Liu Xiaobo, Chinese Dissident Who Won Nobel While Jailed, Dies at 61
by Chris Buckley / New York Times (13 July 2017)
by Chris Buckley / New York Times (13 July 2017)
full article here
Mr. Liu was imprisoned and unable to accept the Nobel Peace Prize
in person in Oslo in 2010. The actress Liv Ullmann read from Mr. Liu’s
“I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court.”Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, died today, July 13, 2017, from complications of liver cancer, while serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” The following essay is excerpted from Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, by Orville Schell and John Delury.
Liu Xiaobo’s Three Refusals:
Mr. Liu was imprisoned and unable to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in person in Oslo in 2010. The actress Liv Ullmann read from Mr. Liu’s
“I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement to the Court.”Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, died today, July 13, 2017, from complications of liver cancer, while serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.” The following essay is excerpted from Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, by Orville Schell and John Delury.
Liu Xiaobo’s Three Refusals:
No Enemies, No Hatred, No Lies
An Excerpt from ‘Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century’
An Excerpt from ‘Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century’
In the spring of 1989, Liu Xiaobo was a thirty-four-year-old professor of literature and philosophy at Beijing Normal University with a keen interest in political ideas, who when demonstrations broke out, quickly became a habitué of Tiananmen Square. Having written a doctoral thesis on the topic of aesthetics and human freedom, he was a prolific if acidic writer, a loner and iconoclast who believed that the most worthy role of intellectuals was to “enunciate thoughts that are ahead of their time” and to strive for a vision that is able “to stretch beyond the range of accepted ideas.” He believed that a truly autonomous intellectual must be “adventurous” and “a lonely forerunner” whose true worth would be discovered “only after he has moved on far ahead.”1 A uniquely independent thinker whose signatures were close-cropped hair, an addiction to cigarettes, and a fondness for aviator glasses, Liu rejected the fundamental premises of one-party rule, which he felt had corrupted the ability of most Chinese to think for themselves. Party rulers, he later said, “bribe us with small favors, threaten us with the lash, entertain us with songs and dances, and use lies to poison our souls.”2 For those intellectuals who too easily accommodated the party, Liu had little but contempt. “And China’s so-called intelligentsia,” he wrote, “is, for the most part, the dictator’s conspirator and accomplice.”3
An admirer of nonviolent leaders such as Vaclav Havel, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., Liu prided himself on his intolerance for cant, groupthink, and political pandering.4 “The Chinese love to look up to the famous, thereby saving themselves the trouble of thinking,” he wrote before the 1989 demonstrations began. That’s why they “rush into things en masse. Occasionally someone stands out from the crowd and lets out a shout: Everyone is astounded. What I’m saying is that there are too few people with their own minds, their own ideas.”5 ....
full article extract here
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