Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo has died, the government of the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, where he was being treated for late-stage liver cancer, said today.

The Shenyang legal bureau said in a brief statement on its website that Liu had suffered multiple organ failure and efforts to save him had failed.

Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for sweeping political reforms.

He was recently moved from jail to a hospital in Shenyang.

Liu was the co-author of a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, which attracted more than 10,000 signatures online before the authorities deleted the document from internet pages and chatrooms. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, a year after he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion.

Charter '08, issued in 2008, reflected an apparent shift in China at the time towards becoming more open to liberal ideals, said Beijing-based historian and political commentator Zhang Lifan. That changed when Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.

Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist who died in 1938 in Nazi Germany's Berlin, was the last Nobel Peace Prize winner to live out his dying days under state surveillance.