INVISIBLE WARFARE

A Chinese dissident writer in exile remains hopeful that writing the truth, in spite of official oppression, can topple dictatorship.

Imprisoned in 1990 for four years in China for performing two protest poems that “railed against and condemned the Tiananmen massacre,” Liao Yiwu has committed his life to fighting against the Chinese government’s widespread oppression. He continued to write when he was released, hounded by the Chinese police, who confiscated his work. In 2011, he was compelled to defect to Germany in order “to publish the writings I’d started in prison.” In exile, he has been able to have much of his clandestine work published—e.g., his hidden prison diary, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, and other books. In this moving speech, written in late 2022 when China suddenly reversed its restrictive Covid-19 lockdown, Liao expresses his determination to keep fighting despite setbacks and ill health. “I indefatigably record all of this to remind the world, and myself, because I worry that if I succumb to nihilism and lay down my pen, I will have failed absolutely,” he writes. The author is haunted by those who have perished with no name or record of their protests, such as “Old Man Yang,” who had been imprisoned for decades “in the bottomless black hole the Communist Party had created” and who offered to hide the author’s papers in prison. It’s clear that Liao is tormented about how he could not save his fellow dissidents. In his “documentary novel” Wuhan, the author exposed the government’s duplicity regarding the closing of Wuhan and other cities during the pandemic, noting how “Xi Jinping’s empire surpassed 1984,” and he writes eloquently in support of the Shanghai protests in 2022.

A pertinent plea against tyranny and an emotional reflection on the need to write in order to remember.