MCLC: No Enemies, No Hatred

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: No Enemies, No Hatred
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/30/11):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/world/asia/01iht-letter01.html

LETTER FROM CHINA
In New Book From Dissident, a Warning on China
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

BEIJING ‹ For a year, Liu Xiaobo¹s empty, blue chair at the Nobel Peace
Prize ceremony in Oslo in December 2010 was almost the only thing that
spoke to the world on behalf of the jailed laureate.

Now a new book is about to fill in the silence.

³No Enemies, No Hatred,² to be published by Harvard University Press in
January, is the first English-language collection of works by Mr. Liu, a
former university professor sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in
prison for ³incitement to subvert state power.²

In two dozen essays and 15 poems written between 1989 and 2009 and a
document collection showing Mr. Liu¹s path through the courts and into
jail, the book offers ³one of the most impressive analyses of China
today,² as well as an important warning to those hoping the cash-rich
country can ³save² the world economy, Perry Link, one of three editors,
said by telephone.

³The image of China in the West is superficial compared to Liu Xiaobo¹s,²
said Mr. Link, a leading scholar of modern Chinese literature at the
University of California, Riverside.

³He sees the problems, the corruption, the bullying. There is the China
that the Communist Party runs, that has so much money and might try to
save the euro, and wants to take over the South China Sea, and then what
he¹s really talking about, the ordinary people and the ordinary problems
from below,² he said.

³He really does have a broad range of interests. And he reasons from
humanistic fundamental principles in a way I find very admirable. There
are other Chinese dissidents I admire who¹ve been in and out of prison,
like Wei Jingsheng, Xu Wenli and Wang Dan, but none of them are as
impressive an intellectual as he is,² Mr. Link said.

Mr. Liu, whose final statement to the court in December 2009 provided the
title of the book, sits in Jinzhou Prison in the northeastern province of
Liaoning. His wife, Liu Xia, who chose the poems, is under house arrest in
Beijing. Mr. Link has been barred from China for nearly 17 years, and
Tienchi Martin-Liao, president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, who
selected the essays, was refused entry earlier this year. These bannings
may illustrate a main tenet of Mr. Liu¹s writings: that China today is
³post-totalitarian,² but still a dictatorship. It¹s in urgent need of
reform, he writes.Saying so has landed Mr. Liu in jail four times since
the suppressed 1989 democracy

protests, in which he was a prominent participant and which he has called
a ³turning point² in his life.

His most recent sentence was for posting essays on the Internet that his
judges said showed ³deep subjective malice² towards the ³people¹s
democratic dictatorship,² and for helping to write Charter 08, a call for
political freedom modeled on Czechoslovakia¹s Charter 77. (Vaclav Havel, a
co-author of the Czech charter, wrote the book¹s foreword.)

Mr. Liu¹s output is prodigious ‹ 17 books, including collections of
articles and poems, and hundreds of essays ‹ and the editors said choosing
texts wasn¹t easy. Yet they flow naturally, grouped into four thematic
parts.

In ³Bellicose and Thuggish,² Mr. Liu offers a disturbing analysis of the
imperial and Maoist roots of today¹s ultranationalism, sprung from China¹s
³underlying arrogance and self-centeredness,² which, faced with Western
technological superiority, is trapped ³in a vicious cycle between
self-abasement and self-aggrandizement.²

In ³The Spiritual Landscape of Post-Totalitarian China² he examines a
³gaping disconnect² in values, where people curse the United States one
moment and happily hop on a plane to study there the next. In this Age of
Cynicism, people have ³split personalities,² scorning the state in private
and praising it in public, hoping for material benefit, he says. ³Both
postures have become second nature.² He blames the party, but also the
³small-mindedness² of Confucius¹s teachings.

In ³Yesterday¹s Stray Dog Becomes Today¹s Guard Dog,² he criticizes
China¹s intellectuals for their failure to think independently.

³It was when Emperor Wu of the Han (156-87 B.C.) announced his ruling to
Œvenerate Confucianism alone²¹ that ³Chinese intellectuals arrived in hell
on earth, because now they were nothing more than handmaidens to power,²
he writes.

³How costly has it been for the Chinese people that this particular
thinker ‹ this most sly, most smooth, most utilitarian, most worldly-wise
Confucius, who shied away from public responsibility and showed no empathy
for people who suffer ‹ became their sage and exemplar for two thousand
years?²

In ³Behind the ŒChina Miracle²¹ Mr. Liu sees ³the Œmiracle¹ of systemic
corruption, the Œmiracle¹ of an unjust society, the Œmiracle¹ of moral
decline, and the Œmiracle¹ of a squandered future.²

Since 1989, the pursuit of money in an unlawful environment has created ³a
robber baron¹s paradise,² he writes.
³Only with money can the Party maintain control of China¹s major cities,
co-opt elites, satisfy the drive of many to get rich overnight and crush
the resistance of any nascent rival group. Only with money can the Party
wheel and deal with Western powers; only with money can it buy off rogue
states and purchase diplomatic support.²

Yet Mr. Liu finds hope in the Internet. Returning in 1999 from three years
in a re-education through labor camp, he found his wife had set up a
computer with online access at home. It changed his life.

³The Internet is like a magic engine,² he writes. ³Now I can even live off
what I write.²

Mr. Liu ³has a habit of writing free from fear,² Mr. Link notes in the
introduction. His time in re-education camp left him ³unre-educated.²

Yet it didn¹t assuage his guilt at surviving the 1989 massacre when
hundreds, possibly thousands, died in the military crackdown. A line about
the death of Jiang Jielian, 17, the only child of Ding Zilin, a philosophy
professor who founded Tiananmen Mothers, an organization for bereaved
relatives, stands out.

That moment, ³All flowers became a single color,² he writes in ³Your
Seventeen Years.²

What gives him the strength to speak out despite severe persecution? He
writes:

Remembering them, the innocent dead,
I must thrust a dagger calmly
Into my eyes
Must purchase with blindness
Clarity of the brain
For that bone-devouring memory
Is best expressed
By refusal.