Friends of jailed democracy activist and Nobel laureate say they are losing hope that he will be allowed to seek cancer treatment overseas 
 
 Friends of China’s most famous political prisoner, the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, said they feared he was entering his final hours on Thursday, as the White House renewed its call for the dissident’s release. 
 
 “Liu Xiaobo is on his deathbed,” said the writer and activist Wen Kejian, who is among those who have been blocked by authorities from visiting their dying friend. 
 
 “Although we know the patient and his family are suffering, we are praying that Xiaobo can hold on for a few more days,” he added. 
 
 The hospital where Liu is being treated in north-east China issued a bleak, though contested, update on the condition of the 61-year-old dissident on Wednesday afternoon. 
 
 Devotion amid despair: the great contemporary love story of Liu Xia and Liu Xiaobo Read more 
 
 In a statement, it said Liu, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence when he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in May, was “close to death”. His kidneys and liver were shutting down and he was suffering from respiratory failure, the hospital claimed. 
 
 Liu, who is reportedly being held under guard, has asked to be flown out of China for treatment in either Germany or the United States. However, Beijing has so far refused to allow his exit from China, with critics accusing it of being afraid that he will use his final days to launch a last attack on its one-party system. 
 
 Some supporters question the accuracy of official reports about Liu’s health, suspecting they may be designed to bolster Beijing’s claim that Liu is unfit to leave China. “We simply don’t know to what extent this is professional medical reports and to what extent this is politically-manipulated information,” Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based activist for Human Rights Watch, told AFP. 
 
 Diplomatic voices told the Guardian they suspected Beijing was deliberately stalling attempts to transfer Liu overseas until it was no longer safe for medics to move him. 
 
 After visiting Liu last weekend, two foreign doctors announced – contrary to Chinese claims – that he was well enough to be taken overseas but it needed to happen as quickly as possible. 
 
 “There still is a window of opportunity [to move Liu] but it is rapidly closing,” the diplomatic sources said. “It seems the leadership … has decided to ride it out, irrespective of the considerable reputational damage.” 
 
 World leaders including the US president, Donald Trump, and the British prime minister, Theresa May, have yet to publicly raise Liu’s plight themselves, although their governments have issued statements on his case. 
 
 On Wednesday a White House spokeswoman said the US remained concerned that Liu and his family were not free to seek the medical treatment of his choosing and were being prevented from communicating with the outside world. 
 
 “We continue to call on the Chinese authorities to grant him full parole and to release his wife from house arrest and provide them the protections and freedoms, such as freedom of movement and access to appropriate medical care consistent with Chinese constitution, legal system, and international commitments,” spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters. 
 
 
 
 A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Geng Shuang, again rejected foreign calls for Liu’s release on Thursday, repeating verbatim previously rebuttals. “We hope relevant countries can respect China’s judicial sovereignty and refrain from interfering in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of an individual case.” 
 
 Wen Kejian said he felt anger and sadness at his friend’s plight and feared the campaign to free him had failed. “I no longer have any hope that Liu will be able to go abroad,” he said. 
 
 “I’m not giving up. I’m just looking at the harsh reality.” 
 
 
 
 Additional reporting by Wang Zhen 
 
 ||||| In this image taken from June 3, 2008, video footage by AP Video, Liu Xiaobo speaks during an interview before his detention in Beijing, China. The judicial bureau in the northeastern Chinese city of... (Associated Press) 
 
 SHENYANG, China (AP) — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, China's most prominent political prisoner, died Thursday at a hospital in the country's northeast, officials said. He was 61. 
 
 Liu had been transferred to the hospital after being diagnosed with advanced liver cancer in prison in May but remained under police custody. In an online announcement, the judicial bureau of the city of Shenyang said he died of multiple organ failure. 
 
 Liu was only the second Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in prison, a fact pointed to by human rights groups as an indication of the Chinese Communist Party's increasingly hard line against its critics. The first, Carl von Ossietzky, died from tuberculosis in Germany in 1938 while serving a sentence for opposing Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. 
 
 "Hitler was wild and strong and thought he was right — but history proved he was wrong in imprisoning a Nobel Peace Prize winner," said Mo Shaoping, an old friend and Liu's former lawyer, adding that he was heartbroken by Liu's death. "The authorities consider Liu Xiaobo guilty, but history will prove he is not." 
 
 Liu's supporters and foreign governments had urged China to allow him to receive treatment abroad, but Chinese authorities insisted he was receiving the best care possible for a disease that had spread throughout his body. 
 
 News of Liu's death triggered an outpouring of dismay among his friends and supporters. 
 
 "There are only two words to describe how we feel right now: grief and fury," family friend and activist Wu Yangwei, better known by his penname Ye Du, said by phone. "The only way we can grieve for Xiaobo and bring his soul some comfort is to work even harder to try to keep his influence alive." 
 
 Liu was imprisoned for the first time in connection with the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010 while serving his fourth and final prison sentence, for inciting subversion by advocating sweeping political reforms and greater human rights in China. 
 
 "What I demanded of myself was this: whether as a person or as a writer, I would lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity," Liu wrote in "I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement," which he had hoped to read out in court when being sentenced in 2009. He was not permitted to do so and received an 11-year prison sentence. 
 
 He came to prominence following the 1989 pro-democracy protests centered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which he called the "major turning point" in his life. Liu had been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York but returned early to China in May 1989 to join the movement that was sweeping the country and which the Communist Party regarded as a grave challenge to its authority. 
 
 When the Chinese government sent troops and tanks into Beijing to quash the protests on the night of June 3-4, Liu persuaded some students to leave the square rather than face down the army. The military crackdown killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of people and heralded a more repressive era. 
 
 Liu became one of hundreds of Chinese imprisoned for crimes linked to the demonstrations. It was only the first of four stays in prisons owing to his ideology. 
 
 His final prison sentence was for co-authoring "Charter 08," a document circulated in 2008 that called for more freedom of expression, human rights and an independent judiciary in China. Although Liu wasn't the initiator, he was a prominent force behind it and already well known to the authorities. 
 
 The sentence only increased Liu's prominence outside of his country. 
 
 In 2010, while Liu was serving his sentence in a prison in a small city in China's northeast, he was awarded the Nobel Prize, with the Norwegian-based committee citing Liu's "long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China." 
 
 The award enraged China's government, which condemned it as a political farce. Within days, Liu's wife, artist and poet Liu Xia, was put under house arrest, despite not being convicted of any crime. China also punished Norway, even though its government has no say over the independent Nobel panel's decisions. China suspended a bilateral trade deal and restricted imports of Norwegian salmon, and relations only resumed in 2017. 
 
 Dozens of Liu's supporters were prevented from leaving the country to accept the award on his behalf. Instead, Liu's absence at the prize-giving ceremony in Oslo, Norway, was marked by an empty chair. Another empty chair was for Liu Xia. 
 
 Liu was born on Dec. 28, 1955, in the northeastern city of Changchun, the son of a language and literature professor who was a committed party member. The middle child in a family of five boys, he was among the first students to attend Jilin University when college entrance examinations resumed following the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. 
 
 Liu studied Chinese literature there and later moved to the capital, first as a graduate student and then as a lecturer at Beijing Normal University. 
 
 After spending nearly two years in detention following the Tiananmen crackdown, Liu was detained for the second time in 1995 after drafting a plea for political reform. Later that year, he was detained a third time after co-drafting "Opinion on Some Major Issues Concerning our Country Today." That resulted in a three-year sentence to a labor camp, during which time he married Liu Xia. He is survived by his wife and by his son from his first marriage. 
 
 Released in 1999, he joined the international literary and human rights organization PEN and continued advocating for human rights and democracy. 
 
 Liu Xia's brother was convicted on fraud charges and sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment over a real estate dispute which supporters said was designed to further persecute Liu Xiaobo's family over his actions. 
 
 Two years after Liu's Nobel prize, a Chinese writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature, to the delight of Chinese authorities. Mo Yan is not a critic of the Communist Party, and after initially evading questions from reporters, he eventually said he wished for Liu Xiaobo's freedom. 
 
 Other Nobel laureates were more outspoken. In 2012, an appeal by 134 Nobel laureates, including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, called the detentions of both Lius a violation of international law and urged their immediate release. Fellow PEN members such as Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie appealed for his release in a letter on June 29 after he was transferred from prison to the hospital. 
 
 Their appeal fell on deaf ears. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Bodeen reported from Beijing. Associated Press writer Gillian Wong and researcher Fu Ting contributed to this report from Beijing. 
 
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 Online: 
 
 Liu Xiaobo's "I have no enemies" speech: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/xiaobo-lecture.html ||||| In this image taken from June 3, 2008, video footage by AP Video, Liu Xiaobo speaks during an interview before his detention in Beijing, China. The judicial bureau in the northeastern Chinese city of... (Associated Press) 
 
 SHENYANG, China (AP) — The Latest on the death of imprisoned Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who passed away Thursday night in the northeastern city of Shenyang following a battle with liver cancer (all times local): 
 
 10:30 p.m. 
 
 Human rights advocates and pro-democracy activists have expressed deep sorrow over the death of imprisoned Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and called for his wife, Liu Xia, to be permitted to leave the country. 
 
 Wang Dan, a prominent leader of the 1989 pro-democracy protest movement on Beijing's Tiananmen Square, tweeted that governments and people worldwide must press for Liu Xia to be allowed to leave China, where she has been held under extralegal house arrest. 
 
 Wang wrote, "Xiaobo, my beloved teacher, my dear brother, you accepted too much hardship, rest easy." 
 
 In Hong Kong, prominent democracy activist Joshua Wong tweeted, "We will strive to carry forward his legacy to fight for democracy in HK and China." 
 
 Internationally acclaimed artist and activist Ai Weiwei tweeted: "Rest in peace. We are here, Xiaobo is here with us." 
 
 Fellow Beijing activist Hu Jia tweeted regrets that "we were not able to obtain your freedom during your life." 
 
 "The world grieves for you. Your unfulfilled wish is our mission," Hu wrote. 
 
 John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco who has advised U.S. administrations on Chinese human rights issues, wrote that Liu's demise "is a waystation on the road to freedom of the Chinese people."
– Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has died at age 61, the AP reports. Liu, the country's most prominent political prisoner, was first put behind bars in 1989 in connection with the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests. His fourth and last prison sentence, for inciting subversion thanks to his work advocating for more human rights and political reforms in China, began in 2008, BuzzFeed reports. He was awarded the Nobel in 2010. Liu, who had been hospitalized for advanced liver cancer that was diagnosed in May, died of multiple organ failure. China had said he was receiving the best care in the country and that he wasn't medically cleared to travel abroad for treatment, but doctors had recently disagreed. The White House had renewed calls for Liu's release this week, the Guardian reports. He died in a hospital in China, still under police custody, making him the second Nobel Peace Prize winner to die while in custody. Friends, supporters, and fellow activists are expressing their grief over his death, with some calling for Liu's wife, Liu Xia, to be allowed to leave China, the AP reports. She was put under house arrest after Liu won the Nobel, despite having been convicted of no crime; China was angered by the prize being awarded to Liu. Liu was a visiting scholar at New York's Columbia University when he returned to China in May 1989 to join the movement challenging the Communist Party; his first prison sentence lasted almost two years. He was detained again in 1995 after writing a plea for political reform, then again later that year for co-authoring another paper regarding problems in China. That sentence lasted three years.