No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  The regime’s judgment of Liu’s involvement at Tiananmen was that he had been a “black hand” behind a “counterrevolutionary riot.” He was arrested on June 6, 1989, and sent for a bit more than eighteen months to Beijing’s elite Qincheng Prison, where he was kept in a private cell, but not severely mistreated. “Sometimes I was deathly bored,” he later wrote, “but that’s about it.” Upon release he was fired from his teaching job at Beijing Normal University.

  He resumed a writing career, but now wrote less on literature and culture and more on politics. He could not publish in China, but sent manuscripts to Hong Kong publications such as The Open Magazine and Cheng Ming Monthly, as well as U.S.-based magazines such as Beijing Spring and Democratic China. In May 1995 the government arrested him again, this time for seven months. No reason was specified for the arrest, but it came in the same month that he released a petition called “Learn from the Lesson Written in Blood and Push Democracy and Rule of Law Forward: An Appeal on the Sixth Anniversary of Tiananmen.”

  On August 11, 1996, barely half a year after his second stint in prison, Liu joined with Wang Xizhe, a well-known dissident from the southern city of Guangzhou, to publish a statement on the sensitive topic of Taiwan’s relations with mainland China. Earlier that year the Chinese military had fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait, in an apparent attempt to intimidate Taiwanese voters on the eve of presidential elections in which the issue of a formal declaration of independence from the mainland was at stake. In their statement, Liu and Wang wrote, “Is the government of the People’s Republic of China the only legitimate [Chinese] government? In our view, it is both legitimate and not completely legitimate.” Less than two months later, on October 8, 1996, Liu was arrested again and sent for three years to a reeducation-through-labor camp in Dalian, in his home province of Jilin. (Wang fled the country right after the declaration was issued and has since settled in the United States. He has never been back to China.)

  The story of Liu Xiaobo’s courage from the mid-1990s on cannot be separated from his wife, Liu Xia. Four years younger than he, Liu Xia is a poet and art photographer whom Liu Xiaobo has known since the 1980s and with whom he was living after his release from prison in January 1996. During his labor-camp incarceration, Liu Xia was allowed to visit him once a month, and, not missing a single month, made the 1,100-mile round-trip from Beijing thirty-six times. Shortly after Xiaobo entered the camp, Liu Xia applied to marry him. Camp authorities, puzzled at her request, felt that they needed to check with her to be sure she knew what she was doing. She reports answering them by saying, “Right! That ‘enemy of the state’! I want to marry him!” A wedding ceremony inside the camp was impossible, and regulations forbade Xiaobo from exiting the camp, so the two married by filling out forms. On April 8, 1998, it was official.

  It was during the three years at the labor camp that Liu Xiaobo seems to have formed his deepest faith in the concept of “human dignity,” a phrase that has recurred in his writing ever since. It was also the camp environment that gave rise to many of his best poems, including most of those that appear in this book. Many of the camp poems are subtitled “to Xia,” or “for Xia,” but that does not make them love poems in the narrow sense. They span a variety of topics—massacre victims, Immanuel Kant, Vincent Van Gogh—that the poet addresses with Liu Xia standing beside him, as it were, as his spiritual companion. Liu Xia has prepared a book of her art photographs, which are deeply probing in what they suggest about China’s moral predicament in contemporary times, and she subtitles her book “accompanying Liu Xiaobo.”

  On October 8, 1999, Liu Xiaobo returned from the reeducation camp, unreeducated. He resumed his writing career with no alteration of range or viewpoint, and lived primarily off his manuscripts, for which he was paid the equivalent of about US$60 to $90 per one thousand Chinese characters. In November 2003 he was elected chair of the writers’ group Chinese PEN, and served in that post until 2007. During those years the rise of the Internet in China began to make a huge difference for Liu Xiaobo as well as for China as a whole. Finding ways to evade the government’s “Great Firewall,” Liu now could access information, communicate with friends, organize open letters, and edit and submit his manuscripts all much easier than before. He also watched with great satisfaction as the numbers of Chinese Internet users passed 100 million in 2006, giving rise to what he saw as “free assembly in cyberspace” and “power of public opinion on the Internet” that have turned into autonomous forces pushing China in the direction of democracy. In October 2006 Liu took over editorship of the Internet magazine Democratic China from his friend Su Xiaokang, who had been editing it from Delaware, and greatly expanded its reach inside China.

  Charter 08, which was conceived in conscious admiration of Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 of the 1970s, and which became the main piece of evidence against Liu Xiaobo at his criminal trial, did not originate with Liu Xiaobo. A number of his friends had been working on a draft for several months in 2008 before he chose to join them. I do not know why he at first stood aside, but my surmise is that he felt the project was unlikely to get anywhere. When he did join, though, his efforts were crucial, and became increasingly so in the weeks and days immediately before the charter was announced. He insisted that the charter not be a “petition” to the government; it was a way for citizens to address fellow citizens about shared ideals. He persuaded his friends to remove certain confrontational phrases so that a wider range of people would feel comfortable endorsing the charter, and this judgment was vindicated when more than twelve thousand people eventually signed. He personally did more than anyone else to solicit signatures, but his most courageous move in the days before the unveiling of the charter was to agree to present himself as its leading sponsor. He was already known as the most prominent “dissident” inside China; taking primary responsibility for this text would only put him more in the government’s spotlight and at greater risk for punishment.

  He was not the only person punished for Charter 08. In the days right before and after it was unveiled, several others who had worked on drafting it saw their homes raided, or received from the police “invitations to tea” (i.e., interrogation) of the kind one is not at liberty to decline. Then came a nationwide campaign to suppress the charter itself. But even in this context, the eleven-year prison sentence that Liu received surprised many observers for its severity. Liu himself said of the ruling, which arrived on Christmas Day 2009, only that it “cannot bear moral scrutiny and will not pass the test of history.” In his “Final Statement” he thanked his captors for the civil treatment he had received during his detention and declared, “I have no enemies.” Then he appealed the ruling—not because he expected it could possibly be changed, but because he wanted “to leave the fullest possible historical record of what happens when an independent intellectual stands up to a dictatorship.”

  When the police came to remove Liu from his apartment late at night on December 8, 2008, they took him to a police-run hostel at an undisclosed location in Beijing for six months of “residential surveillance.” (Chinese law says that “residential surveillance” happens at a person’s residence, but for Liu this was not the case. He was allowed two monitored visits with Liu Xia during this time, but those occurred at a third location, neither his home nor the secret place where he was being held.) On June 23, 2009, he was formally arrested and charged with “incitement of subversion of state power,” after which he was held at the Beijing Number One Detention Center. He continued to be held there after his trial in December 2009, and on May 24, 2010, was transferred to Jinzhou Prison in his home province of Liaoning. (By custom, notable Chinese criminals are sent home for punishment.) Liu Xia has been granted occasional, but closely monitored, visits at the prison.

  We know very little of his prison conditions. Chinese Human Rights Defenders has reported that—as of late 2010—he was sharing a cell with five other inmates (although veterans of Chinese prisons suspect that these five, real inmates or not
, are there to report on him). The other five are allowed weekly visits from family members, but Liu is allowed only monthly visits. Whether or not these visits can be from his wife depends on his behavior, on hers, and on the political “sensitivity” of the times. (A Nobel Prize and an Arab Spring are the kinds of things that generate great sensitivity.) Liu eats low-quality prison food. His cell mates are allowed to pay the prison to get specially prepared, better food, but Liu is denied this option. He has chronic hepatitis and stomach problems, but receives only cursory medical attention. He gets two hours each day to go outdoors. He can read books that Liu Xia has brought to him, but only if they are books published and sold in China. There is a television set in his cell, and the prison authorities control which programs he can watch—but not, of course, how he understands them.

  Liu Xiaobo has published many hundreds of articles and, if one counts collections of essays and poems, seventeen books. To peruse this large oeuvre and select essays that reflect the breadth of his interests and the range of his erudition is no easy task, and I am grateful to his longtime friends Hu Ping and Tienchi Martin-Liao for doing this work so well. The essays selected here are drawn mostly from Liu’s later and more political work done between 2004 and 2008. The poems, which have been personally selected by Liu Xia, are drawn from the 1990s, especially the labor-camp years of 1996–1999.

  I owe a tremendous debt to the thirteen translators for their observance of deadlines, their efficient follow-up, and, most importantly, their spirit of collaboration. Everyone in the project admires Liu Xiaobo, and our shared goal was that he not sound like fourteen different people. We have sought to produce an English-language “voice” for him that is not only consistent throughout the book but captures the eloquence of his Chinese. Readers of Chinese who compare our translations with the original texts will note that we have not pursued word-to-word, or sometimes even sentence-to-sentence, literalness. Such an approach can produce a stilted flavor that is quite absent from the originals when they are read in Chinese. Instead, we have aimed for what we think Liu Xiaobo would likely have written had he been thinking in English. Anyone who knows both Chinese and English knows that to have precisely the “same thought” in two such different languages can seldom be more than a gentle fiction. This fact makes the translator’s work an art, not a science. In the end, though, we feel that the effort to translate tone and spirit, not just words, produces a better kind of fidelity.

  Perry Link

  PART I

  POLITICS WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

  LISTEN CAREFULLY TO THE VOICES OF THE TIANANMEN MOTHERS

  Reading the Unedited Interview Transcripts of Family Members Bereaved by the Massacre

  Late at night on June 3, 1989, a 17-year-old boy named Jiang Jielian was shot and killed by People’s Liberation Army troops in Beijing. Later his mother, Ding Zilin, a retired professor of philosophy at People’s University, joined with Zhang Xianling, who had lost a 19-year-old son, and Huang Jinping, who had lost a husband, to form and lead a group called the “Tiananmen Mothers.” They took it as their mission to seek out family members of others who had been killed or wounded in the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. Their effort required patience and persistence—the Chinese government had made it clear that any victim of the massacre was by definition a “counterrevolutionary rioter,” so families who provided information to the group might face further trouble from the government. Still, after a decade of work, the Tiananmen Mothers had compiled enough material to publish a booklet, Witnessing the Massacre and Seeking Justice, in which they listed the names, along with photographs and capsule histories, of 155 who died in the massacre. The booklet also included twenty-five accounts of the arduous work involved in seeking out family members of victims. An expanded version of the booklet was later published in Hong Kong under the title In Search of the Victims of June Fourth, 1989–2005 (Open Magazine Press, 2005).

  Liu Xiaobo, who regards himself as a student of Ding Zilin, was an early and stout supporter of the Tiananmen Mothers. What follows is an excerpted version of a long essay that Liu wrote in 2004 on the eve of the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre. Two months before Liu wrote it, Ding Zilin, Zhang Xianling, and Huang Jinping had been seized in their homes and held in detention for several days, apparently because (although Party officials never specified the reason) they had publicized their work with the families of victims.—Ed.

  READING THE RECOLLECTIONS of bereaved family members allows me to see in detail the cruelty of the executioners, and, even more clearly, the brightness of humanity that shone in the midst of great terror.

  Immediately after the massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989, Chinese authorities exploited their monopoly of the mass media in order to blur the difference between black and white. They constantly repeated how cruelly so-called thugs had treated the martial-law troops and tried their best to hide the truth about how the troops had wantonly slaughtered ordinary people. But despite the government-imposed lockdown on alternate sources of information, the troops’ cruelty could be gleaned in some accounts that appeared at the time. One of these told of what happened near Xidan when troops used tanks to chase and crush students and civilians. Several eyewitnesses had reported this outrage at the time, but now, thanks to the bereaved families who are speaking out in these transcripts, we have fuller and more vivid testimony.

  It is obvious from the transcripts that troops opened fire blindly in all directions and killed a great number of innocent civilians. Around 10 p.m. on the evening of June 3, troops moving from west to east along Fuxing Boulevard had already begun spraying bullets back and forth into residential compounds, with no regard for life. Around 11 p.m., when a detachment of infantry scouts was passing the bridge at Muxidi, an order suddenly rang out and soldiers hit the ground. Then one of the officers among them rose to one knee, raised his submachine gun, and fired blindly all along the road while many people fell in pools of blood. The startled crowd broke in all directions. Students who tried to stop these blind killings themselves were shot.

  Because the gunfire was so blind, many people died inside their homes. Among the 182 documented dead in the transcripts, some were people who had never joined the protests, never confronted the troops, and never even gone out to watch the excitement. Yet bullets, fired randomly, took their lives. A woman named Ma Chengfen, who had been a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, was shot and killed while sitting on a staircase chatting with a neighbor. A 66-year-old worker named Zhang Fuyuan was shot in the backyard of his relative’s home. Another victim was an old lady from Wanxian in Sichuan who had been working in Muxidi as a nanny in the 22nd-floor home of the head of a government ministry. She was shot dead after she went down to the 14th-floor balcony to see what was going on. In the same building the son-in-law of a deputy inspector was killed in his kitchen.

  Perhaps most shocking of all, passersby who simply encountered martial law troops along the street were sometimes chased down and killed by soldiers who had been carried away by their mission to kill. One group of seven, five men and two women, who were walking near Nanlishi Road were chased down in this way. Three of them, Yang Ziping, Wang Zhengsheng, and An Ji, were killed. Two of the others were wounded.

  These transcripts show, too, how martial-law troops could be so cruel as to impede help for the wounded and dying. Zhang Xianling, one of the original Tiananmen Mothers, reports an instance in which a young man rushed out to take a photo just as the troops began firing and was struck by a bullet. People who saw the boy fall wanted to help him, but soldiers would not let anyone go near. One old lady went to her knees to beg them. “He’s a kid,” she said. “Please let us go help him!” A soldier answered by pointing his gun at her and roaring, “He’s a thug! I’ll shoot anyone who takes one step.” Later two ambulances arrived, and soldiers stopped them. When a doctor got off and tried to negotiate, the troops refused and the ambulances had to turn around. In short, they killed people and wouldn’t let others help: how cr
uel is that?

  Readers of the transcripts can also learn how the shameless murderers sought to cover up the evil they were doing. They hid bodies of the dead. Many people disappeared on June 4, 1989, and even today it is hard to know how many are living and how many died. After Zhang Xianling’s son Wang Nan was shot, martial law troops buried his body in a lawn in front of the gate to No. 28 Middle School (now known as Chang’an Middle School) near Tiananmen. However, because he had been wearing a military uniform and a soldier’s belt, the soldiers later feared he might be one of their own, so they dug up his body and sent it to a hospital. When Zhang Xianling was finally able to locate her son’s body, the troops at first wouldn’t let her take it home. “You can’t have it,” a soldier barked at her. “Get out or you’ll be arrested.” The mother later learned that there actually had been three unidentified dead bodies in that pit. The two others had already been sent to a crematorium—as “unknown corpses.” “During our search,” Zhang Xianling observed, “we ran across people from a dozen or so other families who were looking for their loved ones, be they dead or alive, but were looking in vain. They may well have been looking for some of those ‘cremated unknown.’ ”