[HowardMei]

Not weak, but fragile.

In fact, the government structure designed by Lisi in Qin dynasty 2000 years ago, and still being used today, is a fragile structure in peaceful times. It's a structure designed for war and the law enforcement tends to vanish if no direct threats are present to ordinary people. The central government will lose authority if the officials cannot contain dissenters, especially those who may be backed up by the provincial government officials.

Liu tried to restructure the aforementioned political structure through 08 Charter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_08

We still don't know the details about what he actually had done besides drafting the manifesto.If he tried to create a political group to materialize the 08 Charter, then it's definitely a substantial threat to the central government and even to most of the Chinese people, though it would be a trivial issue in any western countries.

The Norwegian government officials apparently had no idea about the severity of backing a dissenter challenging the central government in China due to cultural gap. In fact, many NGOs failed the same way in China. Those few who helps the central government are successful though.

Liu spotted many flaws in the current political structure that many Chinese people know for years. Even scholars in northern Song dynasty and late Ming dynasty also tried to fix the same drawbacks Liu mentioned, but they failed miserably and gave up the entire civilization to Mongolians and Manchurians.

In my opinion, Liu's importance is exaggerated by western media. His solution to our centuries-old problem is completely non-realistic and very dangerous. Ordinary Chinese people will laugh at his naiveness instead of respecting his idealism.

To do a successful political system reform to attain the same achievements that western civilization has obtained through hundreds of years of improvement, China needs to meet Chinese people's most urgent demands step by step and reason from First Principles instead of mimic any model countries.

It's kind of similar to the way for a startup to succeed.

Edit: Added the Norwegian government paragraph and fixed some grammar issues.