Now, the government is too afraid to publicly speak about Liu, to not sour what they have spent years trying to fix. Weak.
I'm not aware of what happened in Norway after those Chinese sanctions. They could democratically decided that it was ethically worth losing those businesses. Any Norwegian people here?
I'd like to take the opportunity to say that the feeling at the time was that we got left out in the storm by ourselves by other western countries once the Chinese sanctions came on. In the direct aftermath everyone else just kinda looked the other way, and in the long run there is no way a tiny country like us can withstand that pressure over time.
I found this analysis comparing the sanctions to Norway and Mongolia and the final result.
https://cpianalysis.org/2017/02/22/the-costs-of-normalisatio...
In fact, the government structure designed by Lisi in Qin dynasty 2000 years ago, and still being used today, is a fragile structure in peaceful times. It's a structure designed for war and the law enforcement tends to vanish if no direct threats are present to ordinary people. The central government will lose authority if the officials cannot contain dissenters, especially those who may be backed up by the provincial government officials.
Liu tried to restructure the aforementioned political structure through 08 Charter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_08
We still don't know the details about what he actually had done besides drafting the manifesto.If he tried to create a political group to materialize the 08 Charter, then it's definitely a substantial threat to the central government and even to most of the Chinese people, though it would be a trivial issue in any western countries.
The Norwegian government officials apparently had no idea about the severity of backing a dissenter challenging the central government in China due to cultural gap. In fact, many NGOs failed the same way in China. Those few who helps the central government are successful though.
Liu spotted many flaws in the current political structure that many Chinese people know for years. Even scholars in northern Song dynasty and late Ming dynasty also tried to fix the same drawbacks Liu mentioned, but they failed miserably and gave up the entire civilization to Mongolians and Manchurians.
In my opinion, Liu's importance is exaggerated by western media. His solution to our centuries-old problem is completely non-realistic and very dangerous. Ordinary Chinese people will laugh at his naiveness instead of respecting his idealism.
To do a successful political system reform to attain the same achievements that western civilization has obtained through hundreds of years of improvement, China needs to meet Chinese people's most urgent demands step by step and reason from First Principles instead of mimic any model countries.
It's kind of similar to the way for a startup to succeed.
Edit: Added the Norwegian government paragraph and fixed some grammar issues.
As it should be. Speaking up would only draw more attention to Norway's unscrupulous actions in conflicted and autocratic regions, especially considering its public image of neutrality, diplomacy, non-interference, and promoting progressive values. Denmark and Sweden are also in this as well - they say they promote human rights while exporting billions of euros in military technology and services to regions with known human rights abuses.
The article says Norway is complicit in these companies' actions which are complicit in "forced labor, killings, and land confiscation"