Tag Archives: Liao Yiwu

Exiled Chinese Writer’s New Novel Penned in Secret While in Prison

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Chinese dissident writer Liao Yiwu (aka Lao Wei) during the promotion of his book “In the Empire of Darkness,” a testimony of four years spent in Chinese prisons, in Paris, Jan.16, 2013. AFP

Exiled Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, who was once jailed for writing a poem commemorating the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, has published a novel in German based on a harrowing prison memoir penned on cheap paper during four years behind bars. Continue reading

For a Song and a Hundred Songs, by Liao Yiwu, translated by Wenguang Huang

Liao YiwuIt’s not easy to read a prison memoir like this one: For a Song and a Hundred Songs, A Poet’s Journey through a Chinese Prison by Liao Yiwu is a confronting book and it took me a while to get through it. It’s a bit like reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – one can’t just scamper through it, because each chapter is a catalyst for all kinds of reflections about the power of the state … Continue reading

German President Presses China on Political Prisoners During Visit

By

高克在同济大学

President Joachim Gauck of Germany meeting with students after his speech at Tongji University in Shanghai on Wednesday. Credit Johannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIJING — Four days before President Joachim Gauck of Germany began his first state visit to China on Sunday, the exiled writer Liao Yiwu visited Schloss Bellevue, the presidential residence in Berlin. Continue reading

Liao Yiwu: Tamer of Beasts, Tamer of Despots

By Liao Yiwu, translated by Cindy Carter, published: May 24, 2015

My friend Chen Yunfei (陈云飞) has never been of a serious disposition; his mode of dress is, if anything, even less serious. One year on June 4th, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he was clad from the waist up in a suit and tie, and from the waist down in a pair of short Continue reading

Liao Yiwu : Tamer of Beasts, Tamer of Despots

By Liao Yiwu, translated by Cindy Carter, published: May 24, 2015

My friend Chen Yunfei (陈云飞) has never been of a serious disposition; his mode of dress is, if anything, even less serious. One year on June 4th, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, he was clad from the waist up in a suit and tie, and from the waist down in a pair of short trousers that made it look from afar as if he weren’t wearing any trousers at all. On that anniversary, he climbed into a blood donation truck parked in Continue reading

No. 19 Liu Xiaobo: Listening to  Bald Lao Playing Flute

– To Lao Liao

It was never a suitable place for playing flute
But you miraculously
Turned your flesh into the sound of flute
The little restaurant was very simple
But offered extremely delicious grilled steak Continue reading

Prison of the Mind-A Chinese poet’s memoir of incarceration

JULY 1, 2013

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Liao Yiwu was imprisoned from 1990 to 1994, after reciting a poem, “Massacre,” in memory of dead pro-democracy protesters.
CREDIT ILLUSTRATION BY PETER AND MARIA HOEY

Spending time in jail is no fun anywhere, but each society has its own cultural refinements of misery. The sadistic imagination of Chinese prison authorities, though hardly unique, is often remarkable. But so is that of the inmates themselves, who form their own hierarchies, their own prisons within prisons.

At the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau Investigation Center, for example, also known as the Song Mountain Investigation Center, the cell bosses devised an exotic menu of torments. A few samples:

SICHUAN-STYLE SMOKED DUCK: The enforcer burns the inmate’s pubic hair, pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire.

Or:

NOODLES IN A CLEAR BROTH: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine.

Or:

TURTLE SHELL AND PORK SKIN SOUP: The enforcer smacks the inmate’s knee caps until they are bruised and swollen like turtle shells. Walking is impossible.

There are other tortures, too, meted out in a more improvised manner. Liao Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs” (translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang; New Harvest), describes the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood. The cell boss spikes the woodcutter’s broth with a laxative, and then refuses to let him use the communal toilet bucket, with the result that the desperate man shits all over a fellow-inmate. As a punishment for this disgusting transgression, his face is smashed into a basin. The guards, assuming that he has tried to commit suicide, a prison offense, then work him over with a stun baton.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 to study the country’s prison system, and ended up writing “Democracy in America.” Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, from 1990 to 1994, as a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist, including the impact of revolutionary rhetoric, forced denunciations and public confessions, and, as times have changed since Mao’s misrule, criminal forms of capitalism. He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind: prosperity without liberty.”

Liao was incarcerated for writing a poem, “Massacre”—a long stream-of-consciousness memorial to the thousands of people who were killed on June 4, 1989, when the pro-democracy movement was crushed throughout China. The poem, in its English translation by Michael Day, begins as follows:

 

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Amid Scrutiny, Facebook Suspends Chinese Dissident’s Account

4:35 pm HKT Dec 31, 2014

 

OB-TN551_facema_G_20120626181721Just as scrutiny of how Facebook treats China-related content is mounting, the social-networking service on Wednesday suspended the account of a prominent Chinese dissident writer, citing its policy against nudity.

Liao Yiwu, who lives in Berlin, said Wednesday Continue reading