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.

It begins:

Eventually, an explanation for this (the embedded video is from 2012, when Liao and company tried to bring an empty chair to Stockholm to protest Liu Xiaobo’s absence [and, incidentally, Mo Yan's presence]):

It’s good to have a reminder every now and then, especially considering the date next Wednesday, that one of China’s brightest minds remains locked behind bars for bullshit charges while his wife suffers under house arrest after committing no crime.

Illustrations and captions by Meng Huang.

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 most unbearable thing for a political prisoner is to fade into oblivion.” – Li Bifeng, a.k.a. LBH in For a Song and a Hundred Songs

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, the book that won him the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize last October, for which an English translation was made available today by New Harvest. “For once in my life, I decided to head down a heroic path, one on which I advanced with great fear, scampering at times like a rat with no place to hide.”

His secretly recorded post-Tiananmen poem, “Massacre,” composed in the style of his beloved Beat poets, was cathartic but incomplete, only serving to stoke his revolutionary fever, which burned fiercer in part because it had been ignited so late. “Art was my protest,” he writes, and so it was that he and friends began production on a movie called Requiem. It was ultimately this project that led to his arrest in February 1990 and subsequent four-year incarceration — three months locked in an investigation center, twenty-six months in detention, eighteen months in prison. The title of his book is a reference to one of the many horrific episodes he endured, when a guard punished him for singing a song by forcing him to sing one hundred more. Unable to continue, an electric baton was inserted into his anus. “I felt like a duck whose feathers were being stripped.”

There were countless similar degradations, which Liao renders in ghastly detail. (If there are any poetic embellishments, he is much too skilled a writer to have them show.) Prison is its own hierarchical and overcrowded society, divided into classes with people filling roles, marked with cruelty, madness, and, yes, sexual assault. “As Wang Er thrust back forth violently, Big Mouth yelped in pain. Blood trickled down his thighs and the back of his knees in two distinctive lines. Inmates stood around, astonished. I sat on the edge of the bed and tears welled up in my eyes for the first time in a year.” Others are disciplined with psychological torture, manual labor, beatings; two misbehaving detainees find their hands shackled together, prompting one of the book’s funnier moments: “At the end of the bathroom break, each person would bend forward with two legs parting, waiting for the other person to reach underneath to wipe his partner’s butt. As one can imagine, mishaps occurred frequently, giving rise to bitter recriminations.” And then there is the infamous “menu” of corporeal punishment, with items such as “pig elbows braised in herbs” (“enformer jabs the inmate’s back with an elbow repeatedly until it is covered with bruises”), “saw-cut pork” (“enforcer soaks a thick rope in oil, ties it around the inmate’s calf, and pulls it back and forth until it cuts the flesh like a saw”), and “mapo tofu” (“enforcer sticks a dozen peppercorns in the inmate’s anus and stops him from pulling them out”), among many others. In this environment, Liao twice tried to kill himself — his most shameful moments, he writes, because the attempts were so futile.

Yet the book abounds with tender moments of unfailing empathy, stories of colorful characters who have done and continue to do deplorable things yet are no less human because of it. “You are right. We deserve to die. But even bad people have feelings,” a heroin smuggler on death row, Dead Chang, pleads with a guard who threatens to report he and his cohorts for protecting an inmate who has tried to commit suicide. Another death row inmate, Dead Skin, describes how and why he killed his wife, punctuating his story with this line: “I had to kill her to grow up. From now until my execution, I want to live with dignity, free from humiliation.” No one, under Liao’s observant eye and bottomless pathos, is all good or all bad. He calls Wang Er, the rapist, a friend, one who looks out for him and vice versa. After the prisoners stage a comic and somewhat tender funeral for Wang Er at his request, he and Liao have this exchange:

“I don’t believe that humans can completely turn into beasts. Don’t try to prove me wrong,” I said. “You don’t have to have the whole cell turn against you and hate you before you die.”

“But I don’t want to die. I’ve only had thirty years in this life. I wanted to stay longer in this world,” Wang Er said.

“Spending your long life in a labor camp? What’s the point?”

“I can risk my life and escape, or I can settle down and serve out my sentence,” Wang Er mused. “If they put me in jail for twenty years, I would be released at the age of fifty. I can still get a wife.”

“So, you would rather suffer twenty years to gain back an ordinary life?” I asked.

Wang Er’s face reddened with anger. “I want to live.”

And there is poetry in Liao’s stark descriptions of prison. In the detention center, “I closed my eyes and the world morphed into a colossal buzzing fly that I couldn’t chase away.” Standing before a judge, “I felt like a food particle trapped in a big empty mouth.” To illustrate the stench in the air after a constipated man finally relieves himself: “We dabbed toothpaste around our nostrils.” And to portray the ennui of a caged existence: “Like in a swarm of honeybees, each day swirled in a kind of frenetic repetition, a manic and oppressive sameness.”

The utter shame of China’s crackdown on those who participated or editorialized on the Tiananmen Square Incident, the arrests of student leaders and writers — ’89ers, as groups of them in prison are called — is that powerful, original voices such as Liao Yiwu’s will never be heard in their home country. (Liao wrote For a Song and a Hundred Songs three different times, thanks to government interference.) His status as a dissident supersedes his artistry, to no one’s benefit. Even the book jacket does Liao disservice when it claims the book “will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.” That’s unlikely, considering the intended audience is probably Westerners who retain an easy image of Orwellian China. What the book is capable of doing, if it could at all be viewed outside the context of dissident lit, is elevating the reputation of Chinese writers, who are oft criticized for being stale, uninspired, and unimaginative, plus all the things said about Mo Yan.

Liao burst onto the international scene with the publication of The Corpse Walker, wherein he displayed remarkable talent for recognizing that what is sharply, heartrendingly flawed about us is often what makes us most human. His latest work is deeper and fuller. It has all the stories of China’s underclass that made The Corpse Walker a success, but they are told with a stronger narrative voice unafraid to let us know more is at stake, both for the protagonist and the writer in real life. Liao references the likes of Jack Kerouac, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marcel Proust, Milan Kundera, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an unsubtle attempt to place his own work within a literary tradition.

For a Song and a Hundred Songs documents how a poet’s soul descends into the body of a dissident. Liao spares no punches for himself. “How can you claim to be a poet? You are such a dick,” an officer yells at him while he masturbates. Later, a cellmate shoots him “a look of pity and disgust” after watching him kick an inmate begging him for mercy. “I deserved his reproachful look; years of living with the thieves, murderes, and rapists had transformed me.” Throughout this process, however, Liao tries to stay loyal to the truth. As an old poet and friend, Liu Shahe, advises him about his writing: “You must write honestly. That will be a perfect ending to your story. But remember to tell the truth. False testimony will be condemned by the future generation.”

Bitter and angry and vengeful as he must be, Liao only allows himself the briefest of denunciations of the Communist Party of China: “Sometimes I wonder, am I still in jail or am I a free person? It really doesn’t make any difference in the end because China remains a prison of the mind: propserity without liberty. Our entire country might as well be gluing medicine packets all day. This is our brave new world.”

He has earned the right to say that. The state has robbed him of four years of life, severed ties to his friends and family, even made his wife and daughter hate him — he has been with Miao Miao, born when he was in prison, less than two months in the last twenty years. Under threats of another arrest, Liao fled to Germany in 2011, and chances of him returning to China within his lifetime are slim. “I am my own shrink,” he writes. “I am a writer.” But is it enough? Art has been known to sustain lives, but what about happiness? “These words, which I have shared with you, the reader, form the most sincere and truthful expression of what I have seen and learned. Passing it on has given me a sense of dignity.”

On this, the anniversary of the events at Tiananmen in 1989, China could take a lesson from Liao Yiwu, if it at all understands or cares about the meaning of dignity.

Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and a Hundred Songs, released today, can be purchased on Amazon. He will speak on June 13 with Wenguang Huang, his translator, at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library.

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) issue, roughly coinciding with the German debut of Mo’s novel Frog. The author promised only a “very short” interview but ended up talking for two hours, according to Spiegel, and the result probably could not have been better for the venerable magazine.

Mo Yan called his writing style “un-Chinese,” though said his novels contain “hope, dignity and power.” He said that he “realized that the Cultural Revolution was the mistake of individual leaders. It had less to do with the party itself,” which could have been the sound bite of the interview if he hadn’t proceeded to rebuke Liao Yiwu’s criticism of him, then turn his focus on Ai Weiwei.

“Another one of your critics is Ai Weiwei, an artist particularly well-known in Germany,” the Spiegel interviewer says, and one can almost picture Mo snapping:

“What does he have to say about me?”

(We don’t know that he actually snapped; the published account gives no stage directions.)

And then:

SPIEGEL: He too accuses you of being to close to the state. He says you are detached from reality and cannot represent current China.

Mo: Aren’t many artists in mainland China state artists? What about those who are professors at the universities? What about those who write for state newspapers? And then, which intellectual can claim to represent China? I certainly do not claim that. Can Ai Weiwei? Those who can really represent China are digging dirt and paving roads with their bare hands.

Other highlights follow. Let’s start with this excerpt, out of which Der Spiegel pulled three words — “I am guilty” — for its headline:

SPIEGEL: Unspeakable things happen in many of your novels. In “The Garlic Ballads,” for example, a pregnant woman, already in labor, hangs herself. Still, “Frog” seems to be your sternest book. Is that why it took so long to write?

Mo: I carried the idea for this book with me for a long time but then wrote it relatively quickly. You are right, I felt heavy when I penned the novel. I see it as a work of self-criticism.

SPIEGEL: In what sense? You carry no personal responsibility for the violence and the forced abortions described in your book.

Mo: China has gone through such tremendous change over the past decades that most of us consider ourselves victims. Few people ask themselves, though: ‘Have I also hurt others?’ “Frog” deals with this question, with this possibility. I, for example, may have been only 11 years old in my elementary school days, but I joined the red guards and took part in the public criticism of my teacher. I was jealous of the achievements, the talents of other people, of their luck. Later, I even asked my wife to have an abortion for the sake of my own future. I am guilty.

Mo talks briefly about his writing…

SPIEGEL: Your books paint a bleak picture of modern China. There seems to be no progress. Neither your figures, nor society, nor the country as such seems to be heading anywhere.

Mo: I may be rather un-Chinese in this respect. Most Chinese stories and dramas have a happy ending. Most of my novels end tragically. But there is still hope, dignity and power.

…before dropping this semi-bombshell about the Cultural Revolution:

SPIEGEL: How do you yourself think about this? After all, you were forced to interrupt your education during the Cultural Revolution. And yet, you are still a member of the party.

Mo: The Communist Party of China has well over 80 million members, and I am one of them. I joined the party in 1979 when I was in the army. I realized that the Cultural Revolution was the mistake of individual leaders. It had less to do with the party itself.

The Cultural Revolution is referenced again as he addresses the media pressure that surrounded his Nobel win in the context of freedom of speech and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo:

SPIEGEL: But there are people in this country who are harassed, even arrested for what they write. Do you not feel an obligation to use your award, fame and reputation to speak out on behalf of these colleagues of yours?

Mo: I openly expressed the hope that Liu Xiaobo should regain his freedom as soon as possible. But again, I was immediately criticized and forced to speak out again and again on the same issue.

SPIEGEL: Liu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. And indeed, repeated statements of support would make a greater impression than a single comment.

Mo: I am reminded of the rituals of repetition in the Cultural Revolution. If I decide to speak, then nobody will stop me. If I decide not to speak, then not even a knife at my neck will make me speak.

He also turned his attention to Chinese exile Liao Yiwu, one of his most vocal critics. (Liao organized a naked-run protest outside the Nobel Banquet Hall in Stockholm the night that Mo received his prize.)

SPIEGEL: When Chinese writer Liao Yiwu was awarded with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade last year, he criticized you in SPIEGEL as a “state writer” and said you don’t keep enough distance to the government.

Mo: I have read his statement and I have read the speech he gave at the award ceremony. In the speech, he called for the split of the Chinese state. I can absolutely not agree to this position. I think that the people of Sichuan (the province where Liao is from) would not agree to cut their province out of China. I am sure Liao’s parents could never agree to this position. And I can not even imagine that he himself can, in the depth of his heart, agree to what he said there. I know he envies me for this award and I understand this. But his criticism is unjustified.

Mo clarifies that by “criticism” he’s referring to Liao’s accusation that Mo praised Bo Xilai in a poem.

Mo: … in a poem. Actually, the opposite is true. I was sarcastic, I wrote a satire. Let me jot it down again for you.

(Mo Yan takes a notebook and writes)

Sing-red-strike-black roars mightily,
The nation turns its head to Chongqing.
While a white spider weaves a real net that catches bugs,
A black horse with loose bowel movement is not an angry youth.
As a writer one should not be afraid of either a left or right party,
As an official one should hold dear one’s good name before and after his death.
A gentleman, a bedrock in turbulent waters, that you are,
The splendid cliffs shine on Jialing River like fire.

And he addresses the infamous book, which features his writing, that celebrates Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an speech:

Mo: Honestly, it was a commercial project. The editor of a publishing house, an old friend of mine, came up with the idea. He had convinced around 100 writers before and when we attended a conference together, he walked around with a book and a pen and asked me, too, to hand-copy a paragraph of Mao’s speech. I asked “What should I write?” He said: “I chose this paragraph for you.” I was vain enough to take the opportunity to show off with my calligraphy.

There’s more over at Der Spiegel’s website. Go give the interview a read.

Nobel Laureate Mo Yan: ‘I Am Guilty’ (Der Spiegel)

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 this year’s German Peace Prize. He’s the one wearing a black overcoat who ushers the streaker, Meng Huang, over the cordon, and then tells him (clearly audible in the video) to “run.”

Apparently Liao, who lives in Berlin in exile, travelled to Stockholm on Monday with Meng, an artist, according to Scandinavia Today. Sven-Erik Olsson, a spokesperson for the Swedish head police, said Meng was rowdy and drunk, but those charges have since been disputed.

SVT News reports that a photographer on site, Mikael Eriksson, said he smelled absolutely no alcohol on Liao when they hugged before the streaking happened, and that “they both behaved calmly and in good faith.”

Apparently Liao and Meng were at the ceremony to see whether Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Mo Yan would present an empty chair for jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. The empty chair was first placed for Liu at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony in Oslo, Norway to symbolize his absence because he was serving an 11-year prison sentence in China.

When no chair was brought out, Liao and Meng sprung into action.

Liao, who spent four years in a Chinese labor camp himself, has been one of the most vocal critics of Mo winning the Nobel. Asked if he’s met Mo, he replied:

Yes, he once visited Chengdu and we met there. After that there were a number of opportunities for us to meet but he always avoided me. He knows that he represents a superficial China, one that can seem very glossy. Whereas I stand for a grassroots China, its dregs, its dirt.

As quoted in Sweden’s major daily, Dagens Nyheter, he called Mo’s award “the Nobel prize’s biggest dishonor in a hundred years.” And as paraphrased by the BBC, Liao said he was “shocked that Mo Yan won, because he is too closely associated with the establishment.”

He’s now taken things into his own hands. The news, for whatever reason, has yet to spread to English-speaking media. We’ll see if that changes soon.

UPDATE, 4:09 pm: A translation of that SVT (Swedish state television) story comes via one of our readers:

There were absolutely no signs of intoxication, says SVT Culture News photographer Mikael Eriksson.

The background story to the nude action, which attracted a lot of attention last night, involved Liao Yiwu, Meng Huang and an additional regime critic who had planned a protest action against Mo Yan being awarded the Nobel prize.

The plan was to bring a chair for Mo Yan to give to the jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. It would symbolise the empty chair meant for Xiaobo when he could not attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2010, due to him being in jail.

But since the chair never arrived, the artist trio decided to perform a different action. In central Stockholm, Huang got undressed and jumped the fence, dashing toward the concert hall, cheered on by Liao Yiwu (the man in the black coat in the video).

UPDATE, 3:43 pm: Please see this update.

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.

Via SVT via Google Translate:

The photographer captured one of the men springandes naked on the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the ceremony takes place. The man was quickly disposed of by the police.

- The men were drunk and has been hospitalized for sobering up. They showed up with rowdy and drunk, says Sven-Erik Olsson, press spokesman at police länskommunikationscentral.

Do we know why they showed up like that?
- No, it has not revealed anything. They tried to ask them before putting them in sobering. We’ll see if they can say something sensible when sober.

We’re not holding our breath on that last part.

UPDATE, 2:55 pm: Thanks to the top commenter, who points out that a second SVT article claims the streaker, Meng Huang, was “completely sober when he was arrested.” Also, Liao Yiwu was there: he’s the man in the black overcoat who ushers Meng over the first cordon. You can clearly hear Liao (or someone) telling Meng in Chinese, “Run.

UPDATE, 1:47 pm: Youku censors figured it out; the video has been deleted. We’ll try uploading to some other places. 4:20 pm: It’s on 56.com, embedded above. Let’s see how long it lasts.

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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