The collected writings of Chinese Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) have been translated into English for the first time, but there will be no interviews, bookshop signings or appearances at literary festivals. The author is not even aware of the English translation, because he remains incarcerated in a Chinese jail and his wife is under house arrest.
Liu, who won last year’s Nobel peace prize, is serving an 11-year sentence that began in 2009 for “inciting subversion of state power.” Friends have been unable to contact his wife, Liu Xia (劉霞), even though she has not been charged with anything.
The 55-year-old former Beijing University professor has repeatedly been detained or arrested and sentenced over the years for his relentless, but peaceful political activities, calling for democratic reforms, including freedom of expression, and condemning China’s treatment of Tibet. He was barred from attending the Nobel ceremony, and at the funeral of his father earlier this year he was forbidden from talking to anybody.
However, although silenced in China, his voice will be heard again in the West with the first English-language collection of his essays and poetry, which Harvard University Press will publish in January under the title No Enemies, No Hatred.
The 345-page volume will also include “evidence” cited against him by the Chinese court that sentenced him. The publishers describe the book as a critical insider’s account of contemporary China, as well as comparative views of Eastern and Western cultures.
Work by a team of 14 translators has been edited by Perry Link, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Riverside. He said that, until the Nobel, Liu was little known in the West.
“This -collection offers to the reader of English the full range of his astute and penetrating analyses of culture, politics and society in China today,” Link says.
Liu first came to the attention of the authorities in 1989, during the suppression of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. He was sent to prison for 19 months. In 1995, there was a further period of imprisonment for seven months, with no reason given, although it happened after he released a petition called “Learn from the Lesson Written in Blood and Push Democracy.” In 1996, Liu fell foul of the authorities again for speaking out about China’s one-party political system. Charges of “disturbing public order” led to his “re--education” — imprisonment in a labor camp for three years.
It was there that he wrote most of the poems in the Harvard volume, including a particularly tender one entitled Your Lifelong Prisoner, dedicated to his wife.
“He wrote it in a prison, so the contrast between ‘unwilling physical prisoner of the state’ and ‘willing spiritual prisoner of my lover’ has real-world significance,” Link said.
Liu Xia was allowed to visit him once a month, making the 1,760km round trip from Beijing 36 times to be with him. Despite personal risks, he wrote repeatedly of police brutality — a woman beaten up “enough to disfigure her face” — and of the persecution of people “for their words,” observing: “The price of freedom is to go to the limit.”
Such a man cannot be silenced, Link says.
“Once you’ve put someone in prison, other than ... execute him, there’s no further punishment to exact. In that sense, it frees the writer. About six or eight years ago, he just made the decision: ‘OK, no more self-censorship. If I go to prison, I go to prison,’” Link says.
The book’s foreword has been written by former Czech Republic president and Soviet-era dissident Vaclav Havel, whose Charter 77, which called for human rights in 1970s Czechoslovakia, inspired Liu and other Chinese activists to put forward their own manifesto, Charter 08.
Havel writes in the Harvard book: “Despite Liu’s imprisonment, his ideas cannot be shackled.”
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