Political Elegy: Liu Xiaobo's reflections from prison.
in China, past and present, the government has never treated its citizens as human beings, to the extent that the Chinese people must experience the servitude of Wang Shuo’s Please Don’t Call Me Human to know how to live. And China’s so-called intelligentsia is, for the most part, the dictator’s conspirator and accomplice. Some have called me conceited, and yet I cannot deny the awe and humility I feel deep within my soul. In the presence of Christ’s sacrifice, in the presence of Kafka’s desperation, in the presence of the true backbone of Lu Xun’s courage to embrace the corpses of dissenters with bitter tears, in the presence of Kant’s wisdom, in the presence of Daoist metaphysician Jin Yuelin’s pure love for Lin Huiyin, I’m always the smallest of humans.
For too long now we’ve leaned upon the blade of the bayonet’s lies, shamelessness, selfishness, weaknesses, so that we’ve wholly lost both memory and time – life numbed, unceasing and interminable, from zero begins to zero it ends: what qualifications can we claim for our mighty nation? None with the least merit. And what remains for us? Across this land even the deserts are at fault. The deserts with their vast nothingness and desolation – is this what’s left for us? I, too, eat steamed human-blood buns: at the most I form decorative ornaments against an anti-humanist system – caught then released, released then caught – and do not know when this game will ever end, nor know if I’ve actually done anything for the departed souls, to be able to let myself recollect with a clear heart and conscience.
For too long now we’ve leaned upon the blade of the bayonet’s lies, shamelessness, selfishness, weaknesses, so that we’ve wholly lost both memory and time – life numbed, unceasing and interminable, from zero begins to zero it ends: what qualifications can we claim for our mighty nation? None with the least merit. And what remains for us? Across this land even the deserts are at fault. The deserts with their vast nothingness and desolation – is this what’s left for us? I, too, eat steamed human-blood buns: at the most I form decorative ornaments against an anti-humanist system – caught then released, released then caught – and do not know when this game will ever end, nor know if I’ve actually done anything for the departed souls, to be able to let myself recollect with a clear heart and conscience.
I long to use resistance and imprisonment as atonement, to try to realize my idealistic convictions with integrity, but this creates deep, painful wounds for my family. In truth, imprisonment for me, for activists working against an authoritarian system, is nothing to flaunt – it’s a necessary honor living at the mercy of an inhuman regime, where there’s little choice for the individual but resistance. Inasmuch as resistance is a choice, imprisonment is simply a part of this choice: the inevitable vocation of traitors of a totalitarian state, like a peasant must take to the fields, or as a student must read books. Inasmuch as resistance is a choice to descend into hell, one mustn’t complain about the darkness; as far as I think there’s an indestructible wall up ahead, I still must exert the strength to smash into it – and the wound in my head that flows with blood is self-inflicted. One cannot resent anyone, cannot blame anyone, but must bear the wound alone. Who was it who let you deliberately fly like a moth into the flame, rather than circle around?
As I toasted the elders of the autocracy, and my unwavering stance – with a righteousness inspiring reverence – won me the brave epithet of “democracy activist” with an awareness that this was a moment of consummate achievement and virtue – precisely then the slow inner torment of my close, extended family began. Each day I’m rarely concerned with the actual people who live around me, but am usually only concerned with sublime abstractions: justice, human rights, freedom. I use my family for my day’s security as I gaze with troubled heart and trembling flesh upon the everyday failings of the world. During a three-year prison sentence, my wife made thirty-eight trips from Beijing to Dalian to see me, and eighteen of these trips she couldn’t even bear to actually face me and quickly dropped some things off and hurried back alone. Trapped in an icy loneliness, unable to preserve the slightest amount of privacy while being followed and spied on, she tirelessly waited and tirelessly struggled, with a hair-turning-white-overnight perseverance. I’m punished by the dictatorship in the form of a prison; I punish my family by creating a formless prison around their hearts.
This is a particular kind of totalitarian cruelty where the bloodshed remains unseen – and in China it is especially cruel and severe...
