A key figure in the Democracy Wall movement, Liu was arrested as one of the Beijing Fifteen dissidents in 1992 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for counter-revolutionary activities. He was released in November 2004, two and a half years before his sentence was due to expire. Liu was previously detained in the late 1970s for co-editing the journal Tansuo with Wei Jingsheng. In 1998, he received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award and is an honorary member of several international PEN Centers, including those in Germany, Sweden, and New Zealand.