On December 10, 2013, Chinese dissidents Liao Yiwu, Bei Ling, Wang Yiliang, Meng Huang, and Wang Juntao streaked outside Stockholm Concert Hall during Nobel ceremonies to protest the continued incarceration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. Yesterday, an animated video was released recounting that night and the events that led up to it.
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:
Liao Yiwu was a fledging poet without a formal education, a hot-tempered philanderer prone to fights, a dreamer who actively despised politics -- until the early hours of June 4, 1989, when, from the living room of his home in the river town of Fuling, he listened with Canadian Michael Day to shortwave radio reports of Chinese troops opening fire on students around Tiananmen Square. "The bloody crackdown in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life," he writes in his prison memoir For a Song and a Hundred Songs...
Since accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature on December 10, the controversial Mo Yan has turned down every formal interview request from every publication in the world. But he finally broke his silence last week, granting a sit-down with Germany’s Der Spiegel, one of Europe’s largest news weeklies. The article was published in this week’s (February 25)... Read more »
That last video we just put up of a man streaking outside the Nobel Banquet Hall in Stockholm wasn’t just some prankster after a laugh, or a drunk man who’d lost his wits. It was part of a coordinated protest featuring none other than Liao Yiwu, author of The Corpse Walker and the recipient of... Read more »
In Stockholm on Monday, on the night of the Nobel banquet, a man dashed butt-naked through the cold and snow, his ebullient battle cry resonating across the dark Swedish night. Wherefore?
According to SVT News (via Notes on the Mosquito, a website about the poetry of Xi Chuan), the streaker was protesting Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. (We don't know Swedish, but we see very clearly after putting the article through Google Translate that Mo Yan is involved.) He was also very drunk, which most people have to be to denude in subfreezing temperatures.
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.
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