December 5, 2012
Success for one writer means punishment for the other.
The recent Party Congress in Beijing (above) has placed further restrictions on dissidents in China. Photo: Remka Tanis. Creative Commons.
The Sichuan writer Li Bifeng is 48 years old. He has already spent one-fourth of his life in jail and now another 12 year term awaits him. After the June 4th 1989 crackdown on the democratic movement in Tiananmen Square, he was imprisoned for five years because of his “counterrevolutionary” behavior. While in prison he met his longtime friend, the poet Liao Yiwu, who was there because of his poem “Massacre” and his plan to make Requiem, a documentary about the Tiananmen incident.
Li went to prison a second time in 1998 because he investigated and reported about a strike in Mianyang, Sichuan Province. However, in the court indictment he was accused of economic fraud, and lost seven years of freedom in jail.
In recent years Li had became a successful businessman, but he caught the Chinese authority’s attention again after supporting some dissidents financially. Last July, when his friend Liao Yiwu escaped from the Republic and fled through Vietnam to Germany, the authority arrested Li in September and accused him of helping Liao with money to escape, although this allegation was totally groundless.
Li Bifeng’s trial, which was scheduled for this May, was postponed while Liao Yiwu started a worldwide campaign to appeal for his freedom. Meanwhile Liao received acknowledgment and fame in the West, for his literary reportage in: The Corpse Walker, God is Red, For a Song and a Hundred Songs, and Bullets and Opium, which are published in multiple languages and have gathered a broad readership. In the last two books Liao described his friend Li as a sensitive and devoted poet, who goes after his political and literary ideas without considering the consequences. Liao received the Geschwister Scholl Awards in Germany and the Kapuzinski Award in Poland, yet his success means bad luck for his friend.
Recently Liao also received the prestigious Friedenspreis prize from the German Book Trade during the Frankfurt Book Fair. At the ceremony, Liao delivered a courageous speech in which he predicted that an empire, where soldiers kill children, the basic human rights of millions are abused, and freedom of expression is impoverished, must and will fall apart. His speech raised attention and discussion in the West, but annoyed the Chinese authority, who called him mentally unstable. Four weeks later, his friend Li Bifeng was sentenced to 12 years in prison. The indictment this time was for “contract fraud.”