Renowned Chinese political activist and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo died Thursday at age 61.
» RELATED: Chinese political prisoner Liu Xiaobo dies at age 61
Here are seven things to know about the legendary Chinese dissident:
He was a professor before becoming an activist.
Xiaobo taught literature at Beijing Normal University and acted as visiting scholar at many universities outside of China, including New York’s Columbia University and the University of Hawaii.
During his time as a scholar and lecturer, publishing literary critiques in several magazines, Xiaobo became known for his radical opinions on official doctrines and criticism of Confucianism, according to PEN America.
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Shortly after earning a doctorate in literature and becoming a visiting scholar in 1988, Xiaobo returned to China for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while in jail.
While he was serving an 11-year sentence on subversion charges, Xiaobo earned the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.”
The prestigious award includes the iconic gold medal, a diploma and the equivalent of $1.5 million.
Xiaobo was put in jail in 2009 after he and fellow compatriots called for an end to one-party rule and instead, for the implementation of multi-party democracy — part of the Charter 08.
Charter 08 also called for freedom of expression and declared: “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.”
According to the BBC, some of the Charter's authors were simply asked to withdraw their signatures but Xiaobo was given an 11-year prison term in northeast China.
After he was awarded the Nobel, his wife was put under house arrest.
According to the Guardian, Xiaobo's wife, Liu Xia, was able to meet Xiaobo after the award was announced but later posted on Twitter and in emails to friends that after her return, her phone was cut off, all contact with her husband was cut and she was no longer allowed to leave her apartment.
Xiaobo’s lawyers were also unable to contact her.
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"She has been physically and mentally destroyed," Ye Du, a writer who knew Xia for many years, told the Guardian.
When Xiaobo’s fatal condition was announced, Liu was unable to speak out about the belated treatment of her husband’s terminal cancer.
"[He] can't undergo an operation anymore, can't undergo radiation therapy, can't undergo chemotherapy anymore," she said in a devastating video message to a friend that quickly spread online.
According to the Associated Press, the United States is calling on China's government to release her from house arrest following his death.
Xiaobo included an ode to his wife, Liu Xia, in his Nobel Prize statement:
"If I may be permitted to say so, the most fortunate experience of these past twenty years has been the selfless love I have received from my wife, Liu Xia. She could not be present as an observer in court today, but I still want to say to you, my dear, that I firmly believe your love for me will remain the same as it has always been. Throughout all these years that I have lived without freedom, our love was full of bitterness imposed by outside circumstances, but as I savor its aftertaste, it remains boundless. I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you."
Xia and Xiaobo met in the 1980s when she was a young poet and when both of them were married to other people.
After their marriages ended (shortly after the 1989 protests of Tiananmen Square), the two fell in love and eventually married.
Xiaobo had a son, Liu Tao, from his previous marriage to Tao Li, but both mother and son immigrated to the U.S. after the divorce.
He is one of three people to receive the Nobel Peace Price while incarcerated by their own governments.
In 1935, German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky earned the Nobel for decrying German rearmament.
And in 1991, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel for her efforts to bring democracy to the military-ruled Myanmar (or Burma).
He played a major role in the Tiananmen protests in June 1989.
Xiaobo joined the protests upon returning from Columbia University and led a hunger strike and peaceful student demonstration in the face of thousands of soldiers with drawn rifles.
"If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4," Gao Yu, a veteran journalist and fellow dissident with Xiaobo who was arrested before tanks and troops killed at least several hundred demonstrators, told the New York Times.
In his Nobel acceptance statement, Xiaobo described the protests as a "turning point," changing the course of his life from academics to activism of political opposition.
Xiaobo died of terminal liver cancer.
Xiaobo was still serving his 11-year term in prison when he became incredibly ill. In the weeks leading up his death Thursday, doctors in Western countries like Germany and America advised the Chinese government to let Xiaobo travel and seek urgent care elsewhere, but Chinese medical experts said he was too sick to travel.
Liu ultimately died from multiple organ failure at age 61, according to a brief statement from the Shenyang legal bureau.
"The life and death of this Nobel laureate underline the cost of political defiance in China," BBC China editor Carrie Gracie wrote.
Not many people, including the Chinese, know about him.
During his time, Chinese authorities “rigorously censored” any news about Xiaobo and his work.
In fact, all of Xiaobo’s published works are banned in China, including his radical literary critiques and three books, one of which was a bestselling non-fiction work.
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