Late one night in December 2008, police arrived at the home of Liu Xiaobo--China's leading dissident, a key figure in the prodemocracy manifesto Charter 08--and took him away. When Liu won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize as a political prisoner, the award was bestowed on an empty chair. Inside China, the regime sought to erase every trace of his existence. Liu died of liver cancer in 2017 without ever having been allowed to return home.