To Serve People: Global Times Harasses Torture Victim For Winning The German Peace Prize, That Prick

A weekly column in which Chinese media is taken to the stocks.

By TAR Nation

Liao Yiwu won the 2012 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, causing Global Times columnist Shan Renping to act like a baby, a baby in sore need of being bashed against a tree.

The media went balls-to-the wall, calling Liao insane for, perhaps overzealously, shouting at his acceptance speech, saying China was an “ever-expanding garbage dump” and “an inhumane empire with bloody hands” (note: true, but who hasn’t been to a bachelor party like that). At the end, he shouted “the empire must break apart” six times.

What did China’s propaganda rags do? Raise your hand if you know the answer…

That’s right class: they called Liao Yiwu a “bigot,” accused him of being insane, affronted the whole of Germany, and bragged about the Nobel Prize win with the righteous approach of a masturbating hyena.

Let’s start with Shan Renping’s words:

Some Chinese dissidents that the West chooses to support are mediocre in ethics and wisdom. They catch eyes through political radicalism, since they are unable to deal with the normal competition within Chinese society.

“Unable to deal with the normal competition in Chinese society”? Okay Renping, let’s talk a little about Liao Yiwu’s “normal competition.” You see, whether or not he’s a good writer (note: he definitely fucking is. Get Corpse Walker on Kindle here), Liao Yiwu’s life is a perfect example of how you can’t disagree with the party and get a fair shake. Get ready for a big sexy paragraph.

Yiwu barely survived Mao’s Great Famine, suffering from an array of ailments, not to mention the lack of, ya know, food. His father was denounced as a counterrevolutionary during the Cultural Revolution (Mao’s great idea to set human history on fire), so his parents divorced to keep the kids safe. But, lo and behold, his mom was caught using the black market (i.e. trying to sell some cloth to get food for her kids). As a result she was “paraded, along with other criminals, on the stage of the Sichuan Opera House in front of thousands of people.” I can’t imagine why this guy held a grudge. After high school, he worked as a truck driver and cook, traveling the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and becoming a well-known poet in the process. His work in underground magazines (and everyone else’s for that matter) were called “spiritual pollution” by the Party authorities. After publishing “The Yellow City” and “Idol,” his home was searched, and he was repeatedly interrogated. The magazines he published in were subsequently closed and punished. Afterwards he was arrested, along with six friends and his pregnant wife, and Liao was given four years imprisonment in 1990. Under torture in the prison system, including torture with electric batons, being forced to stand in the sun for hours and having his hands tied behind his back for 23 straight days, he started to go mad (and grow large gross abscesses in his armpits). The other prisoners gave him the nickname “the big lunatic,” because prisoners aren’t known for their creativity (which is surprising as being creative in China gets you locked up). The torture got so bad that he tried to kill himself by bashing his head against the wall. He got out in 1994 due to protests from the West, only to find that, in his absence, his wife had absconded with his child. He spent four years largely destitute until he published The Fall of the Holy Temple, which ended with the publisher being forbidden from publishing anything for a year (on the orders of a vice-premier). Destitute again, he worked odd jobs and published Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society . It was, in the words of the Asia Literary Review, “sanitized” for publication, becoming a massive hit in China. After all of his tortures, loss and imprisonment, he stayed in China – Chengdu – under police surveillance with his wife until 2010 when he wrote to Angela Merkel herself to get permission to leave the country, which was granted. He was denied exit again to the US prior to the release of an English translation of his book. At the PEN Festival, Salaman Rushdie left an empty chair on the stage for him, writing to Liao and saying, “Quite simply, we miss you.” The Communist Party forced him to sign a declaration that he would not publish any “illegal books” abroad. He escaped by land into Vietnam, then Warsaw, then Berlin. Why? In his own words, “Personal freedom and freedom to write.”

That’s normal competition, is it? Shan Renping pretty much just went to the People’s Daily compound and opened his mouth so that they could make sure that it did, indeed, smell like CCP cock. Adding up all of the political persecution, imprisonment, torture, marginalization and general fucked-upness of life for the curious in an intellectual graveyard, it doesn’t really sound fair to me. As I have none, I can only guess that being someone with talent in China carries with it consequences. As Liao Yiwu put it, “flee, sit in prison or shut up.”

So, let’s see how this disgusting piece of detritus, Shan Renping, goes on to insult Yiwu from his ivory tower at GT (ivory made from dissident bones).

The speech makes some people doubt his judgment and the ability to control his own emotions. It’s surprising that Germany picks such a bigoted person as the award winner.

The “control his own emotions” jibe is perhaps better put in the Global Times “Voices” where they quote Kong Qingdong, professor at the Chinese Department of Peking University, when he says, “People have the freedom to be schizophrenic,” which, apart from being impertinent, is untrue. Laio Yiwu spent four years in prison, decades under surveillance and lives in exile because of his “schizophrenia.”

Moving on:

Liao’s performance will make the Chinese look down upon Germany’s wisdom and breadth of thought in awarding the prize to Liao.

Goodness me? The “Chinese” looking down on a country in the West? Shock! Horror! Chaos! Dogs and cats living together! Sarcasm! There you go, blame an entire country for a prize, just like the Nobel. If I’m ever in ill-repute with the Communist authorities, the New Haven 4th Grade School Science Fair will surely be a “Westerner-loving charade” in the eyes of the Chinese propaganda rags.

But China’s reform and opening-up is a process of building up social justice and increasing individual rights and dignity. Those who cannot feel the momentum are either closing themselves off or fail to separate their personal experience from the zeitgeist.

It doesn’t count as increasing “rights and dignity” if you’re the one who took them away in the first place, not to mention the daily savaging “rights and dignity” take in the propaganda rags. If I beat a guy up, steal his car, drive it into a telephone pole and poop in his back seat before returning the car, I did not “increase” his car ownership. “Zeitgeist,” though, is a good word. I like that word. Where does that come from again?

Germans probably think this award could exert some influence on China. But Chinese are used to Westerners using dissidents.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Communist Party’s official line on China’s dissidents, they think Western countries collect them like baseball cards to use against “China.” Shan Renping has done this so often, he has a little box of self-made dissident cards under his bed that he plans to trade for things like fresh-smelling soaps and nozzles — you know, douche-related materials. Also, Liao Yiwu doesn’t consider himself a refugee of any sort. When asked if he was a refugee by New Yorker reporter Philip Gourvitch, Liao said, “I’m excited about political developments in China, and looking forward to a Jasmine Revolution. I am quite sure that Hu Jintao may be a refugee some day, but not Liao Yiwu.”

Chinese dissidents who have been abroad should have the responsibility to overcome hatred… Public has expected that these dissidents can have broader horizons and take a more rational and objective attitude to China after they leave the country. However, their minds have become more and more narrow.

Shan Renping’s mind is so narrow you could stab someone with it, preferably him. Dissidents aren’t more hateful when they leave, they’re just allowed to say stuff and not get thrown in prison. No one wants to be hateful when speaking out, or, as Liao Yiwu said in the New York Review of Books, “My writing is illegal… I don’t know. I’m just writing something and now have broken their law. I don’t want to break their laws. I am not interested in them and wish they weren’t interested in me.”

Cards on the table, Liao Yiwu probably is not stable. He attempted suicide. When his magazine poems were banned, he belted them out in audio recordings in chants as if in religious fervor. He is a bit shouty (big lunatic).

Perhaps he’s completely nuts. Luckily, those are the kind of writers everybody likes. JD Salinger was so nuts he chose to be a recluse in New Hampshire of all places, Philip K. Dick thought “pink beams” of light were giving him messages, Hunter S. Thompson was so crazy that he convinced the world it was a choice, Poe fucked the shit out of his underaged cousin/wife and had hallucinations, Kurt Vonnegut famously took up smoking as a “classy” way to commit suicide, and Hemingway ate two barrels for breakfast one day, probably because he thought he was just that badass.

So, maybe being a bit loud about an award isn’t all that terrible.

Still, on behalf of the free world, thanks for another inspiring genius, China. We’re happy to have them.

Also this week, Japan can eat a dick, South Korea can eat a dick, Japan can eat a dick, America can eat a dick, Japan can eat a dick again, the ASEAN (also America) can eat a dick, America can eat a dick, Japan can eat yet another dick, America can eat another dick, Japan and South Korea can eat a dick, and (“evil”) America and Japan can eat a dick. I wonder why China is a diplomatic pariah. For a really, really good laugh, a laugh that makes you want to throw up and kill yourself, check out, “Poll: Chinese public satisfied with selection of officials.”

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