China’s Iconoclast

I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo by Perry Link, the leading Western chronicler of dissent in China, and a Chinese colleague who writes anonymously as Wu Dazhi is the definitive biography of the most famous dissident in the nearly seventy-five-year history of the People’s Republic of China. The book, long and necessarily ambitious, is also a tour de force survey of Chinese political thought, activism, and dissent over the past half-century.

This is a huge canvas, but Liu’s life easily holds it together. Even as a Ph.D. student in the 1980s he was so outspoken that foreign news services sent reporters to cover his dissertation defense. On the night of June 3–4, 1989, he was the only major public intellectual to remain on Tiananmen Square, where he helped negotiate a truce that allowed student protesters to avoid the bloodshed that occurred elsewhere in the city. Despite numerous chances to live in exile, he chose to stay in China and fight for civil liberties, spending years in prison. In the 2000s Liu was a leading figure in the Rights Defense Movement, the most sustained effort to rein in the Communist Party’s unchecked power. He won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize while in prison, and seven years later he became the first laureate to perish in custody since the German journalist Carl von Ossietzky in 1938.

Born in 1955 in northeastern China’s Jilin province, Liu grew up the third of five boys in a family that had connections with the new regime’s privileged caste. His mother was a nursery school teacher, and his father was a linguist who had joined the Communist Party before it took power in 1949, giving him status as a “prerevolutionary cadre.” One of Liu’s classmates was the son of an army major-general and lived in a two-story house with maids, a driver, and servants. The boy, nicknamed Fatty, wreaked havoc in school but was protected from consequences by his teachers’ fear of his powerful father. Years later Liu would draw on these experiences to describe the Communist Party as a corrupt ruling class that needed checks and balances.

His experiences in the Cultural Revolution had an even more profound effect on his character. When it was launched in 1966, Liu was too young to be a Red Guard but witnessed public executions, beatings, and torture. His parents became targets of party-organized violence because his father, even though a loyal party member, came from a family that had once owned land, making them, in official parlance, exploitative “landlords.”

With school suspended and his parents subjected to days-long psychological torture, he and his younger brothers roamed the streets. They imitated the older children by taunting or harassing people persecuted by the state, such as a former soldier in the opposition Kuomintang whom Liu beat and humiliated. In later essays he expressed disgust at his behavior, but at the time he was notorious for smoking, fighting, and truancy.

Soon after, Liu’s family was exiled for four years from Changchun, the provincial capital, to Inner Mongolia. In this stark landscape of steppes and blue skies, Liu became close to Tao Li, the first of two women who helped guide him toward a better path in life.

Unlike the boisterous and rule-breaking Liu, Tao came from a family of academics and was a model student. The two were drawn together by a love of books, which she cultivated in him. They became reading partners, making the best of the heavily censored world of the Cultural Revolution by scouring Marx and Engels for Western cultural references. Liu also read China’s greatest twentieth-century writer, Lu Xun, and for the rest of his life sought to emulate his iconoclastic views, especially his criticism of traditional Chinese culture.

These pages of I Have No Enemies stand out for their sharply reported details of life on the Mongolian grasslands that “basked in sunlight and brimmed with life.” Compared with China’s crowded cities, the region was filled with the scent of wild apricot blossoms and teemed with boars, deer, and pheasants. This shaped Liu’s political views. He came to think of himself as a “sense-based” person who lived by instinct. This was only possible, he later wrote, because of his childhood experiences in nature, which formed a counterpoint to the repressive society that the party had created.

Liu and Tao married in 1982, the same year Liu graduated from Jilin University with a major in Chinese and began graduate studies at Beijing Normal University. Tao, herself a formidable scholar of Japanese literature, accompanied him. Their son, Liu Tao, was born the next year.

This was the beginning of the reform era, a roughly thirty-year period that started a few years after Mao died in 1976 and ended around the time Xi Jinping took power in 2012. The 1980s in particular were a period of intellectual ferment. Works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Ezra Pound circulated widely in China for the first time in two generations. Liu was enthralled by T.S. Eliot and especially by Franz Kafka, a passion that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He read broadly in Western philosophy, which allowed him to step outside the Marxist ideology that had shaped his youth.

Liu quickly became one of the best-known figures of this period, which is even more remarkable given that he initially had modest academic qualifications. In 1983, while still working on his master’s thesis, he published a widely read essay on aesthetics, which was a highly politicized field. The official line was that aesthetics was objective. A correct and incorrect way of seeing beauty could be determined, with one’s political standpoint an important factor. Liu, however, sided with people like Gao Ertai, a famous academic who had been persecuted in the 1950s for writing that beauty was subjective and dependent on a person’s free will.

Liu suddenly was in demand as a lecturer. Though a lifelong stutterer, he was transformed on the public stage into a fiery, provocative speaker. This was nowhere more apparent than at a 1986 symposium on aesthetics featuring some of the decade’s most prominent writers, including the novelist Qian Zhongshu and the minister of culture, Wang Meng. Liu was very much their junior—a mere teaching assistant at Beijing Normal University, where he had only just completed his master’s and entered its Ph.D. program. These were also some of the most liberal voices in the Chinese establishment.

But for Liu they did not go far enough. He gave a speech that took swipes at every major cultural figure, saying that they had retreated from the progressive ideals that had shaped Chinese intellectuals during the early twentieth century. A friend who ran a small magazine in the freewheeling city of Shenzhen published his speech with the title “Crisis! Literature in the New Period in Crisis!” and an editor’s note describing Liu as a “dark horse” surging to prominence—a label that stuck with him for the rest of the decade.

Liu’s impact was enormous. People wrote of a “Liu Xiaobo tornado” that was sweeping China’s cultural scene. Some scholarly and popular magazines published articles attacking him for being too one-sided, while others defended him as a necessary corrective to years of Maoist repression. Reporters flocked to his home. The director Zhang Yimou, while working on his award-winning film Red Sorghum, reportedly handed out copies of Liu’s speech, hoping it would inspire his crew to follow Liu’s “human sensory surge.”

His Ph.D. dissertation caused another storm. It synthesized his work on aesthetics, meaning it challenged not only the government but also moderate liberals. Finding people to serve on his exam committee became a delicate political issue. His adviser put together a group of seven. But China’s Education Commission insisted that the committee be expanded to add four academics it considered politically “reliable.”

Held in June 1988, his oral defense attracted a huge audience, forcing administrators to move it to an auditorium that could accommodate five hundred people. Foreign correspondents from Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse attended. Liu spoke fluently and avoided provoking the conservatives on the committee. All eleven examiners recommended him for a Ph.D.

This was Liu’s apogee as an establishment intellectual. Although he was a fierce critic of the system, the party had at various times in its history tolerated his kind of iconoclasm. As his wife put it:

Xiaobo, on the surface you seem to be a rebel in this society, but in fact you have a deep identification with it. The system takes you as an opponent, and in so doing accommodates you, tolerates you, even flatters and encourages you. In a sense you are its oppositional ornament.

Liu, though, soon ended this flirtation with respectability. Within a year he began to forge a new identity as a vocal critic of Communist Party rule.

After obtaining his doctorate, Liu went abroad in late 1988 on a series of fellowships. From Oslo he went to Hawaii and then New York. The experience radically changed him. He began to see China’s problem as one not so much of battles over abstract ideas, such as aesthetics, but of politics. He also saw how democratic societies embraced laws and rules—it was not all liberty and spontaneity. These thoughts crystallized when the Tiananmen protests began in April 1989.

Liu was emotional as he watched the student protesters on television in New York. He and other intellectuals, many of them permanent exiles, issued statements. But after a while he could watch no longer—impulsive as ever, he had to participate. He managed to find a ticket to Beijing on April 26 and headed back to a country in the midst of its biggest political upheaval in a generation.

His reception sobered him. A year earlier he had been an intellectual superstar. Now he had been overtaken by the student leaders, who were younger and offered simpler narratives: the students were good and the government, especially its hated premier, Li Peng, was bad. Just a few years earlier Liu might have agreed. But his views were now more nuanced. In one impromptu speech he told the students on the square to go back to their campuses and build democratic structures. Their methods, he argued, simply mirrored the government’s view of the world:

This isn’t democracy, it’s hatred…. Hatred can lead only to violence and dictatorship, hatred only sees straw men…. What Chinese democracy needs most is to rid itself of hatred and of the enemy mentality; what we need most is calm, reasoned dialogue—consultation—what we need above all is tolerance!

Some of the students ridiculed him, shouting him down as a “fake scholar” and jeering that the dark horse had turned into a sheep. But he stayed on the square. He was touched by the students’ idealism and moved by the support of ordinary Beijingers, who contributed money, clothes, and warm food. “For the first time,” he later wrote, “I doubted my pessimism about Chinese national character, for the first time could shed my disdain for ‘the mediocre crowd,’ and for the first time felt the power that could flow if people woke up.”

Eager to find a way to reach the students and moderate their position, he and three other prominent figures joined a hunger strike that student leaders had organized. With Liu as the lead author, the four issued a declaration that Link and Wu call “a rare and important document in China’s pursuit of modern government.” Its core message was that the Communist Party was only part of the problem; society, including the students, had to throw off the tradition of defining people as either friends or enemies. Even Li Peng, they wrote, was not their enemy. “We have no enemies!” they proclaimed.

But this idealistic moment was quickly overwhelmed by state violence. On the night of June 3, the army fought its way into the center of Beijing, killing hundreds, if not thousands. Early on the morning of June 4, Liu helped arrange a truce on the square so that the students could evacuate safely.

Two days later he was arrested and sent to Qincheng, a prison reserved for dissidents and disgraced party members, for being a “black hand” behind the protests—a perverse charge given his actual role. He was fired by his university. In early 1991 he was released and began his new career as a political dissident.

As influential as he was, Liu had many character flaws. After meeting him in the 1980s, the Australian Sinologist Linda Jaivin wrote that he was “intolerably full of himself” and so self-obsessed that he was “never a great audience.” Instead, he would walk up to people and say simply, “I am Liu Xiaobo,” before beginning a monologue that often involved quoting his own writings.

During this period his relationship with his wife started to collapse. Already in the 1980s he had begun liaisons with other women, even bringing them into his home. When Tao confronted him, he spoke of “modernity,” which insulted her. His behavior on Tiananmen Square made things worse. He later berated himself for his marital infidelities, which took place even in the hunger strike tent. His fellow hunger striker Hou Dejian was so incensed that he said he wanted to kick Liu for his crass behavior. After Liu’s imprisonment in 1989, Tao’s health deteriorated. In 1990, while he was still in prison, she filed for divorce. He never reconciled with his wife and son, who moved to the United States and now live there anonymously. Years later he expressed remorse, describing himself as having been “truly a ghoul.” Link and Wu see this “problem of self-control” as following a pattern: Liu would know he was wrong, try to stop, fail, confess, blame himself, and try to stop again.

But his desire to improve himself through rigorous self-reflection paid dividends. As if to atone for his behavior with Tao, he began a loving relationship with the poet Liu Xia. The two married in 1996 and were inseparable, whether he was in or out of prison. He also abandoned his take-no-prisoners debating and writing style. Looking back in 2003, he wrote:

I realize that my entire youth was spent in a cultural desert and that my early writings had all been nurtured in hatred, violence, and arrogance—or, alternatively, in lies, cynicism, and loutish sarcasm. These poisons of “Party culture” had been soaked into several generations of Chinese and into me too.

Liu began to squeeze out these toxins, gradually becoming kinder and more influential as a moderate, sensible voice for change. In addition to his marriage to Liu Xia, the other main cause of his transformation was his work with the Tiananmen Mothers, made up of parents who lost children during the massacre.

In one of the most moving passages of the book, Link and Wu describe how he visited the group’s founder, Ding Zilin, and her husband, Jiang Peikun. Soldiers had shot dead their seventeen-year-old son while he was hiding behind a wall on the western approaches to the city. Jiang had served on Liu’s Ph.D. committee, and Liu wanted to pay his respects. His visit seemed perfunctory. He showed up empty-handed and dressed casually in a T-shirt and brightly patterned shorts.

Then the couple showed Liu their son’s ashes, which were in a jar housed in a custom-built wooden cabinet. Jiang recounted their son’s fate. Liu was stunned. He had come out of prison feeling heroic. But what had he really done? His jail term had been less than two years because of a confession he had written. Now he was free. The boy was dead. His was a real sacrifice. Liu bolted from the room, returning soon after with flowers. He fell to the floor in front of the urn, sobbing.

Liu became close friends with Professors Ding and Jiang, meeting them often and, with Liu Xia, going on vacation with them. Through them, he began to see the need to address the concrete concerns of people victimized by China’s authoritarian regime. He also came to define these victims broadly, thanks to the writing of his friend the novelist Wang Xiaobo. Wang’s influential essay “The Silent Majority” described how vast swaths of Chinese society were victims, not just those who were politically oppressed.¹ These included people with different sexual orientations, miners, child laborers, farmers, and workers with no rights. They were silent because they had no voice in society, while those who spoke paid them no heed.

Liu decided to focus on this silent majority but was not sure how. Initially he continued the old-style dissident approach of issuing petitions and statements, but that achieved little other than more prison time. When he was released from a three-year stint in a labor camp in 1999, however, a new method to reach broader groups of people presented itself: the Internet.

Twenty years ago China’s Internet was less censored than it is today, allowing citizen activists to uncover malfeasance in society and publicize it. Liu was one of the most thoughtful advocates and analysts of this trend. He befriended, advised, and wrote about people at the center of these movements, such as Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who in 2003 helped expose the SARS epidemic, and the family of a woman killed by her boyfriend, a case that raised issues about the status of women in Chinese society. In response, the government began to moderate some policies.

Liu also saw how digital technologies could revive books and films that had long been banned. With PDFs, for example, the works of people such as the 1960s Communist Party critic Yu Luoke, who was executed in 1970, could be republished and spread widely. Liu passionately admired these early opponents of Communist Party rule and helped promote their rediscovery.

This was the heyday of one of the most significant citizen efforts to contain the party’s unchecked power, the Rights Defense Movement. Its campaigns often followed a pattern: advocates would find an injustice, publicize it, and wait for popular opinion to push the government toward reform.

These ideas were influenced by the Beijing writer Cui Weiping’s translations of works by Václav Havel and Adam Michnik. State publishing houses would not issue them, but they spread on the Internet. Many Chinese were inspired by the idea that change could happen by focusing on daily life, common sense, decentered efforts, and gradual progress. Liu’s own writings echoed these concepts. He urged Chinese “to live an honest life in dignity” (an idea from Havel) and to “start at the margins and permeate toward the center” (an idea from Michnik).

Ironically, Liu was imprisoned for involvement in what by then had become an atypical cause for him. In 2005 Chinese intellectuals began debating the need for a political treatise that would codify the kind of open and humane society that the Rights Defense Movement was promoting. By 2008 they were eager to publish their statement, named Charter 08 in homage to Charter 77, which leading Czechoslovak writers had issued in 1977. Liu had given up drafting and signing these kinds of documents, but he agreed to participate when Professor Ding from the Tiananmen Mothers told him that it needed his editing and his help in gathering signatures. Liu began to polish the text and used his prestige and credibility to recruit a stellar list of 303 public intellectuals and activists to sign it.

Liu was taking a huge risk. He was easily China’s best-known dissident and, just like after Tiananmen, would be an obvious target once the charter was released. When Liu Xia saw what he was editing, she scolded him, saying, “You will be the one arrested—you alone, no one else—and the person doing the prison visits will be me alone.” On December 8, 2008, the police dragged Liu blindfolded out of his apartment. The next day the group released the charter on Chinese websites.² Some participants were detained, but as his wife predicted, only Liu was imprisoned. He would never walk free again.

This remarkable biography prompted me to reflect on how the outside world thinks about China. Although it is widely regarded as a powerful rival to free societies around the world, people seem uninterested in exploring it. We are bombarded with policy analyses—on important topics, to be sure, but impossible to formulate intelligently without understanding the country’s deeper trends.

Consider I Have No Enemies. It has been all but shunned by the mainstream media, with substantive reviews only appearing in two publications, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the China Books Review, and there was a one-paragraph review in Foreign Affairs. Could it be that at more than 550 pages, the book is too long? Certainly it could have been trimmed. But during the cold war, it would have been inconceivable for mainstream newspapers and magazines not to cover a comparable biography of a major Soviet dissident. Michael Scammell’s 1,050-page biography of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, was widely reviewed when it was published in 1984.

The question of neglect goes beyond this one book. In researching China’s counterhistory movement, I was struck by the lack of attention paid in the English-speaking world to the Chinese equivalents of the famous Central and Eastern European filmmakers and writers. China’s greatest independent director, the Nanjing-based Hu Jie, has never had a retrospective at a major film festival, nor has the feminist scholar and prolific documentary filmmaker Ai Xiaoming. Many of China’s political authors have likewise not been translated.

There are plausible explanations for this neglect—the language barrier, the squeezing of publishers’ profit margins, the decline of book review sections—but a more worrying reason is that many people view China as deserving little more than opprobrium. Three years ago I moved back to the United States after two decades in China and was shocked to see that this was the dominant view. Since then my work in the policy field has allowed me to see up close how many political leaders and commentators treat China as a country to be contained but not engaged. Broader society reflects this rejection. Enrollment in Chinese studies has cratered in part because the country’s repressive political atmosphere does not inspire young people to study there, but also because many can’t imagine that the subject could be worth their while.

This dismissiveness is wrong on two levels. From a realpolitik point of view, to understand Xi Jinping’s China we must understand why he was chosen to lead the country. It was precisely because people like Liu were challenging the regime so forcefully that the Chinese Communist Party tacked hard toward authoritarianism in the late 2000s, leading to Xi’s appointment. In other words, Link and Wu’s biography gives us the prequel to Xi.

But it is also a mistake to see China as nothing more than a dystopian horror show. The trends that Liu championed are under siege, but they are not defeated. When he helped found the Rights Defense Movement, Liu saw the Internet as a weapon of the weak. Today the Chinese Internet is too tightly controlled to permit the activism of that era, but the broader digital revolution that Liu advocated is still alive. Technologies such as PDFs and digital cameras have unleashed a torrent of underground magazines, films, and books by citizen historians. Even today these people create works that challenge the Communist Party’s whitewashed version of the past. More importantly, they disseminate banned books and tracts written over the past eight decades, creating a collective memory of resistance to one-party rule that is new in the history of the People’s Republic.³

Xi’s years of repression have diminished but not killed this movement. It lies dormant, waiting for less oppressive times. In this sense, Liu helps us understand not just the China before Xi but a China that could still emerge after him.