The hospital—a squat, red-brick structure—seemed to bulge with the flow of patients pushing through its front entrance on a damp Friday morning in July. Inside, patients with gauze wrapped around their heads sat in the waiting area while nurses wheeled gurneys through the hallways. Life went on as usual; no one knew that Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous political dissident, had died just yesterday, on the twenty-third floor.
Liu had become famous as a writer and poet in China during the intellectual ferment of the 1980s. When the turmoil leading up to the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 began, he returned to China to participate in the student movements in Beijing, where he eventually negotiated the safe passage of students out of the square on the night of the violence. Over the next two decades, he continued writing and teaching in the city, eventually drafting Charter 08, a relatively moderate manifesto that delineated a potential transition for China to democracy.
The manifesto garnered mixed reactions. China sentenced him to eleven years in prison for state subversion in 2009; Norway awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. His wife, Liu Xia, was placed under house arrest despite never having been charged with a crime.
Earlier this year, his imprisonment was disrupted by liver cancer. On June 26, he was moved into a heavily guarded ward in the top levels of a sprawling hospital in the northeast city of Shenyang. By July 13, he was dead. The hospital quietly removed his body and spirited it to a crematorium in the dead of night. At a press conference near the hospital that evening, his Chinese doctors told reporters that Liu had had a particular form of cancer that often went undetected until its late stages.
The day after Liu’s death, two bulky guards continued to block the narrow entrance to the ward, alarming visiting family members who were bewildered as to why men in uniforms were now asking them for identification to see their loved ones. When I asked the ever-cheery nurses to search the records for a patient named Liu Xiaobo, they insisted that no such person had ever stayed at the hospital.
I flagged a taxi to visit the crematorium where Liu’s lawyers had confirmed his body had been taken. But as we pulled into the facility’s expansive grounds, I could see we were already too late. White-shirted men—plainclothes police—prowled the rows of freshly chiseled tombstones that lined the property periphery. Farther in was a group of police loitering around the entrance, some smoking cigarettes, others on their phones. Seeing our car approach, they quickly regrouped and straightened their hats. My bemused taxi driver pulled up to the gates.
I made up a story about visiting relatives inside—a story that sounded flat even to me, given that the place was completely deserted. The police seemed skeptical, checking a list of names on a clipboard before consulting in whispers with one another. They insisted on photographing my passport. I made one last attempt.
“I’m actually here to see someone named Liu Xiaobo,” I said.
“There is no one here name Liu Xiaobo. You should leave now,” said one officer, with a dismissive wave of his hand.
I told my taxi driver to drive back into the city.
He nodded. “China has no human rights,” he said. “You should not have given them your passport! What right did they have to demand it?”
He explained during our ride that he had spent almost twenty years in Japan and South Korea, working as a cook in Chinese restaurants. He had only returned recently, because the apartment he owned was being razed, and he had to collect his compensation in person.
The name Liu Xiaobo sounded incredibly familiar to him. Perhaps, he said, he had heard it from a news broadcast in Korea.
The sky opened up later that evening, and water came with such force that it shook dust loose from the rafters of the café where I had taken refuge. The hour after Liu’s death was announced, thunderstorms had roiled Beijing too, but the rain had come down softly, as if comforting the hard earth.
They were already waiting for me when I walked into the hotel lobby the next morning: four men, in tight black T-shirts, looking bored. They were state security, sent to tail me now that my presence in Shenyang was known.
I headed to the airport, figuring Shenyang was on such tight lockdown that I might as well follow the story from Beijing. I had one leg out of the car when my phone rang.
On the other end was my foreign-ministry minder, sounding harried: There was to be at least one press conference, in forty minutes, about Liu Xiaobo and the details of his cremation and funeral. He had just been told about it himself and had been frantically calling every journalist he supervised in Beijing.
Inside the ornate ballroom where the press conference was being held, a foreign-ministry employee sent down from Beijing sidled up to me. “The Shenyang government is very anxious to know what you want to know. If you have any questions you want to ask, let me know, and I will make sure they get asked,” he offered helpfully.
But few of our questions were answered. We learned that Liu Xiaobo’s body had already been cremated at daybreak, and a small, private funeral had been held. But questions about the plight of Liu Xia, his wife, were met with the seemingly oxymoronic response, repeated: “She is a Chinese citizen. She is free.” And with that, we were shooed out of the ballroom to wait for the second press conference, to be held at a yet undetermined time.
We regrouped downstairs, about thirty bleary-eyed journalists sprawled across the lobby. The video and photography guys huddled with their equipment and Wi-Fi routers, anxiously checking their email. Close by, our security minders sat glumly, chain-smoking and watching music videos on their phones. When I got up to use the bathroom, one helpfully offered to watch my laptop while another casually meandered ten feet or so behind me.
My personal minder, a stout, tan man with a thick string of Buddhist prayer beads encircling his wrist, appeared slightly embarrassed at the close quarters he was now forced to share with his surveillance target, and he compensated for this by asking a lot of questions, most of which I bounced back to him.
When he was not following journalists, he told me, he provided security for soccer games and other public events. It was clearly a better gig than this job, which had resulted in a lost weekend and a very late night tailing me and a group of other journalists to dinner and then to a bar in the torrential rain.
“I am tired,” he said, draped over a brocade chaise lounge. By noon, all of our minders were fast asleep.
The hours dragged on. I booked a later flight and canceled my dinner plans, then ordered takeout to the hotel.
When the second press conference finally rolled around, we shuffled back into the ballroom to watch the next act of the political theater China’s leaders had spun.
To the surprise of all, Liu Xiaobo’s eldest brother walked in.
In a tremulous voice—hoarse from cigarettes and fatigue—Mr. Liu praised the Chinese Communist Party for the care it had bestowed on his brother and the grace by which they had fulfilled every request his family had placed before them. Liu’s ashes had been scattered at sea only hours before, leaving no trace of him to be mourned. The hasty funeral had been the family’s idea, as was the sea burial; their own sister, after all, had been buried in such a fashion.
“This demonstrates the advantages of the socialist system,” he concluded wearily.
The room collectively tensed, seconds away from erupting in questions. Sensing this, a government spokesperson quickly cut in.
“Mr. Liu is very tired, so he will take his rest now,” he timidly ventured.
Mr. Liu kept his eyes resolutely forward and jammed an unlit cigarette into his mouth before being frog-marched out of the room by two state spokespeople as disbelieving journalists shouted questions that would never be answered.
“The world is watching,” shouted one journalist.
I did not have the heart to point out that this was written for a foreign audience—that we were sitting in a hotel ballroom with plastic chandeliers.
