Credit: Wall St Journal
A new collection of Liu Xiaobo’s writings demonstrates that the Chinese dissident has much in common with Vaclav Havel, writes Ellen Bork, “chiefly a faith in individuals and the impact they can have on a totalitarian system”:
The title “No Enemies, No Hatred” is taken from the June 2, 1989, announcement by Mr. Liu and a few comrades of a hunger strike at Tiananmen Square. Several essays and poems, and his final statement to the court, reflect the profound influence on Mr. Liu of the Tiananmen protests and massacre—events the Party still distorts and denies. In 1989, Mr. Liu, then a visiting professor of literature in New York, came home to join the protesters, consciously rejecting what he saw as the passivity of most Chinese intellectuals. On the night of June 3-4, as troops advanced, killing indiscriminately, Mr. Liu saved lives by persuading students to leave Tiananmen and negotiating their safe passage. He survived but retained a burden of guilt about his comparatively mild prison experience (“deathly bored . . . but that’s about it”), his forced “confession” and the disproportionate attention “luminaries” received for their role in the protests
“Moral authority, in the popular view, lies increasingly with the people,” he writes. But Liu is no purist, notes Bork, director of democracy and human rights at the Foreign Policy Initiative:
He urges tolerance and respect, including for those working inside the system. Nevertheless, he distinguishes between tolerance and compromising on principle, warning that “when the ‘rise’ of a large dictatorial state that commands rapidly increasing economic strength meets with no effective deterrence from outside, but only an attitude of appeasement . . . the results will not only be another catastrophe for the Chinese people but likely also a disaster for the spread of liberal democracy in the world.”
