BACKGROUND: Liu Xiaobo: China's communists hold people hostage

Beijing - Liu Xiaobo, one of China's leading dissidents, was sentenced to 11 years in prison by a Beijing court on Friday, after he was found guilty of subversion. He was convicted because of his involvement in Charter '08, a call for transforming China into a liberal democracy, and also because of six essays critical of the ruling Communist party.

Human Rights in China (HRIC), an activist group, translated and published excerpts of those essays.

"Since the Communist Party of China (CPC) took power, it has always yakked about patriotism in order to maintain its absolute rule over the people and country," Liu wrote.

"It has also emphasized a specious logic of governance - the theory of 'death of the party is death of the nation' ... In fact, the 'death of the party' and the 'death of the nation have no inevitable causality. This is because any political party is a representative of a special interest group and does not have the grounds to assert that it represents the 'nation, ethnic groups, and people.'"

"Even if it is the ruling party, it does not equal the nation, and even less the ethnic groups or culture. The CPC regime does not equal China, and even less the Chinese culture," he said.

"All dictatorships like to proclaim patriotism but dictatorial patriotism is just an excuse to inflict disasters on the nation and calamities on its people. ... The essence of this patriotism is to demand that the people love the dictatorship, the one-party rule, and the dictators," Liu said, according to HRIC.

"Whether to let the CPC dictatorship, that has taken more than one billion people hostage, continue to degrade human civilization or to rescue the world's largest group of hostages from enslavement - this is a priority not only for the Chinese people themselves but also for all free nations," the dissident wrote. "Were China to become a free country, its value to human civilization would be incalculable."

"Since the Communist Party of China took power, generations of CPC dictators have cared most about their own power and least about human life."