No Enemies, No Hatred

by Liu Xiaobo

  One of humanity’s greatest mistakes in the twentieth century, in my view, has been its attempt to escape its predicaments using the civilizations that it has already created. In fact, neither the classics of the East nor modern culture in the West is strong enough to rescue humanity from its plight. The most that we can hope for is that advanced civilization in the West might draw the backward East into its own survival mode; but the larger problem is that the Western pattern itself is tragic. Humanity so far has been unable to conceive a completely new civilization that might solve such problems as the population explosion, the energy crisis, environmental imbalance, nuclear disarmament, and addiction to pleasure and to commercialization. Nor is there any culture that can help humanity once and for all eliminate spiritual suffering or transcend personal limits. Humanity has built weapons that can extinguish all of humanity in an instant, and there is no escape from the fundamental anxiety that results; it has become part of the backdrop of every person’s life. The specter of death can render all human effort futile. The best that anyone can do is to face the cruel realities squarely and to stride bravely toward the abyss. Humanity has been seeking a final destination ever since its banishment from the Garden of Eden; Western culture is not that final destination, but merely a stage in the journey.

  Even more lamentable, the Western notion of “original sin” has grown weaker over time and general awareness of repentance is in sharp decline. The religious notion of the sacred has come to be little different from rock ’n’ roll—more nearly enjoyment than painful self-examination. No one in the years since Jesus was nailed to the cross has again sacrificed himself for humanity, and humanity has lost its conscience. The disappearing awareness of “original sin” has left human life weightless and has led to another fall for humanity, leaving us unlikely ever to recover from the original fall of Adam and Eve. How can people who lack a sense of “original sin” ever hear the voice of God? From the early Middle Ages, when God was a being of reason, to the late Middle Ages, when God was a figure of power, to modern times, when God became even more profoundly subjected to reason, and finally to today’s world, where God has gradually become secularized, human civilization has been in descent. By its own hand, humanity in the West has killed the sacred values of its heart.

  This is why, after I finished this book, whose guiding principle was to use Western civilization as a tool for critical reflection on China, I suddenly found myself at a loss, trapped in an awkward position, and shaken. It struck me like bolt from the blue that I had been attacking an obsolete culture with a weapon that itself was only a bit less obsolete. I was like a paraplegic laughing at a quadriplegic. Now looking at myself plainly, I suddenly can see that I am no theorist, and no personage of note: I am but a common person who must begin again from scratch. When I was in China, the pervasive ignorance in the social background made my intelligence stand out. But it stood out only in the sense in which my own tenuous health might look good if I were to stand next to an idiot. Here in the West, without that backdrop of ignorance, it is obvious that I am no great mind. Without an idiot standing next to me, my own inadequacies appear in profusion, and they are plain in the friends around me as well. In China, I lived for a fame that was 90 percent puffery; here in the West, for the first time, I have had to face reality squarely and make difficult choices about life. When a person falls from an illusory height into the abyss of reality, he discovers that he had never been at a height in the first place, but in fact had been struggling in the abyss all along. The frustration and despair that seized me when I awoke from my dream caused me to hesitate, to vacillate, and to consider the cowardly alternative of reentering the illusion, returning to the Chinese context that I knew so well, where again I could stand out among the ignorant. Were it not for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I might actually have done this.

  My wife [Liu Xiaobo’s first wife, Tao Li—Ed.] once wrote to me in a letter:

  Xiaobo, on the surface you seem to be a rebel within this society, but in fact you have a deep identification with it. The system treats you as an opponent, and in so doing it accommodates you, tolerates you, even flatters and encourages you. In a sense you are an oppositional ornament of the system. But me? I’m an invisible person; I disdain even to demand anything of this society, and don’t lose sleep over how I am going to denounce it. It is I, not you, who am fundamentally incompatible with it. Even you cannot comprehend my profound indifference. Not even you can accommodate me.

  When I first read these words they went right past me, but now, thinking back, I can see that they hit the nail on the head. I am grateful to my wife. She is not only my wife but also my most perceptive critic, and her criticisms leave me nowhere to hide.

  Right now there is no escape for me. Either I jump off the cliff or am crushed to smithereens. The price of freedom is to go to the limit.

  Before ending this essay, though, I need to make some unpleasant comments about the ways in which Westerners flatter China. Their interest, and their effusive praise, seems to me rooted in the following sorts of psychology:

  1. Some are attracted to Chinese culture purely from personal inclination, temperament, interest, and values. They seek spiritual resources, or a kind of comfort, and there is nothing wrong with that. It is a normal human pursuit. It’s just too bad that Westerners of this kind, who are responsible only to themselves, are so few. Indeed, it is too bad that human beings of this kind in general are so few.

  2. Some, beginning from criticisms of their own societies, look to China for weapons that they can use to try to transform the West. Their mission leads them to embrace a Chinese political language and conceptual system, to strain it through their own Western thought processes, and thence to come up with a version of “Chinese” culture. These Westerners believe that they are Sinicizing themselves, but in fact they are doing nothing of the sort. They are doing a very Western thing. (In my view cultures usually block out other cultures; we will have to await the birth of a truly transcendent talent if we are ever to see a person fundamentally exit the cage that is native culture.) There is nothing wrong with Westerners idealizing Chinese culture for their personal use; but to idealize it with a view to improving the human condition will only cause humanity to regress. This idea is even more ridiculous than the idea that Western culture itself is humanity’s salvation.

  3. Some begin with Western superiority firmly in mind and a sense of noblesse oblige toward Chinese culture. Their affirmation of things Chinese is like that of an adult who commends a child for handling “big people’s language” or a nobleman who praises the loyalty of a slave. Both are mixtures of charity and insult. I have heard plenty of this kind of praise during my current trip abroad. People say things like: “This is the first time I’ve heard a Chinese say anything like that,” or “What an understanding of Western philosophy for a Chinese!” or “How did China ever produce a rebel like you?!” Such comments are meant as compliments, but each reflects the premise that normally Chinese are dodos. When I hear such praise, it makes me feel as if I am not really a visitor from China so much as a person who has been stuffed into a leather case and loaded onto an airplane to be displayed, as and where my hosts see fit, as a novel object from a distant land. In this pattern we can see how, despite centuries of progress toward democracy and equality, the deep-seated human impulse to master other people has not disappeared, but waits to be resurrected at a moment’s notice. The Westerners of this type include those extremely career-minded so-called China experts.

  4. Western tourists praise Chinese culture out of their amazement at unfamiliar things. These people—who enjoy modern civilization and would never dream of leaving it—nevertheless thirst for a change of pace and a different flavor, and China, suddenly opened up to them after decades of being sealed off, provides an ideal destination. China’s ignorance, backwardness, and primitiveness present sharp contrasts to the culture of Western civilization, and all of this, for tourists, stimulates curiosity and a sense
of mystery. The praise that these tourists give to China springs from the satisfaction of their personal curiosity. If their enthusiasm were to stop there, without moving on to broach the great issues facing the world, I suppose no harm would be done. But the problem is that they frequently elevate their personal hedonism to the level of a cultural choice for the entire human race—and this, if I may be blunt, is just too preposterous for words. Their hypocrisy is plain when you consider that they come to China only to sightsee—never to stay—and yet say to Chinese people, “Your civilization is first-rate; it is the future of humanity.” Their shift from tourist to savior is not merely absurd; it is cruel. It recalls the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, where the nobility who sat in the stands of the Coliseum would never have dreamt of joining the battles within the arena, yet could be intoxicated with pleasure at viewing them. It was no doubt true that those savage and bloody spectacles offered novelty, stimulation, and hence a certain kind of pleasure. But how must the cheers have sounded to the slaves who were being torn apart? Another example: viewed from an airplane, the sight of an old buffalo plowing a field produces a feeling of pastoral beauty. But can the viewer therefore say to the tiller, “Stick with your primitive ways; they are charming”? To do so would be to ask a living human being to freeze eternally in a primitive state for the viewing pleasure of another, more comfortable human being. How unjust, how cruel, is that? To use the suffering of others for the pleasure of oneself is the ultimate ugliness. To me, as a Chinese, it could not be plainer that China is not going to be the answer for humanity in the twenty-first century. In a world that is already riddled with divisions and strata, and on an earth that is so limited in its natural resources, how could China, with its population of over a billion, ever be the beacon of the twenty-first century? Even if its self-transformation succeeds in the short term, China cannot rise to the economic level of the U.S. or Japan; our planet cannot bear a superpower so large. This is why I do not look to the flourishing of any race to support my own well-being, do not pin my hopes on any particular group, and do not count on any society’s progress to assure my future. I can only rely on my own efforts in contending with this world.

  5. A very small number of Westerners view China from a purely academic standpoint. These people, who study China from a certain remove, are relatively objective and clear-sighted. China’s virtues and vices are irrelevant to their personal interests, and their views of China, for that reason, are all the more realistic and of theoretical value. These are the Western voices that Chinese should listen most carefully to.

  Writing this epilogue has exhausted me.

  New York, March 1989

  Originally published by the Tangshan Publishing House, Taipei, 1990

  Translated by Stacy Mosher

  ON LIVING WITH DIGNITY IN CHINA

  This piece, written near the end of the second year of Liu Xiaobo’s third incarceration, seems to signal a turning point in his thinking. From this point on he puts heavy emphasis on “human dignity,” on the responsibility of each human being to be loyal to that idea, and on the examples of people like Václav Havel, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Jesus Christ, who have shown how this is done. His exaltation of Christ becomes especially strong, but, unlike his younger friends Yu Jie and Wang Yi, who are Christians, Liu has not declared himself formally to be a believer in any religion.—Ed.

  IN A TOTALITARIAN STATE, the purpose of politics is power and power alone. The “nation” and its peoples are mentioned only to give an air of legitimacy to the application of power. The people accept this devalued existence, asking only to live from day to day.

  This has remained a constant for the Chinese, duped in the past by Communist hyperbole, and bribed in the present with promises of peace and prosperity. All along, they have subsisted in an inhuman wasteland.

  They live without a shred of human dignity, valued only as pawns in a system ruled by fear.

  Mao Zedong, echoing Lenin in his famous “Talks at Yan’an” in 1942, exhorted the Chinese people to serve as “cogs in the revolutionary machine.” And even though the people have shifted from embracing revolution under Mao’s rule to avoiding it since the days of Deng Xiaoping, in both cases they have remained willing cogs.

  To live in opportunism is to sink into unabashed wickedness.

  To live in hypocrisy is to sacrifice integrity to cynical scheming.

  To live in apathy is to become inured to selfish inaction.

  To live on one’s knees is to settle for charitable handouts.

  To live in frivolity is to escape into farce and buffoonery.

  To live in tearful humiliation and shame is to stifle one’s innate moral capacity with silence.

  To live in groveling impotence is to lose faith in the power of principles and righteousness.

  To live in resignation and compromise is to let opportunism devour one’s principles.

  To live in chicanery is to sell one’s conscience, to betray others who are heroes of conscience, and eventually to abandon one’s sense of shame. A person or nation that lives free of shame can get along quite well.

  Rationalizing such ways of life has eroded people’s spiritual dimension, inflamed their brutishness and materialism, and degraded them to the level of animals. With the devaluation of faith and the sacred, people are enthralled by carnal desires. Stripped of compassion and a sense of justice, they are reduced to callous, calculating economic beings, content with a life of ease.

  In the conflict between survival of the flesh and dignity of the spirit, if we cower to preserve ourselves, we become mere zombies, despite our trappings of prosperity. If we stand up for our dignity, we live nobly, no matter how much we may risk or suffer.

  The Chinese people often question the need for dignity, conscience, ideals, compassion, rectitude, and a sense of shame. After all, they contend, such notions won’t put food on the table or money in your pocket, and empty blather undermines our national interest. Hiding one’s head in the sand, and even resorting to outright ruthlessness, they maintain, are the only ways to survive.

  Admittedly, righteousness is weak unless it is backed by power, but power devoid of righteousness is evil. If most people cast their lot with the latter, then evil will prey forever upon humankind, as wolves and tigers prey upon lambs.

  But unarmed righteousness fostered by love can overcome weapons and power, as demonstrated by the miraculous triumph of Jesus over Caesar, or Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King’s victories through nonviolent resistance. Jesus is a model of martyrdom because he withstood the temptations of power, wealth, and glamour, and remained steadfast even when threatened with crucifixion.

  Most important of all, Jesus exemplified opposition without hatred or the desire for retaliation; his heart was filled with boundless love and forgiveness. Completely eschewing violence, he epitomized passive resistance, serenely defiant even as he meekly carried his own cross.

  No matter how profane and pragmatic our world is, we will have passion, miracles, and beauty as long as we have the example of Jesus Christ.

  In the labor camp, Dalian, August 1998

  Originally published in Dajiyuan (The Epoch Times), July 18, 2004

  Translated by Susan Wilf

  LOOKING UP AT JESUS

  For my unassuming wife

  Jesus, do you know me?

  a yellow-skinned Chinaman

  from where we bribe the gods with bread soaked in human blood

  we pray to gods and Buddhas solely to exterminate divinity

  our gods are burnished in gold

  from emperors and sages to soldiers and virgins

  countless people have turned into gods

  we only beg for blessings and never repent

  even a puddle of piss reflects gods upside-down

  I don’t know you, Jesus

  your body is too gaunt and shriveled

  each rib assaultingly distinct

  your posture on the cross is too tragic
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  each nerve bearing the suffering

  head slightly angled forward

  neck crisscrossed with protruding veins

  hands, hanging down limp

  when their five fingers extended

  it was like dry branches in a fire

  Humanity’s evil is too heavy

  and your shoulders are too narrow

  can you hold it up, the cross

  that was forced upon you?

  blood soaking into the wood grain

  brews the wine that rears humanity

  I suspect you were a bastard child

  cruel god tearing the hymen open

  he made you sacrifice alone

  how could it have been a way to

  spread the news of God’s love?

  Believers who read the Old Testament

  are awed by its grammar of command

  and terrified by its wrathful God

  no questions, no discussion

  no rationale at all

  belief and disbelief, obedience and disobedience

  when He wants to create, He does what He likes

  when He wants to destroy, the floods rise high

  God has no form

  but sows seeds of hate

  The creation story is a bit of entertainment

  that caused unprecedented evil

  our progenitors, the Tree of Wisdom, the snake

  make a loop manipulated by God

  since the start of humanity’s exile

  God has become a bottomless trashbin