Books
Dissidents and their activitiesPosted by Joel Martinsen on Friday, November 5, 2010 at 5:57 PM
"Who is Liu Xiaobo?" asks the English translation of an unflattering article about the most recent Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The Chinese title of the article is 刘晓波其人其事, or something like "Liu Xiaobo: The Man and His Deeds." This also happens to be the title of a book published in September 1989 to inform the reading public of Liu's outrageous words and criminal activities. From the preface:
Beginning with Liu-specific excerpts of Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong's report on the 6-4 incident, the book (the text of which is widely available online) blasts Liu's scholarship and commentary, including his views on the controversial TV drama River Elegy (河殇), colonialism, the role of intellectuals, and Achesonian "democratic individualism." The third appendix contains the full text of Liu's 1988 interview with Hong Kong's Liberation Monthly, which is the source of the widely-quoted line about 300 years of colonialism (as well as the expensive bottle of wine mentioned in the recent critical article). The China Youth Publishing House, which published the book, followed up a few years later with a volume recording the misdeeds of a collection of well-known public figures who fled the country in the wake of the events of 1989. Here's the cover blurb from Exiled "Elite" and Their Activities (亡命“精英”其人其事), published in May 1991:
Like the Liu Xiaobo book, Exiled "Elite" is a compilation of interviews, news reports, and essays that attempts to let the subjects defeat themselves with their own words. The book also includes, in an appendix, the text of Gao Xingjian's 6·4-themed play, Fugitives (逃亡). Although the book, with a print run of around 20,000 copies, was not a best-seller, it still made the text available to readers in the days before contraband information could circulate freely on the Internet. Today, perhaps because the full text of "Charter 08" is easily obtainable online, an attack on Liu Xiaobo does not need to include it as an appendix. Or maybe the authors of the latest look at the man and his deeds are worried about possible side-effects: a thread on the online forum Tianya discussing the two books contains a comment that reads, "I've got a copy. And that was the book that pushed my thinking in a 'reactionary' direction." Judging from a roundup of other biographies that employ "the man and his deeds" (其人其事) in the title, the formula appears to be intended to pull back the curtain on the wickedness of the man and the awful deeds he has done. Here's a selection:
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Comments on Dissidents and their activities
This makes my eyeballs feel dirty! I know people have a lot of opinions about Chai Ling, but Liu Binyan was a socialist and a populist until the day he died. He's a reminder that actually believing in the ideals of the CCP is foremost on the long, long list of crimes that the government will punish you for.
These publications show every sign of disgusting even the people that write them. No wonder they have an effect on readers that's opposite of what's intended.