A group of Chinese dissidents and exiles ran naked on a chilly night outside the Stockholm Concert Hall on Tuesday, December 10, and published a declaration undersigned by Liao Yiwu (pictured above), Bei Ling, Wang Yiliang, Meng Huang, and Wang Juntao. As translated by China Change, the declaration begins:

We have come to Sweden to run in the nude, because it was here where Mo Yan, a defender of censorship and a senior Communist cadre, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature last year.

With our act, we want to remind this forgetful world that there is a staunch denouncer of censorship, a witness of the Tian’anmen Massacre in 1989, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison for his writings and views, and he is now behind bars in China. His name is Liu Xiaobo.

With our act, we want to remind this forgetful world an outstanding artist named Liu Xia. She has no particular interest in politics, but just because she is the wife of Liu Xiaobo, she has been placed under house arrest since her husband was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October, 2010.

This is not the first time Liao Yiwu, author of Corpse Walker and the prison memoir For a Song and a Hundred Songs (which I reviewed earlier this year), has streaked in Stockholm. He did it last year with artist Meng Huang while Mo Yan was inside the concert hall attending a Nobel Prize ceremony. Mo’s decision to not present an empty chair in honor of Liu Xiaobo set Liao off.

From “Our Naked Declaration” again:

In a world all too surreal, Liu Xia cried out, “Both Mo Yan and Liu Xiaobo are Nobel Laureates, why are they treated so differently?”

Meanwhile, Chinese netizens have been talking about Liu Xiaobo in the context of Nelson Mandela, and the authorities would like them to stop doing that please. Via Reuters:

An influential Chinese paper lashed out on Wednesday at comparisons between Nelson Mandela and China’s jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, saying Liu was a common criminal not worthy of any praise.

Many Chinese internet users have noted the apparent contradiction of Beijing lauding Mandela’s legacy at the same time that it continues a harsh crackdown on its own human rights activists.

For more, see China Digital Times.

Chinese Author, Artist, and Dissident Streaking in Stockholm, Sweden (China Change)

The New York Times’s Austin Ramzy has a story you should read about Liu Xia, painter/poet/artist and wife of (as routinely noted) jailed Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. The entire thing is worth your time, but we’d like to highlight a letter Liu Xia, who remains under house arrest in Beijing, wrote to an American friend in July. In a word, it’s heartbreaking.

Liu compliments her friend (identity withheld) on the friend’s “epistolary novel”: “When I find books that I love, I feel the author is writing for me alone, and feel a private joy.” Reading her letter, it’s difficult not to feel empathy, specifically that obverse analog of joy — sorrow. How many lonely minutes and hours is Liu neither reading nor writing, but engaged in the tougher undertaking of simply being?

Liu’s missive is a form of epistolary in itself, and includes a poem she wrote in 2011, plus anecdotes from previous trips to the US. “I’ll find a 1996 photo of me — maybe you Americans really can’t tell the age of Oriental people.” There is no romanticizing of the dissident’s life, or even the cause, which presses on in spurts and sputters. “I chose this life myself,” Liu writes, “so need to see it through to the end.” Neither is there self-pity or wallowing; instead, only a promise that the next correspondence will be “only about happy thing.”

The letter, translated by Perry Link, is reproduced below from Ramzy’s NYT Sinosphere post.

Dear XXX,

I’ve read your “epistolary novel.” If I imagine myself an outside reader, I can only wonder how or through what special power you manage to keep on writing when the protagonist for whom you are pleading is absent. It moves me.

I have always loved reading, and do much of it. Most of the books in our home are ones I personally purchased and brought here, and most of the hours in my life are spent in reading them. I describe myself as having grown up “feeding on books.” My reading has no specific goal; for me it’s rather like breathing — I have to do it in order to live. When I find books that I love, I feel the author is writing for me alone, and feel a private joy.

In the 1980s I, too, wrote fiction and film scripts. I have faith that there will come a day when that absent person writes another part of his (her) story.

Please tell XXX that the book I am currently “feeding on” is A History of the Gulag. Living in almost total isolation, I find the road before me populated by countless books. I hide among the books and meander in the world.

You can imagine how terrified I felt to face the world alone after they came to take Xiaobo away. I have had no choice but to accept that reality. I have been extremely tired.

Let me offer you one of my poems. Hah! This will be a challenge for your translator!

“Fragment 8”

The light of death
That often appears, as I gaze at my reading,
Feels warm.
I feel sad that I must leave.
I want to go to a place that has light.

That tenacity, mine for years,
Has turned to dust.
A tree
Can be felled by a bolt of lightning
And think nothing.

The future, for me,
Is a shut window.
The night within has no end
And the horrid dreams do not fade.

I want to go to a place that has light.

(Written in 2011)

“Eleven years” in duplicate now weigh on me, but I do not feel as depressed as when I wrote “Fragment 8.” This is because all of you have helped me to open the window and let the sun rise. I know that all of this is not the end — even if justice is too long in coming.

I chose this life myself, so need to see it through to the end.

In 1996, at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., I bought a postcard that showed a pile of shoes of Jewish people. Since then, innumerable Jewish people have been standing in my memory. I think that some day we, too, will have a memorial building to remember those people who are slipping out of the memories of Chinese today. We will. For sure.

I’ll tell you a funny story. In 1996 when I was in Boston a friend invited me to go out drinking. We went from bar to bar, but they always asked to see my passport for proof that I was of drinking age. I was 35 then, but had left my passport in New York. My hair was long then, so I bundled it up and then let it go, repeatedly, hoping this would make me look old enough to drink. Finally, around midnight, we did get a drink at an outdoor bar. I’ll find a 1996 photo of me — maybe you Americans really can’t tell the age of Oriental people. The memory makes me want to chuckle. (A photo here)

Next time, I’ll write only about happy things.

XXXXXXXXX

Liu Xia

July 26, 2013

Isolation Under House Arrest for Wife of Imprisoned Nobel Laureate (Sinosphere)

This post originally appeared on Kotaku.

An entrepreneur in Dallas got in touch with me last month saying he had a product called Political Prisoners of China Playing Cards, asking if I’d like to review them. Chinese political prisoners. Playing cards. Dallas. I live in Beijing. It made no sense. How could I say no?

To field test, I got in touch with a dissident. We met for lunch with a pair of mutual friends at the popular hang-out Fodder Factory in Caochangdi art district.

You might not recognize the name Wang Zhongxia, but authorities do. As Wang tells it, he was first made aware of China’s internal security apparatus when agents interrogated him in 2007 for participating in Chinese democracy online forums while he was a student at People’s University of China. He signed Liu Xiaobo’s Charter 08 in December 2008, again attracting unwelcome attention, and three months later police issued a warrant to search his house. They seized his laptop, a flash drive, a book by Hu Ping, and T-shirts featuring images of Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia (Wang made them; here he is modeling one).

That year, the 20th anniversary of the June Fourth Incident, Wang was placed under house arrest from May 27 to June 8. He was detained for 23 days in 2010 after Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize, and again in 2011, possibly to keep him from commemorating Liu’s birthday (Wang said authorities never told him). “Being a political prisoner is something that stays with you for whole life,” he said. He admitted that he was scared after his initial encounter with the Public Security Bureau, but his desire to speak out simply overpowered his fears.

The cards themselves arrived in a standard card-sized box in plastic shrink wrap, obviously professionally made and — it became clear after a conversation with creator Grant Shepard — carefully conceived.

“This was really a labor of love,” Shepard said, describing how he’d return from work at 5ish, put the kids to bed, then coordinate with two designers in Indonesia from 9 pm to 2 am. There was lots of trial and error. There were interviews with human rights experts, facilitated by Rick Halperin of Southern Methodist University and Jennifer Holmes of University of Texas at Dallas (who’s a board member on the Bill of Rights Defense Committee). A pool of 100 Chinese dissidents was whittled to 40, and finally to 13, one for each card value from 2 to King, with a special image for the Ace of Spades.

“I feel like if any region needs to allow its citizens to freely collaborate and communicate, it’s China. If it does, they’re going to take advantage of the biggest goldmine of talent that the world has ever seen,” said Shepard, who’s always been fascinated by China. He has yet to visit but would like to soon. “I’d like to get these [cards] to China someday, but that is probably not a realistic short-term goal. The goal is to make one ponder, inspect, and want to learn more.”

Possessing one of these decks here, of course, will not get you detained. Believe it or not, police have better things to do. But it’s equally clear that you’d be foolish to try selling them alongside cigarettes on, say, the streets. Peering off the laminated cards are the likes of Tan Zuoren, who petitioned the government following the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake; Shi Tao, who disclosed state secrets and was ratted out by Yahoo; and lesser-known individuals including 1989 Tiananmen demonstrators, minority leaders, religious dissidents, writers and bloggers. All the dissidents are peaceful, Shepard noted. The Ace of Spades is Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel laureate who is five years into an 11-year sentence for subversion.

Now the real question for the potential customer: how do the cards play?

Our game of choice was the Chinese classic Zhengshangyou (争上游), or Big Two. I shuffled and we did the Chinese thing of taking turns grabbing cards off the top. Almost immediately, Wang noticed that the Queen — land rights activist Ni Yulan — had actually been released from prison in early October. Whistleblower Shi Tao — the 10 — is also out, released in August.

Wang puzzled over the 2-card, Zhiwen Wang — “This guy seems important but I don’t know him,” he said. (He later googled; Zhiwen Wang is a Falun Gong practitioner.) The 2 happens to be the highest value in Big Two; knowing my opponent had one certainly helped my position. So did card-playing savvy: despite a weak hand, I finished second, just ahead of Wang.

The cards were… good. They played like any normal deck. I dealt the second game –snatching is slow — and the cards slid just the right distance (whatever that distance might be). To nitpick a little, in several versions of Big Two, the relative size of the jokers matter, i.e. red or black, and in the political prisoners deck, both jokers are red. A shrewd player should recognize Xi Jinping as “bigger” than Hu Jintao — current vs. former president, for those not caught up on Chinese politics — but outfitting Hu with a black vest would’ve cleared up any confusion.

“I think it’s a good way for people to know prisoners in China,” Wang said. “But actually, this set only includes 13 people — that’s too few. Fifty or 40 would be okay. With only 13, the choices can be questioned.”

And indeed, he began questioning. “Recently the leadership has arrested too many people,” he said, naming Xu Zhiyong, detained in July for gathering “crowds to disrupt public order,” andWang Gongquan, a member of the New Citizens Movement. Increased censorship over the past three months, especially in social media, has magnified the chilling effect on exchange, too. Of course, if Wang is any indication, there’ll be no shortage of expression. In other words, Shepard might not lack candidates to fill out an entire deck in the future.

Wang did slightly better in our second game. He beat me, sliding Zhiwen Wang across the table with his final play.

~

What: Playing cards, laminated, professsional and complete (reciprocal images so you never have to turn the cards in your hands, one-eyed jacks, suicide kings, etc.). Original artwork from three designers.

Cost: $7 (limited time only)

You’ll want to buy if… You want to impress friends or a particular someone with some “real talk” about China over beer, tequila shots, and vodka cocktails while playing Kings Cup.

You’ll not want to buy if… You’ve ever gotten on the wrong side of the China’s Public Security Bureau, are paranoid about real or perceived contraband, or work in a Chinese diplomatic setting. Also, if you hold any particular grudge against these people…

Liu Xiaobo
Zhiwen Wang
Kong Youping
Gulmira Imin
Xi Chen
Zhu Yufu
Alimujiang Yimiti
Chen Wei
Hada
Shi Tao
Tan Zuoren
Ni Yulan
Gao Zhisheng

…you may not be completely happy with this product.

Political Prisoners of China Playing Cards can be purchased here. World Freedom Products founder Grant Shepard encourages interested retailers to contact him directly at sales@worldfreedomproducts.com.

Wu’er Kaixi, who fled China following the 1989 student-led protests at Tiananmen, reportedly flew into Hong Kong this morning via Taiwan and is pleading with authorities to extradite him to face trial on the mainland.

As the 45-year-old posted to his website today:

I hereby make an appeal to the Hong Kong SAR and to the world.

I am willing to turn myself in to the Chinese authorities. I urge the SAR government, based on Chinese law, and by my own agreement, to exercise its judicial power and extradite me to the Chinese authorities.

This is not the first time Wu’er Kaixi — a Taiwanese citizen — has tried to enter the PRC. In 2004 he was permitted to enter Hong Kong, where he said, “I have to have that hope — that one day we will come home (that I’ll be allowed to enter China).”

As pointed out on the Facebook page of journalist Paul Mooney (who’s had some difficulty of his own getting into the PRC):

In June 2009, he attempted to surrender himself via Macau; in June 2010, he attempted to break into the Chinese embassy in Tokyo; and in May 2012, he attempted to do the same in Washington.

In Wu’er Kaixi’s post, he noted that he has been unable to see his parents or other family for the 24 years since his exile.

My parents are old and in ill health. The Chinese government refuses to issue passports for them to travel aboard and visit me. My parents have been told clearly that the reason they will not be issued passports is that their son is a dissident. I would like to ask the Chinese government, is this behavior in keeping with the international treaties it has signed; is it true to the spirit of Chinese traditional values; is it in accordance with PRC law?

I believe the answer to those questions is, no, and that is why I feel I have no alternative but to turn myself in. I miss my parents and my family, and I hope to be able to be reunited with them while they are still alive, even if the reunion would have to take place behind a glass wall.

The open letter is addressed to Hong Kong citizens, and concludes, “I hope my efforts to return home are finally a success on this occasion. If so, let me take this last opportunity to take a deep bow to Hong Kong, and express my deepest gratitude and admiration.”

Updates as they become available.

UPDATE, 1:42 pm: Wu’er Kaixi is traveling with Albert Ho, “chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party from 2006 to 2012, and is currently a solicitor, member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, and secretary general of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China.” That quote and the below picture is from this Wu’er Kaixi Tumblr (h/t Paul Mooney).

UPDATE, 11/26, 2:51 pm: Wu’er Kaixi did not succeed. Via AP:

The second most-wanted student leader from the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests was turned back from Hong Kong on Monday in his latest attempt to surrender to Chinese authorities and return home.

It was the fourth such attempt by Wu’er Kaixi, who said his lack of success so far was the result of “absurd” actions by the Chinese government. Wu’er, who has lived in exile for more than two decades, is stuck in a situation in which he’s both wanted for arrest and, like many other dissidents who have fled, prevented from returning to China.