Review: No enemies,No hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Lin Xiaobo

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Review: NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED: Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo February 21, 2011 by Thor Halvorssen Liu Xiaobo is in the Jinzhou Prison in the Liaoning Province of China serving an 11-year prison term. His “crime:” drafting and promoting Charter 08, a manifesto that demands human rights and democratic reforms in China. Although known in human rights circles, Liu came to widespread international attention when he was named the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. When the prize was announced, Liu’s wife Liu Xia was promptly placed under house arrest, rendering her unable to attend the ceremony. Chinese state media then launched a vicious attack, denouncing Liu for winning an award “undeserved for a criminal.” While Beijing has done everything in its power to suppress Liu’s work and his international recognition, a recent collection of essays and poems allows readers to explore his unique insight. NO ENEMIES, NO HATRED: Selected Essays and Poems [Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, January 2012] features essays interspersed with poems selected by Liu’s wife. The most poignant are written to her and represent, ultimately, what the struggle is about—the choice between love and hatred. His poems converge with the academic essays, touching on critical reflections of state communist ideology, and diverging from the pedantic to instead examine the writer as a human. The result is a provocatively sophisticated compendium of observations of contemporary Chinese authoritarian society. Despite his profound contributions to the human rights movement in China, Liu’s essays are saturated with determined modesty and guilt. In the book’s first piece, “Listen Carefully to the Voice of the Tiananmen Mothers,” Liu expresses regret for surviving the tumultuous Tiananmen Square protests while others were murdered by China's government. “What have I ever done for the massacre victims?” he asks. He laments his “self-styled elitism” and the fact that he wrote a confession while in detention for the first time. It is perhaps this humble perception of his own contribution to the cause that drives him to continue to publicly voice his discontent with China’s one-party state: “If we stand up for our dignity,” Liu explains, “we live nobly, no matter how much we may risk or suffer.” In the course of his writing, Liu makes an intriguing observation about China’s double standard in its relationship with the West. Despite its overtly anti-Western political stance, Beijing’s dogged nationalism is being chipped away by its people’s desire to “Westernize”. In the recent past, “pretty-girl writers” who wrote about sexual female characters cloaked in Chinese notions of Western clothes, in Western bars, and Western notions of sex, became quickly popular in China, and Chinese film and television were filled with story lines of infidelity, prostitution, and excess. “The craze for political revolution in decades past has now turned into a craze for money and sex,” says Liu. He is worried about the youth’s interest in political reform being overtaken by an obsession with material things. Liu isn’t entirely pessimistic about China’s progress toward democracy. With the help of the internet, Liu believes change can be made in China. He muses about how with the click of a mouse, his words can be made available to the world in under a second. He is also hopeful the popular egaos—online political satires—will ease the eventual transition to democracy. “Satire of what is wrong implies that something else is right,” says Liu. Liu’s fearless essays are especially compelling because they bridge the gap between academic analysis of China’s political situation and dilettante observations of the country’s cultural and social evolution. They are an invaluable window into Chinese intellectual life and an extraordinary contribution to modern literature. Sadly, forceful discourse and revelatory disquisitions like these constitute a crime in today’s China. And Liu is not the only victim of this kind of political persecution. Human rights violations are state policy in China; forced labor camps hold millions of prisoners; arbitrary detention, media censorship, and blatant disregard for the rule of law are routine. Some may want to turn a blind eye to Beijing’s abuses because of its influence on the global economy or its record of poverty reduction since it abandoned Maoist socialism for Milton Friedman's free enterprise system, but its draconian repression has made it one of the cruelest dictatorships on the planet. The similarities with the writings of both Václav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn are striking. All three possess an uncomplicated ability to inspire the dignified and peaceful fight against totalitarianism. In Solzhenitsyn's Nobel lecture he asked what one man, let alone a writer, can do against the pitiless onslaught of naked violence: "violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood," and gave his prescription: "one word of truth outweighs the whole world." In a different decade Havel observed: "If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth," and Havel's time in prison is proof that truth, for a regime, "must be suppressed more severely than anything else." Liu's choice to "live in truth" makes him unique among Chinese intellectuals. In 1989, before returning to China from the United States, Liu said, “I hope that I’m not the type of person who, standing in the doorway to hell, strikes a heroic pose and then starts frowning in indecision.” Liu didn’t frown. We shouldn’t either. Thor Halvorssen is president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum. He is a member of the International Committee to Support Liu Xiaobo. Read the original article at Forbes.