The Freedom Writer
By ELLEN BORK
The Wall Street Journal (Bookshelf), 30/12/2011
Writings on Tibet, Tiananmen Square and Chinese society by Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
Writings on Tibet, Tiananmen Square and Chinese society by Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned dissident who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.
When the dissident Liu Xiaobo won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize from his prison cell, the Chinese government reacted hysterically—denouncing the Nobel Committee, retaliating against Norway diplomatically and trying to intimidate foreign governments out of sending representatives to the ceremony. Mr. Liu had been arrested nearly two years earlier, just before the release of Charter 08, a declaration of democratic principles for China inspired by Charter 77, the Czechoslovak initiative led by the playwright (and later Czech president) Václav Havel that, 31 years earlier, led to the Velvet Revolution and inspired people throughout the Soviet bloc.
China's leaders should feel just as aggrieved by "No Enemies, No Hatred," a collection that shows why the Communist Party fears this 56-year-old intellectual-turned-activist and his ideas. In essays on China's rise, Tibet, the impact of materialism and nationalism on morality and sex, the 2008 Olympics, and much more, Mr. Liu advances the antithesis to the Party line, writing "free from fear," as co-editor Perry Link puts it in his valuable introduction.
The essays appeared mainly in publications based in the U.S. and Hong Kong and found their way back to China via the Internet, which Mr. Liu celebrates, perhaps only half-jokingly, as evidence of a divine being. Interspersed throughout are poems, often searing, that attest to Mr. Liu's intellectual as well as emotional partnership with his wife, Liu Xia, an artist currently under house arrest. Rounding out the book are documents including the text of Charter 08, Mr. Liu's poignant statements at his 2009 trial and the verdict sentencing Mr. Liu to 11 years in prison.
The title "No Enemies, No Hatred" is taken from the June 2, 1989, announcement by Mr. Liu and a few comrades of a hunger strike at Tiananmen Square. Several essays and poems, and his final statement to the court, reflect the profound influence on Mr. Liu of the Tiananmen protests and massacre—events the Party still distorts and denies. In 1989, Mr. Liu, then a visiting professor of literature in New York, came home to join the protesters, consciously rejecting what he saw as the passivity of most Chinese intellectuals. On the night of June 3-4, as troops advanced, killing indiscriminately, Mr. Liu saved lives by persuading students to leave Tiananmen and negotiating their safe passage. He survived but retained a burden of guilt about his comparatively mild prison experience ("deathly bored . . . but that's about it"), his forced "confession" and the disproportionate attention "luminaries" received for their role in the protests.
Mr. Liu's writing is most personal when writing about Tiananmen, but all of the essays display a distinctly humane spirit. He takes evident pride in the changes that ordinary Chinese have brought about despite the Communist Party's tight grip on power. "Moral authority, in the popular view, lies increasingly with the people," he writes in an essay that was later cited at his trial as evidence of subversion. Repression is the only element of totalitarianism still in place in China, and even it, Mr. Liu says, has unintended consequences, no longer turning people into "political leper[s]" but "actually helping a person to achieve spiritual wholeness."
Reforms for which the Communist Party takes credit and is lauded abroad originated in pressure from "the bottom up," he writes in "Xidan Democracy Wall and China's Enlightenment." Xidan is an area in central Beijing where, in 1978, brave souls hung posters on a "Democracy Wall" criticizing the Party and arguing for liberalization. This movement, he argues—not Party-sponsored debate—triggered official reforms, fostered a new solidarity among dissidents that influenced the wei quan ("rights defense") movement of the past decade, and transformed the language of dissent from "Maoist cant."
Mr. Liu has a keen eye for the cynicism and hypocrisy that warps Chinese society, fed by propaganda extolling wealth, power and national pride. Youth turn their "patriotism" on and off like a switch, he writes. "When these students are cursing America, they are filled with righteous indignation; when sitting on a plane headed for Boston, their hearts are even more wild with joy." Intellectuals who bend with the political winds come in for no less scorn. Chinese Leaders' embrace of Confucius—a "mediocre" thinker—signaled "the moment Chinese intellectuals arrived in hell on earth, because now they were nothing more than handmaidens to power," he writes in "Yesterday's Stray Dog Becomes Today's Guard Dog."But Mr. Liu is not a purist. He urges tolerance and respect, including for those working inside the system. Nevertheless, he distinguishes between tolerance and compromising on principle, warning that "when the 'rise' of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement . . . the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world."
When Mr. Liu won the Nobel, Havel wrote to him of being "touched" but not surprised that Charter 08 drew inspiration from Charter 77 (a compliment Havel returned by working to free Mr. Liu and defend Charter 08 until his death earlier this month): "There simply exists a sort of moral minimum that is common to the entire world and thanks to which people from countries as different and far apart as the Czech Republic and China can strive for the same values and sympathize with each other, thereby creating the basis for true—not simply feigned—friendship." Mr. Liu already shares a great deal with Havel, chiefly a faith in individuals and the impact they can have on a totalitarian system. One day, we can hope, Mr. Liu will also join him in having brought about the end of a communist regime.
Ms. Bork is director of democracy and human rights at the Foreign Policy Initiative.
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