On the New York Review of Books blog, Perry Link writes about the 11 year sentence handed down to Liu Xiaobo and the tenacity of the Charter 08 movement:

Friends and supporters of Liu were generally startled at the length of the sentence. Fellow writer Li Jie, for example, wrote that “I expected [the authorities] might want to play down the issue—give Liu a one-year sentence, declare that he’d already served it [because he had already been held without trial for a year], let him go home, and move on. I really did not imagine that they would be as feeble-minded as this.” Among Charter 08’s supporters, there is little doubt where the eleven-year sentence originated; such a decision could be made only by the government’s most senior leaders. But no one has a good answer for why eleven seemed the right number. (The maximum under the law was fifteen years.) One theory that has spread on the Chinese Internet is that eleven years is 4,018 days, and Charter 08 contains 4,024 Chinese characters. So: one day for each character you wrote, Mr. Liu, and we’ll waive the last six.

If the purpose of the harsh sentence was to intimidate others, it has not worked well. Hundreds of signers of Charter 08 have endorsed an additional statement declaring that if Liu Xiaobo is guilty then we are, too. Cui Weiping, a film scholar (and translator of Vaclav Havel into Chinese), spent the days following the announcement of Liu’s sentence conducting a telephone survey of more than 100 prominent Chinese intellectuals, including both signers and non-signers of Charter 08, on how they viewed the sentence. Finding almost unanimous disgust, she collected her findings under the heading “We Give Up on Nothing” and published them in a series of twitter feeds that circulated widely in China and abroad—even to my computer in California. Until now, the authorities have not been able to stop her.

Cui quotes Zhang Sizhi, a senior lawyer, who wonders how the once “great, glorious, and correct Communist Party” could now be so “manipulative, petty, and selfish.” Wang Lixiong, a leading writer and advocate of peace with the Tibetans, said the best way to support Liu Xiaobo is to continue to work for his cause, until “society is changed and everyone in it is free.” Liang Xiaoyan, a well-known editor, said the sentence shows that while some things in China have changed radically in the last thirty years, other things “haven’t budged, and there is not the slightest impulse [at the top] to budge them.” The eminent historian Yu Ying-shih, reached at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, noted that this was the third time in twenty years that China’s rulers have sent Liu Xiaobo to political prison, and “each time has been more glorious than the last.”