Liu Xiaobo has emerged as the liberal conscience of Chinese intellectuals in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, and the publication in English and French translations of a body of his writings is extremely timely. As Perry Link notes in his introduction to No Enemies, No Hatred, Liu has authored many hundreds of articles and, including his essay collections and books of poetry, some 17 books. Consequently, it was no easy task for either Perry Link or Jean-Philippe Béja to reduce this vast and varied oeuvre of nearly 30 years to a manageable body of representative works. With Link relying on two longstanding friends of Liu and Liu's wife, Liu Xia, and Béja on only himself after an abortive effort to involve the imprisoned Liu through the mediation of Liu Xia, the two editors have produced impressive, highly poignant collections of essays, with each having the considerable merit of including archival materials from Liu's 2009 trial. The latter proceeding resulted in the harsh 11-year prison sentence for “the crime of incitement to subvert state power” that Liu is now serving in a prison in Jinzhou, Liaoning Province.
No Enemies, No Hatred draws its title from a formal statement made by Liu at the end of the 2009 trial. While he does not invoke here the names of other great modern civil libertarians as he does on other occasions – notably Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi – his calm and dignified tone is consonant with that struck by the latter in their own struggles for human freedom and dignity. Repeating a sentence from his “June 2nd [1989] hunger-strike declaration” in Tiananmen Square, he advises the court that he does not view the functionaries of the Chinese state with enmity and that he hopes to “rise above [his] personal fate and contribute to the progress of [China] and to changes in [Chinese] society” and to “use love to dissipate hate” (No Enemies p. 323). He also makes the telling point here that he has had the opportunity to express his political views publicly on only two occasions over the course of his life, each of which occurred at a legal prosecution at Beijing Intermediate Court, once in 1991 and again in December 2009. Liu has now been jailed four times by the Chinese state and, by 2020, will have served over 16 years in a jail or a re-education-through-labour camp.
At its heart, Liu's attempt to introduce basic human rights into Chinese society has two allied objectives: the expansion of the public sphere to include a plurality of voices, however discordant, and collaterally the ending of the domination of civil society that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained since 1949 through the neglect of rule of law, systemic corruption, coercion and violence on a scale unprecedented in human history. Though Liu is by training a literature professor and literary critic – interestingly, his dissertation was entitled “Aesthetics and human freedom” – his most powerful essays here, and they are preponderant, deal with political morality, social ethics, and forms of public discourse and agency. He is acutely aware that circumstances in China today – the “post-totalitarian” era – are very different from the horrific Maoist period. Still, as he sets out in “To change a regime by changing a society” (2006), notwithstanding the advent of a market economy under Deng, the slow development of diverse value systems among the Chinese people and the reduction of the most extreme political terror, there remains a single terrible hold-over from Mao's day: “the political monopoly [of the CCP] with its bag of tools for repressing alternate views” (p. 24). As he laments in one of several free-verse poems collected in No Enemies, No Hatred, “there has never been a New China/only a Party” (p. 19).
Although acknowledging the modest progress that China has made in many areas since Mao's death, Liu is nonetheless scathing in his criticism of Chinese leaders of all stripes – certainly Mao's successors but also opinion-makers like academics, intellectuals and journalists. In the title essay of La philosophie du porc et autres essais, he analyses and roundly condemns the manner in which members of the Chinese intellectual elite have been co-opted by the CCP through all manner of preferment. As he trenchantly observes, many of those who were “spontaneously” engaged in the 4th June movement, have now “spontaneously” taken the road to the “pigsty” of careerism and material corruption (p. 159). To salve their consciences, these would-be liberals have tactically misconstrued Isaiah Berlin's well-known notions of “negative” and “positive liberty” to mean “passive” and “active liberty.” They use this cynical misreading of Berlin as a principle to justify their political passivity and quiescence, and to obscure their co-optation intellectually and morally. In contrast, as a past-president of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre, as a leading organizer of the Charter 08 initiative, as an indefatigable expositor of Chinese political life in print and on the internet, and now as the most famous political prisoner in the world, Liu Xiaobo has obviously maintained the courage of his convictions over the years, and rejected the path to the pigsty.
Ten months after his 2009 conviction, Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize, which brought to the world's attention one of the most articulate, most impassioned defenders of human rights in contemporary history. Neither Liu nor any of his relatives were permitted by the Chinese state to attend award ceremonies in Oslo, and his absence there was dramatized by a prominently placed empty chair. The two volumes under brief review here help to introduce to a global readership Liu's views on a myriad of important subjects: the history, the internal and external politics, the social ethics, the literature and the popular culture of China. In doing so, they provide Liu with a global voice through which to reach the people of the world at a time when the Chinese state has silenced him. It is relevant to note that, while each collection is ambitious in scope, there are sufficient differences in make-up between the two – only about 25 per cent of their respective contents are the same – to make each an important contribution in its own right. Much can be learned about Liu Xiaobo's life, his iconoclastic political positions and contemporary China from either book, but a great deal more from the two combined.
