The Liu Xiaobo Project

The Chinese poet, essayist, former professor and pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo is still a political prisoner in China. His work is banned. The very words “empty chair” are censored from the Internet in China, referring as they do to his seat left vacant at the Nobel prize ceremony in 2010, occupied only by his Peace Prize.

I had very mixed feelings about visiting China. I’ve often struggled with such thoughts: do I avoid France because of Algeria? Spain because of what it did as a conquering and colonial power throughout Latin America? England because of what it did to Ireland, in India? But China still at this moment oppresses Tibet. On the very eve of my departure more people were killed in demonstrations in the Xijiang Uighur area. Its own citizens are not free to speak and publish.

In the end, obviously, I went. My humble gesture of conscience and defiance was to take along printed copies of Liu’s work—mostly poems—in the original Chinese, kindly provided to me by the editor of a collection in translation due out in April, No Enemies, No Hatred. These I—distributed, as I went: in the Temple of Heaven, in restaurants, taped to the “red panda” enclosure at the Beijing Zoo, the longest treatise left in the library of the riverboat Katarina, given with tips to chambermaids and guides. Etc. That was my project.

I hope we see, sooner rather than later, Liu Xiaobo, Yu Xie, Li Tie, Chen Wei, Chen Xi, Zhu Yufu, and every other Chinese dissident, freed from detention, free to speak out. Liu Xiaobo, perhaps more forgiving and noble than I can hope to be, said in late 2009: "I still want to say to this regime, which is depriving me of my freedom, that I stand by [my] convictions. ... I have no enemies, and no hatred."