Espen Rasmussen for The New York Times
In absentia: An image of Liu Xiaobo in Oslo during the ceremonies marking his winning of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Liu has always been most animated by democracy. This concern underlies his essays on Taiwan, Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union, the failures and lies of the Mao era, the “miracle” of the Deng Xiaoping reforms after Mao’s death in 1976 and, perhaps most emotively, Tibet. Even while Beijing condemned the Dalai Lama as “a wolf in monk’s clothing,” Liu breathtakingly suggested in 2008 that China could solve its ethnic unrest by inviting “the Dalai Lama back to China to serve as our nation’s president. . . . Such a move would make best use of the Dalai Lama’s stature in Tibet and around the world.”
An accomplished poet, Liu pays close attention to the power of language. Noting that the party charged him with “incitement of subversion of state power,” he said this was an excellent example “of treating words as crimes, which itself is an extension into the present day of China’s antique practice called ‘literary inquisition’ ” — a practice exemplified by the 18th-century emperor Qianlong’s purge of subversive books.
More fervently still — Liu never misses an opportunity to skewer Communist Party hypocrisy — he recalls that in the years before its victory in 1949, the party’s newspapers “were constantly criticizing the Chiang Kai-shek regime for its repression of free speech and often issued loud appeals on behalf of persecuted voices of conscience.” He contrasts this with the execution during the Cultural Revolution of Zhang Zhixin, who was condemned to death for criticizing the Mao cult; before Zhang was shot, her throat was cut so she could not cry out a final denunciation.
I recall Liu’s arrival in Tiananmen Square in May 1989. An angular, awkward, bespectacled man bending over and waving his arms, he exhorted the demonstrators to add democracy to their demands for a free press and an end to corruption. On June 2, he and three friends announced the start of a hunger strike. “We seek not death,” they read out to a crowd that had fallen silent, “but to live true lives.” They emphasized that “we should recognize that all Chinese citizens are strangers to the matter of running a country on democratic principles. . . . We must not let hatred or violence poison our thinking. . . . We are citizens before we are anything else.” The next night the tanks and soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army crashed into the square and began the slaughter of many hundreds. Liu and a few others negotiated with the soldiers to allow the surviving students to leave the square in safety.
Some of Liu’s most eloquent observations came afterward. He recalls “the cruelty of the executioners and, even more clearly, the brightness of humanity that shone in the midst of great terror.” Liu faults himself for seeking shelter after the massacre rather than staying in the square to help the victims. Soon after, he was imprisoned for the first time — the sentence was for 19 months. In 2003 he wrote, “I remain acutely aware that I am the lucky and undeserving survivor of a massacre in the waning years of a dictatorship.” Referring to himself ironically as “one of those ‘influential’ figures” on the night of the killings, Liu remembers that “all the people who . . . went out to rescue the wounded or received heavy sentences were common people,” and that “the blood of ordinary people has gone to nourish the reputations of opportunists large and small, people who run around presenting themselves as the leaders of a ‘people’s movement.’ ” I think I know who Liu means, but those who survived, like him, were also heroes who waited to flee until death was staring them in the face.
Nothing escapes Liu’s scalpel. The economic reforms that have transfixed many foreigners who claim that China is on its way to being No. 1 were not the result, he insists, of top-down policies. They arose, he says, from demonstrations in Beijing and the countryside that began even while Mao was alive: peasants called for control over the crops they grew, and ordinary workers like Wei Jingsheng put their mark on Democracy Wall in 1978-79. Liu writes that Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues in the Chinese leadership granted a little more space to those who demanded to be treated like citizens — before stamping on them. “These spontaneous popular forces for reform were rooted in the human longing for freedom and justice, not some slogans of the rulers.”
Always he sees words as the party’s enemy: “Democracy Wall laid a foundation for language — and hence a system of values — that was independent of official ideology.” In a foreword to “No Enemies, No Hatred,” the late Vaclav Havel observed that Charter 08 “articulated an alternative vision of China, challenging the official line that any decisions on reforms are the exclusive province of the state.” Liu notes that the Internet has provided China’s people with news and views of the world hitherto denied them and a way to communicate instantly and often safely. But he laments that “under the guise of restoring national honor . . . thuggish language that unabashedly celebrates violence, race hatred and warmongering passion now haunts the Chinese Internet.”
After Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, Beijing cowed 16 ambassadors to Norway into shunning the ceremony. An empty chair on the Oslo stage highlighted Liu’s absence. His words, however, are always with us. Already in 2003, Liu wrote that those “who dare to speak out about major public events may not receive tangible benefits, but they receive the very considerable reward of high moral reputation among fellow Chinese as well as in the international community.” Within Liu’s dark Communist world, the court’s judgment was wholly correct: “Defendant Liu Xiaobo has committed the crime of incitement to subvert state power.”
Jonathan Mirsky, a journalist and historian specializing in China, was named British International Reporter of the Year in 1990 for his dispatches from Tiananmen Square.
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