A bronze statue of Nobel peace prize winner Liu Xiaobo that was placed outside a Chickeeduck outlet has been removed on Sunday, after authorities said the statue obstructed the street.
The shop's owner Herbert Chow Siu-lung said the statue has been returned to the League of Social Democrats. It will be stored at a warehouse of Citizens' Radio temporarily.
Last Friday, officers from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department and Lands Department patrolled the streets in Tin Hau. They found the statue to be occupying government land, and ordered the shop to remove it by Monday.
Chow, a vocal pro-democracy activist, said the statue in question has been put up outside the Tin Hau outlet for three months.
He said he did not want the statue to be confiscated by the government. That's why he asked League of Social Democrats activist Koo Sze-yiu to pick up the statue to return to the political party. A truck was arranged to take away the statue on Sunday afternoon.
Chow said if he opened a bigger outlet, he would consider putting the statue inside it. In the meantime, the statue will be kept inside a warehouse.
Liu took part in the student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. For that he was sentenced to two years in prison. Later he served three years in a labour camp for having criticized China's one-party system.
He was sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in prison on “inciting subversion” charges for his involvement with Charter ’08, a manifesto calling for political reforms in China.
He served nearly eight years in a Liaoning prison, and was then transferred to a Shenyang hospital in June 2017 as his health deteriorated. He died on July 13 the same year from complications of liver cancer.
