MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (1)

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair (1)
After noting that “People use the term ‘dissident writer’ in a very confused way,” Eric Abrahamsen goes on to say (as paraphrased in Christopher Beam's New Yorker article) that  "Dissidents like Woeser, Tohti, and Liu Xiaobo, he added, are jailed for their political activities, not their creative writing."
The view thus presented (and since Mr. Abrahamsen is an astute and precise man, I suspect that the editing process may not have done him full justice) fails to distinguish between political acts and political speech.  I am not aware that Woeser and Ilham Tohti have engaged in political activity -- in the sense of, for example, founding a political party or organizing a strike or calling for demonstrations in the streets. I believe even Liu Xiaobo's Charter '08 must be located in the sphere of speech rather than action; its operational clause is "We offer the following recommendations."  It is for speech that these writers have been persecuted, speech committed to writing in the public space where a society works out its cultural values.
The view attributed to Mr. Abrahamsen could be taken to suggest that this persecution is not a blot on the Party's record with regard to culture, because what the dissidents were doing was not purely cultural (in the sense that "writing novels" is purely cultural).  I disagree.  Challenging conventional assumptions as one envisions an alternative social order is a creative act and, surely, one of the greatest contributions a cultural worker can make to his society.  One could even argue that to qualify as great art, a work must on some level be discomfiting and subversive:  Du musst dein Leben ändern.
It is true that imaginative & poetic works such as the novels of Yan Lianke do not usually provoke the same official reaction as overt challenges to policy or historical interpretation.  But even here there are distressing exceptions.  Who could not be moved by Nurmuhemet Yasin's touching, imaginative parable, "Wild Pigeon"?  He got ten years for it, and his publisher three.
Finally, in response to Mr. Abrahamsen's comment that Liu Xiaobo is not a very good poet, may I share a translation I made of one of his June 4 elegies? It is that time of year.
http://raggedbanner.com/LXB/SuffocationSquare.html
A. E. Clark <aec at raggedbanner.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 10, 2015
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