MCLC: What does Liu Xiaobo stand for (3)

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What does Liu Xiaobo stand for (3)
I agree with Anne here, although for some other reasons. This article was tasteless when it was first published, and is even more so today, now that Liu has died in confinement. I am perplexed by the number of thoughtful people I have seen sharing this hit piece, to which, we must note, Liu never had a chance to respond.
Liu Xiaobo was a scholar who published a number of challenging books, from "Critique of Choice" in the 1980s to his "Critique of Chinese Nationalism" in the 2000s. Sautman and Yan show no interest in the full body of his work, spanning decades--rather, they cherry-pick a few quotes and engage in a little "leftist" political posturing against so-called "Western-style political systems" (i.e. systems that acknowledge universal rights) to make completely spurious claims about Liu and his thought as a whole.
If we must obsess over these comments about Iraq etc (not by any means the core of Liu's work), they could be usefully contextualized. It is easy to dismiss and label romanticization of the attack on Iraq, but considerably more difficult to understand how an anti-authoritarian Chinese intellectual could reach these conclusions. I would propose that perhaps the daily regimen of being followed and harassed and repeatedly imprisoned by arbitrary and unaccountable CCP forces for decades, combined with facing a broader public easily taken in by nationalist myths of "foreign forces," created a worldview that was immensely distrustful of authoritarian leaders and their supporters, whether we are talking about Saddam Hussein or Xi Jinping or his predecessors.
In my many years in China I have also encountered people who said things like "Bush should have bombed Zhongnanhai." I've never taken this literally, but rather seen it as a not at all subtle attempt to jar people out of the simplistic anti-foreign nationalism that is the core of state ideology today. Liu's comments about Iraq or colonization could similarly be seen as an attempt at, following his interest in Nietzsche, a transvaluation of values. As we all know, the end product of the transvaluation of values is not always as coherent as we would like....
It is not easy to fully capture the thought of a complex thinker in an op-ed. Sadly, it is easy to smear a complex thinker in an op-ed. I agree that it is important for people to better understand Liu Xiaobo's thought. After all, I hope people never forget, he spent a significant amount of his life in prison for what he wrote, so we should read his work and know what he stands for. Yet I disagree that this article contributes in any way to any understanding.
I can only encourage people with adequate Chinese proficiency to read some of Liu's writings online (http://blog.boxun.com/hero/liuxb/), and hope that more translations of his work will be forthcoming.
Kevin Carrico <kjc83 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 20, 2017
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