In the latest human rights violation in iron-fisted China, authorities have detained Nobel Peace Price winner Liu Xiaobo’s wife Liu Xia ,after she visited him in jail to tell him he was a Nobel laureate. On hearing of the award, a tearful Xiaobo had reportedly dedicated it to the Tiananmen martyrs.

Chinese feathers are ruffled after jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo was accorded the honor by the Swedish academy. The police are preventing Liu Xia from talking to newsmen , and she is under house arrest in her Beijing apartment, with no access to a mobile phone, even as the authorities could not charge her with any crime whatsoever.

A U.S. group for human rights ,Freedom Now ,is representing Liu Xiaobo. China has dubbed the honor for decades of Liu Xiaobo’s peaceful struggle against violence “an obscenity”, infuriated with the widespread applause for Xiaobo. Beth Schwanke , who is a lawyer and spokeswoman for Freedom Now, said that Liu Xia is being put under enormous pressure from the state, and the informant who reported about Liu Xia’s detention preferred to remain anonymous, fearing the state’s vengeance.

Liu has seen many a jail terms since 1989, when he first joined student staging a hunger strike, after which the army was called in to pulverize the Tiananmen Square movement for democracy. Xiaobo was handed a lengthy jail for subversion of the police state.

As China wields its economic might and unleashes a currency war, the human rights scenario looks ugly as ever.
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