, not outspoken dissidents. That's why the many prosaic encounters with the Chinese government that result in tragedy are permitted only a mayfly lifespan in the Chinese media; a brief burst of attention in the aftermath, followed by a swift closure of discussion of the topic.

Political persecution, on the other hand, is given a proud public place. When the government decided to crush China's flickering, hopeful online life in 2013, prominent blogger Charles Xue was made to confess to his crimes as a Weibo activist on live television. Talking with an intelligent and liberal colleague after the televised confession, she seemed unfazed by the crudity and echoes of the Cultural Revolution. "He must have had warnings," she said.

Or take Falun Gong. In the initial stages of persecution, there was a lot of public sympathy for the group; why were the police harassing nice Mrs. Liu, who did tai chi in the park? But when Falun Gong's leaders pushed the group toward direct confrontation with the state, surrounding the central palace of Zhongnanhai, where the leadership resides, and setting themselves on fire in protest, that sympathy evaporated.

It's tempting to see some deeper cultural current in this. The doctrine of karma has a long history in China; the idea that your fate has ultimately been determined by past sins, if not present ones. (When British football coach Glenn Hoddle was sacked for saying that disability was the fault of previous existences, he was expressing a perfectly common - if loathsome - religious view.) But it's not as if Christianity doesn't have its own perverse theologies of suffering, from original sin and the fallen world to the sociopathic smugness of the modern U.S. prosperity gospel.

Westerners in China aren't immune to it either. I remember conversations in the expat world when Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist, was arrested, deprived of his medicine, and forced to confess on live television. He'd been too intemperate. He'd crossed a line he should have known about. Surely the same thing couldn't happen to us, who stayed within limits we were sure would be respected? (In fairness, Dahlin was given to playing Bob Dylan loudly in the small hours of the morning, which in a just world surely would be severely punished.)</s>He is China's number one dissident, described in the press here as a criminal, for others a hero of Chinese democracy. Either way, Liu Xiaobo's collapsing body is at the heart of a struggle to control the message over the meaning of his fast approaching death.

China's dying Nobel Peace Prize winner is at the centre of an information war.

The country's state-run media say Liu Xiaobo's cancer "mustn't be politicised" as they publish leaked recordings of him under surveillance while in jail and now in hospital.

International human rights groups say they are dismayed he is still being held under guard to the very end and the German government says China's security forces are running the treatment of this terminally ill patient rather than doctors.

The truth is that the Chinese government knows this all looks bad.

Not since Nazi Germany has a Nobel Peace Prize winner died while in custody and that is exactly what is unfolding here.

Following a diagnosis of terminal, late-stage liver cancer, Chinese officials moved him from prison to hospital to see out his remaining days under guard but with better medical care.

Nobody is doubting the genuine effort of the Chinese doctors who have tried to help Liu Xiaobo nor their professional capability.

But the German government says they are not running the show around Liu Xiaobo's bed at Shenyang's First Hospital of China Medical University. That has been the job of China's state security forces.

And it has been a show.

According to a statement from the German Embassy, when one of the country's doctors came to help, audio and video surveillance of this meeting was recorded despite prior written German requests that no such recordings be made.

Then this material was selectively leaked to Chinese state media in order to get out the message that his treatment had been humane.

Liu Xiaobo has been held since soon after the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

He was given an eleven-year jail term for "inciting subversion of state power" after he and others co-authored a manifesto called "Charter '08" advocating a sweeping democratic overhaul of China's system of government.

One of the most risky things you could possibly do in China is promote any form of organising around the overthrow of Communist Party monopoly power.

While in custody in 2010 he won the Nobel Peace Prize which was awarded to an empty chair in his absence.

In recent times Liu Xiaobo's health has been deteriorating. Since his cancer diagnosis, Western governments and human rights groups have called for him to be allowed to go overseas for better treatment.

Chinese officials have responded that he is too unwell to travel yet two foreign doctors, after visiting the hospital, contradicted this diagnosis.

As a compromise, China has allowed two international specialists to come and see him in Shenyang.

After their initial visit, Dr Joseph Herman from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Dr Markus Büchler, chairman of Heidelberg University's Surgery Department, released a statement:

"Liu Xiaobo and his family have requested that the remainder of his care be provided in Germany or the United States.

"While a degree of risk always exists in the movement of any patient, both physicians believe Mr. Liu can be safely transported with appropriate medical evacuation care and support.

"However, the medical evacuation would have to take place as quickly as possible. The University of Heidelberg and MD Anderson have each agreed to accept Mr. Liu for treatment."

The Chinese government has not agreed to allow this to happen.

Instead it has been releasing footage of Liu Xiaobo appearing to say on camera that Chinese doctors have treated him well and that some of his symptoms pre-date his incarceration.

The clip of surveillance footage with the foreign team of doctors achieves the same effect.

Liu Xiaobo is shown lying in bed with a small crowd of medical staff and others around him.

Dr Büchler is seen speaking to Liu Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia, who is standing at the bottom of his bed with her back to the camera.

"It's very, very good that the doctors from China have asked us to come and help," he says in English. "So they are very committed to the treatment of your husband. They want us to help and I think this is a very nice gesture."

Liu Xia does not reply and must appear distressed because the American doctor says "Are you OK?" as he reaches out to comfort her.

When asked about requests that China's most influential dissident be allowed to travel overseas for medical help the response from the Chinese government has been that this is an internal matter for this country and that others should simply mind their own business.

At the regular foreign ministry press briefing on Monday, eight of the 17 questions to the spokesperson were about Liu Xiaobo but, when the official transcript of the press conference appeared on the ministry's website, all questions relating to Liu had been removed.

This is standard procedure for the authorities here when it comes to sensitive subjects. Promote your own line (foreign doctors praising their Chinese counterparts), and shut down all discussion which contradicts it (foreign doctors saying he can travel overseas or German government saying surgeons not in charge of his care).

As an exercise I have been asking "ordinary" Chinese people in recent days about Liu Xiaobo.

My questions were met with a blank expression - er, who?

People do not even seem to know that China has had a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

When Western journalists visited the hospital in Shenyang and asked the nurses on duty where Liu Xiaobo was, they not only could not find his name on the database but appeared to have never heard of him, along the lines of "Sorry could you spell that name again? Why have so many people have been asking about this man? Who is he?"

For the Chinese government this represents mission accomplished.

As for the country's reputation overseas they will just plan to ride this one out like they have with other unpleasant subjects.</s>Mr. Liu, 61, was sentenced late in 2009 to 11 years in prison on charges of inciting subversion, a year after he was detained on the cusp of issuing a bold democratic petition called Charter 08. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, infuriating the Chinese government.

The prison authorities revealed late last month that Mr. Liu had advanced liver cancer and had been given medical parole. He has been receiving treatment in the university hospital in Shenyang, a city 390 miles northeast of Beijing, guarded by the police. He and his wife, Liu Xia, have not spoken publicly or received well-wishers outside their immediate family.

But a lawyer for Mr. Liu and friends of the couple have said the couple wanted Mr. Liu to go abroad for treatment, apparently out of distrust of Chinese hospitals and to give Mr. Liu some freedom in his final days.

Their efforts received a boost over the weekend after the American and German cancer specialists examined Mr. Liu on Saturday and said he was well enough to travel.

Dr. Joseph M. Herman of the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas and Dr. Markus Büchler of the University of Heidelberg were invited by the Chinese government to examine Mr. Liu. But they apparently departed from the government’s official script that Mr. Liu was not stable enough to travel.

“While a degree of risk always exists in the movement of any patient, both physicians believe Mr. Liu can be safely transported with appropriate medical evacuation care and support,” the two doctors said in a joint statement on Sunday. “However, the medical evacuation would have to take place as quickly as possible.”

But the two doctors were also used in Chinese propaganda. They were shown visiting Mr. Liu in a video that appeared to have been made and issued with the backing of the Chinese authorities. The video released Sunday showed them and a number of Chinese medical workers crowded around Mr. Liu, gaunt and motionless in a bed, while a woman with short hair — apparently his wife, Liu Xia — stood at his feet.</s>Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident writer, is dying of liver cancer. He’s been in prison since 2009, his “crime” being the publication of a charter calling for political reform. But he’s not a hero to his countrymen. Most Chinese have only vaguely heard of Liu if they’re aware of him at all; those who know about him, in my experience, speak of him with distaste. “He should be grateful that the government is giving him medical care for free!” one acquaintance posted online.

There was a time when I was shocked by the disdain middle-class Chinese, even those with relatively liberal views, showed toward dissidents. The first impulse always seems to be to find a way to blame them. All the agency was placed on the victims, not on the people who arrested, tortured, and imprisoned them; the system was just the system, after all.

In time, though, I came to see it as a psychological survival measure, an authoritarian-adapted version of something that prevails everywhere; the just-world hypothesis. That’s the belief, consciously or otherwise, that when things go wrong for people there must be a sensible reason behind it. He got cancer because he didn’t pray enough. She got raped because she went to a neighborhood where she should have known better. He should have been more deferential to that police officer.

People believe in a just world as a psychic defense mechanism against the obvious and monstrous injustice of the universe. In reality, none of us are God’s favorite children, and at any moment disease, accident, or disaster could snatch everything we love away from us. But we pretend that we are not spiders hanging by a thread over the fire, and look for ways to justify the suffering of others to maintain our own blithe conviction that we’ll be OK.

In China, it’s not just an unjust universe that people need to explain away, but an even more immediate unjust government. This isn’t the argument that a few Chinese intellectuals make — that China has to put stability and the social order above justice and freedom. (Even then, they tend to frame it in abstract terms, not in the realities of broken fingers and imprisoned journalists.) It’s an attempt to turn an unpalatable event into a psychologically acceptable narrative — not so much to deny the injustice, as to shrug it away as the fault of the victim. It turns the state into a force of nature, not a moral actor; going up against it is as foolish and pointless as waving an umbrella in a thunderstorm.

Many Chinese, like other residents of authoritarian states, don’t want to confront what officialdom could do to them at any moment. When the government crushes people, then, it must be the victim’s fault. They should have known what would happen. They shouldn’t have been so arrogant. They should have realized who they were up against.

That’s why the government has always been relatively comfortable with talking about Liu and others who directly and forthrightly challenge the system. Indeed, Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize saw a concerted blast of Chinese media coverage (after a week of silence where the system processed the news). People like Liu are potential object lessons; cross the line and we will destroy you — and it’ll be your own fault.

The government gives the impression, and much of the public seems to believe, the lines in question are clearly drawn. The problem is they’re often invisible until you accidentally blunder across them. My friend Jimmy’s uncle didn’t know that his construction company was bidding against a mafia run by local officials and gangsters — until they kidnapped him, took him to the top of an unfinished building, chopped off his legs and left him to bleed to death, while their official counterparts arrested his brother on false charges.

The vast bulk of the damage done by the Chinese state is to people who did nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And these are by far the most dangerous injustices, from the government’s perspective. If the public is ever stirred from its apathy, it will be because of ordinary victims, not outspoken dissidents. That’s why the many prosaic encounters with the Chinese government that result in tragedy are permitted only a mayfly lifespan in the Chinese media; a brief burst of attention in the aftermath, followed by a swift closure of discussion of the topic.

Political persecution, on the other hand, is given a proud public place. When the government decided to crush China’s flickering, hopeful online life in 2013, prominent blogger Charles Xue was made to confess to his crimes as a Weibo activist on live television. Talking with an intelligent and liberal colleague after the televised confession, she seemed unfazed by the crudity and echoes of the Cultural Revolution. “He must have had warnings,” she said.

Or take Falun Gong. In the initial stages of persecution, there was a lot of public sympathy for the group; why were the police harassing nice Mrs. Liu, who did tai chi in the park? But when Falun Gong’s leaders pushed the group toward direct confrontation with the state, surrounding the central palace of Zhongnanhai, where the leadership resides, and setting themselves on fire in protest, that sympathy evaporated.

It’s tempting to see some deeper cultural current in this. The doctrine of karma has a long history in China; the idea that your fate has ultimately been determined by past sins, if not present ones. (When British football coach Glenn Hoddle was sacked for saying that disability was the fault of previous existences, he was expressing a perfectly common — if loathsome — religious view.) But it’s not as if Christianity doesn’t have its own perverse theologies of suffering, from original sin and the fallen world to the sociopathic smugness of the modern U.S. prosperity gospel.

Westerners in China aren’t immune to it either. I remember conversations in the expat world when Peter Dahlin, a Swedish human rights activist, was arrested, deprived of his medicine, and forced to confess on live television. He’d been too intemperate. He’d crossed a line he should have known about. Surely the same thing couldn’t happen to us, who stayed within limits we were sure would be respected? (In fairness, Dahlin was given to playing Bob Dylan loudly in the small hours of the morning, which in a just world surely would be severely punished.)

In Liu’s case, his past writings were dragged out to use against him. He’d written that it would take “300 years of colonialism” for China to become as civilized as Hong Kong, been an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war on terror, and sometimes been willfully blind about the West’s failings. That was dragged out as an excuse by many Chinese intellectuals — and some Western apologists. At no point did they explain how intemperate speech or naivety justified decades of persecution and imprisonment — it was enough to point the finger, to come up with an excuse, and to sleep comfortably at night.

One of the strangest ways that people talked about Liu and other dissidents like the ebullient Ai Weiwei, I found, was as though their actions were really some kind of cunning career move, made to get them attention or money from the West. Editorials in the state-operated Global Times described the democrats as “having made a failed bet.” In part, this was because of government propaganda that did everything it could to link internal dissent to the ever-present “foreign forces.”

But it was also a way of reducing everything to the same cynicism with which the rest of Chinese society operates. Pretend that taking on the system was done for Western gold, rather than principle, and you could justify the compromises and corruption that you took part in every day. It was especially prevalent among those who had been young and once idealistic in the 1980s. They’d compromised, so why the hell couldn’t those stiff-necked bastards? Everybody else — or at least, the people in their class: urban, educated professionals — had done so well in the years afterward, after all.

One day, I hope, Liu will be remembered as one of many martyrs over the centuries for a better, fairer, kinder China. But that’s a long way off. Right now, when he dies, most of his compatriots will shrug. What, after all, did he expect was going to happen?</s>Shenyang doctors say the Chinese dissident is suffering from a severely swollen stomach and poor kidney function.

The hospital treating ailing Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has said his condition is now critical and doctors are in "active rescue".

Shenyang's First Hospital of China Medical University said on Monday that Liu, who has late-stage liver cancer, is suffering from a severely swollen stomach, low blood pressure and poor kidney function.

Doctors also said Liu's tumour has grown and his liver is bleeding.

China has come under international pressure to let its most prominent dissident leave the country for treatment, but Chinese doctors said over the weekend that Liu was too sick to travel.

German and US doctors who visited Liu, however, said on Sunday that they deemed him strong enough to be evacuated. The doctors said any evacuation would have to take place "as quickly as possible" before Liu's condition deteriorates further.

READ MORE: Liu Xiaobo can be taken overseas, foreign medics say

Liu, 61, was diagnosed with liver cancer in May while serving an 11-year sentence for inciting subversion after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for basic human rights and sweeping political reforms.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate was recently moved from jail to a hospital in Shenyang to be treated.

Beijing has come under fire from rights groups over its treatment of Liu and for waiting until he became terminally ill to release him from prison.</s>Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo's condition is now critical and doctors are in "active rescue" mode for China's best-known political prisoner, the hospital treating him said.

The First Hospital of China Medical University said in a statement today that Mr Liu, who has liver cancer, is suffering from a severely swollen stomach, low blood pressure and poor kidney function.

Mr Liu's health has been the subject of international attention after the dissident expressed a desire to be transported abroad for treatment.

Two Western doctors visited him and said on Sunday that they deemed him strong enough to be evacuated, apparently contradicting Chinese expert opinion.

The Western doctors said the evacuation would need to take place soon before Mr Liu's condition deteriorates further.

Supporters and Western governments urged China to allow Mr Liu to choose where he wants to be treated and to release him, which Beijing has so far resisted, citing his fragile health and arguing that he is receiving the best possible care in China.

Mr Liu was convicted in 2009 of inciting subversion for his role in the "Charter 08" movement calling for political reform.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year later while in prison.

At a daily briefing on Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang repeatedly declined to say whether Mr Liu would be allowed to leave China and asked other countries to "respect China's national sovereignty and refrain from interfering in China's domestic affairs due to an individual case".

A video clip surfaced on Monday of what appeared to be a foreign expert, Markus W Buchler of Heidelberg University, addressing Mr Liu's wife Liu Xia to tell her that Chinese doctors were doing their utmost to help Mr Liu and were "very committed to his treatment".

Following a visit with Mr Liu on Saturday, Mr Buchler and American doctor Joseph Herman from the University of Texas said yesterday that they deemed him strong enough to be evacuated.</s>Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo’s condition is now critical and doctors are in “active rescue” mode for China’s best-known political prisoner, the hospital treating him said.

The First Hospital of China Medical University said in a statement on Monday that Mr Liu, who has liver cancer, is suffering from a severely swollen stomach, low blood pressure and poor kidney function.

Mr Liu’s health has been the subject of international attention after the dissident expressed a desire to be transported abroad for treatment.

Two Western doctors visited him and said on Sunday that they deemed him strong enough to be evacuated, apparently contradicting Chinese expert opinion.

The Western doctors said the evacuation would need to take place soon before Mr Liu’s condition deteriorates further.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo is in "critical condition," according to Chinese doctors.