I happened to be in Chengdu during the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize wrangle. Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned human rights activist, became the third person to receive the prestigious award while in detention. When his prize was announced in October, Beijing denounced the award and subsequently pressured governments to refrain from attending the ceremony.
Most Chinese I met during my trip did not know much at all about Liu, but some — even those who basically support the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — were quite critical of how the government mishandled the situation.
Liu was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment at the end of 2009 for coauthoring the Charter 2008 manifesto. It is a plea for political reform, which states: "After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A 'modernization' bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity."