Today was a good day in Beijing, weather-wise, if not a bit on the hot side, and humid. There were blue skies and white clouds. Moments after Liu Xiaobo’s death, this was the scene:

Liu Xiaobo will be remembered by the Chinese people — someday, even if it’s not today or in the near future — as a man of immense dignity and unyielding grace, whose unshakeable conscience caused him much suffering, but in the end elevated all those who understood what he stood for and why he persisted. He will be celebrated.

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 wife of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo was seen in public for the first time in more than two and a half years today as she attended the trial of her brother, 43-year-old Liu Hui, who has been charged with fraud.

According to Tania Branigan of the Guardian:

Liu Xia shouted: “I’m not free – tell everybody I’m not free,” as she glimpsed the crowd outside the courthouse in Huairou, a diplomat said.

She added: “I love you – I miss you,” before she was escorted away.

Liu Xia was interviewed in December by AP reporters, and a few weeks later met with activists who pushed past security guards.

Liu has been under house arrest since October 2010, when her husband won the Nobel Peace Prize. Because it’s difficult to further punish Liu Xiaobo, already serving an 11-year prison sentence, authorities are applying pressure to his family. Reports AP: “Lawyers and family members said the charges against her brother, Liu Hui, appear to be in retaliation for those [December] visits. The charges relate to a real estate deal in which prosecutors said Liu and a partner pocketed 3 million yuan ($500,000) that was claimed by another party to the transaction.”

Last month, another attempt to approach Liu Xia’s apartment, by two Hong Kong journalists, was not as successful.

Liu Xia appears in public (The Guardian) (Image via Lagarde Stephane)

On Saturday, South China Morning Post reported that two Hong Kong journalists and activist Yang Kuang were beaten on Thursday outside the home of Liu Xia, the wife of Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo.

We last heard from Liu Xia, who is under house arrest, when activists pushed past security guards and filmed their brief face-to-face conversation with her on December 28, Liu Xiaobo’s birthday.

The latest incident involved TVB and Now TV cameramen who were filming Yang’s attempt to visit. Provocational journalism at its, ahem, best?

Via SCMP:

Yang’s whereabouts were unknown [Friday] night. A witness, a mainland activist who requested anonymity, said while Yang was waiting for a taxi shortly after 10pm a dozen men attacked him. He was taken away in a police car afterwards, the activist said.

Another activist, Hu Jia, posted on his microblog a picture he claimed to be the moment Yang was put in the police car.

Before Yang was taken away, he told the SCMP that security guards refused to let him register to see Liu Xia. It’s unclear what TVB’s Tam Wing-man or Now TV’s Wong Kim-fai did, if anything, before the guards began striking them, though it seems obvious that trying to push past guards — who, with their shitty jobs, probably aren’t the most tolerant and even-tempered people in the world — while wielding big cameras seems like a pretty good way to elicit a physical response, if that’s what you were after.

Resorting to violence is despicable, of course, and Liu Xia’s continued extralegal imprisonment remains a farce and a stain on the country that allows it.

Tam said he was punched in the face, then pushed to the ground before five or six men trampled on him. Wong said they pulled him and tried to snatch his camera, before hitting him in the head. He said his camera was damaged during the scuffle.

Along with TVB, Hong Kong delegates in Beijing for the Two Sessions have also issued statements condemning the attacks.

TVB issued a statement calling for the attackers’ arrest. It also urged the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council to protect Hong Kong journalists’ safety on the mainland.

Local delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and Chinese People’s Consultative Conference (CPPCC) said the attack was unacceptable.

“Hong Kong treasures and respects freedom of the press. It is unacceptable for reporters to be attacked when they are doing their job legally, and [such action] should be condemned. It’s a pity for something like this to happen during the annual congress,” NPC deputy Ambrose Lee Siu-kwong said.

Beijing’s response is continued silence.

Hong Kong journalists, activist beaten outside home of wife of dissident Liu Xiaobo (SCMP, h/t Alicia)
Outrage over attack on local cameramen (SCMP)

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)

On Friday, December 28 — the birthday of jailed Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo — a group of activists made a daring visit to the residence of his wife, Liu Xia, currently under house arrest.

You can watch them in the above video, uploaded yesterday to the YouTube account of Hu Jia, activist/dissident and director of the June Fourth Heritage and Culture Association. Hu writes that he and Hao Jian, Liu Di and Xu Youyu, among others, arrived at about 9 pm and basically overpowered a surprised guard. They stayed with an astonished and obviously apprehensive Liu Xia for three minutes before willfully taking their leave, just before “large quantities” of security personnel rushed up to intercept.

It’s a gripping and emotional video. Check it out.

UPDATE, 1/1, 11:21 am: Via AFP:

[Hu Jia] later told AFP that after leaving the apartment the group were detained momentarily by the guards but eventually allowed to leave.

“The video is all about fear and anxiety,” Hu said. “She has already lost a lot of hope. The authorities are making her fearful. What she is afraid of is her family will come under pressure.

“Imagine people come to visit you after two years under illegal house arrest and all she feels is fear that the authorities will crack down further.”

…”For two years, they have only allowed Liu Xia to visit her parents and go see Liu Xiaobo, no one else. She is like a political prisoner, when she meets her husband it is a meeting between prisoners,” Hu said.

“I went to visit her as friend, I have the right to visit her. The authorities know who I am, I have done nothing wrong. Her house arrest is illegal.”

(H/T Austin Ramzy via Alicia)

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).

Liu Xia has been under house arrest ever since her husband, Liu Xiaobo, won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago. Her location isn’t exactly a secret though, so AP reporters staked out outside her house, then walked in while the guards were out to lunch.

In her first public interview in 26 months, Liu said, “We live in such an absurd place. It is so absurd. I felt I was a person emotionally prepared to respond to the consequences of Liu Xiaobo winning the prize. But after he won the prize, I really never imagined that after he won, I would not be able to leave my home. This is too absurd. I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this.”

Give the piece a read. It comes on the heels of China officially saying it will not be releasing Liu Xiaobo, due to all those crimes he committed: embarrassing China, basically.

One more excerpt from the AP story:

Once a month, she is taken to see her husband in prison. It wasn’t clear when Liu Xia started regular visits with her husband or if they would continue following her interview. She was denied visits for more than a year after she saw him two days after his Nobel win and emerged to tell the world that he had dedicated the award to those who died in the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

…The authoritarian government’s detention of the Liu couple, one in a prison 280 miles (450 kilometers) northeast of Beijing and the other in a fifth-floor apartment in the capital, underscores its determination to keep the 57-year-old peace laureate from becoming an inspiration to other Chinese, either by himself or through her.Her treatment has been called by rights groups the most severe retaliation by a government given to a Nobel winner’s family.

…”I don’t keep track of the days anymore,” she said. “That’s how it is.”

By the way, while their situation in no way compares to Liu’s (not even close), we’d like to point out that the guards in charge of watching over Liu have it pretty tough, too.

Around midday, the guards who keep a 24-hour watch on the main entrance of Liu’s building had left their station — a cot with blankets where they sit and sleep.

Modernity. Kafkaesque.

On Tuesday, 134 Nobel laureates wrote to Xi Jinping asking him to release 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, currently serving an 11-year sentence for subversion (etc.) after he coauthored “Charter 08,” a manifesto calling for greater freedoms in China. His wife is also currently under house arrest.

The decision is probably not Xi Jinping’s alone to make, but the point of the letter — with Mo Yan set to address the Nobel committee this week — was to garner a response. And sure enough, China has answered. Here’s Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei in front of reporters yesterday, via Voice of America:

“China is a law-abiding country. Liu Xiaobo was lawfully sentenced to a fixed-term imprisonment by the judicial organ because he committed an offense against Chinese law,” he said. “The Chinese government opposes outsiders handling matters in any way that would interfere in its judicial sovereignty and internal matters.”

When asked what specific law Liu violated, Hong refused to comment.

Let us paraphrase:

“China is a [insert macro]. Liu Xiaobo was [insert macro] to a [insert macro] by the [insert macro] because [insert macro] against [insert macro]. The Chinese government [insert macro] [insert macro] in any way that [insert macro] and [insert macro].”

The Microsoft Word office assistant Clippy could literally do Hong Lei’s job just as well.

“Liu Xiaobo will not be released from prison even if a thousand Nobel laureates swoop out of the sky riding screaming harpies like stone rain.”

That would have been a good quote. The CCP should hire me as a speechwriter.

(Photo via AFP, which also reported on this.)