Muffled voices
This year, the Committee to Protect Journalists will present one of its International Press Freedom Awards to Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist and poet currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for “leaking state secrets abroad”. Richard Lea looks at his work, and the charges that were brought against him.
The Chinese journalist and poet Shi Tao will not be in New York on Tuesday November 22 to collect his Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Press Freedom Award – he is serving a 10-year prison sentence with forced labour in Chishan Prison, Yuanjiang City.
“He was detained at his house at the end of November 2004”, says the Amnesty campaigner Anu Kultalahti. “In December, he was formally arrested on charges of illegally revealing state secrets abroad, and sentenced in April 2005 to 10 years’ imprisonment.”
The charges brought against Shi Tao relate to emails that he sent to websites based outside China, containing a memo sent to journalists by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) concerning the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. “He posted an internal CCP note about the Tiananmen crackdown to some overseas websites,” explains Kultalahti. “It was a note that was circulated to journalists, basically warning them about possible unrest during the anniversary period and telling them how to report such unrest if it occurred.”
The memo offered an analysis of the current situation, noting that as 2004 was the 15th anniversary of the “June Fourth Event” some of the “overseas pro-democratic elements” were “more active”, propagating “various harmful information” on the internet, and “making use of religion and other ways [printings, internet] to attract the youths”. It went on to list seven “safeguard measures”, and five “current tasks to be promoted vigorously”, including “upholding the correct theories and duty consciousness”, “enhancing conscientiously the intelligence work and controlling every kind of activities and situations” and “persisting the correct guidance of public opinions”.
According to Kultalahti, the main evidence provided against Shi Tao came not from inside China, but from the global internet service provider, Yahoo. In its defence, Yahoo claims that it was only following local legislation. When quizzed about the case in China earlier this year Yahoo’s co-founder Jerry Yang said that the company was never informed by the authorities of the reasons why they were requesting the firm to provide information. “To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law,” he said.
Kultalahti offers further explanation. “Every company has to sign a public pledge on self-discipline for the internet industry,” she says. “In effect it means that they agree to the Chinese system of censorship and control. “There has also been some debate as to whether Yahoo was legally bound to provide such information to the authorities, since they are based in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system from mainland China. We are very disturbed by Yahoo providing information to the Chinese authorities which was used to convict Shi Tao.”
Shi was born in 1968 in Yanchi City, north-west China. Though perhaps better known as a journalist, he is also a widely published poet; he began writing poetry as a teenager, founding the Zhuxi Literary Society while still at school. He was active in university poetry societies while studying politics at East China Normal University, where he founded the urban poetry group Woting and served on the board of the Shanghai University Associations of Poets. He was influenced by Shanghai’s City Poetry group and bgan publishing poems in well-respected state-run literary journals with a national readership, such as Shanghai Wenxue and Mengya. In 1989 he took part in the wave of student demonstrations that ended in the Tiananmen Square massacre.
After graduating in 1991, Shi worked for a year as a teacher in Xi-An City, before taking the first of many jobs in journalism. He went on to work for a succession of titles in Xi-an, Taiyuan and Changsha as reporter, editor and director.
Meanwhile, he has published several collections of poetry, including ‘Borders of Heaven’, which was published by Shanxi People’s Publishing House in 2002. However, Shi’s work has never been featured in a major anthology. Chip Rolley of Sydney PEN suggests that after he left university his poetry may have taken a back seat as he concentrated on his journalism. Publication in Shanghai Wenxue and Mengya when he was only 22 suggests “early recognition”, he says, but “it’s less clear to me what has happened since.”
“I wouldn’t say Shi Tao is particularly pioneering in his poetry,” says one of his translators at SOAS, Heather Inwood, “although it has been said that he is one of very few contemporary poets who really ‘worries about the country and its people’ in his writings. His involvement in pro-democracy and freedom of speech movements seems to be reflected in his poetry”, she says. Many of his poems are “full of anger, death, blackness, blood and violence.”
“I imagine his essays and reportage on overseas pro-democracy websites may have affected the development of any reputation on the mainland,” says Rolley. “I suspect politics would have got in the way.”
Now, however, Shi may never find out if he was destined for poetic greatness. His release of the CCP memo has now brought both his careers to a halt. He is not allowed to write anything while in prison, except for letters to his family.
“He is kept in a prison on a small island where most of the prisoners are serving long sentences,” says Kultalahti, “and is forced to do labour processing jewels.”
At the time of his arrest “he had some health problems,” she says, “a heart condition and a chronic ulcer. These have worsened.”
His family is able to visit him twice a month. His mother, Gao Qinsheng, says that apart from being unable to write he is doing “OK”. She had hoped to attend the CPJ award ceremony herself. She has been unable to obtain a passport.
Pain and Heretical Theories
by Shi Tao
The portrait on the wall has lost its powers of reflection,
yet the wind at my window cannot stem this violence.
I torment you through one long night of passion
till we’re both completely spent – two kites left in the rain.
Once, long ago, I was the star of a children’s play.
Once, long ago, I used both my hands to teach children to sing.
Once, long ago, I heard two crows conversing, lit by the moon.
But the brute fact of cruelty
struck me down. Pain lacks the tenderness of moonlight.
Struggling, trapped in an iron box full of lies, I try to be a model patient,
to swallow a spoonful of spite down the throat of the motherland.
Heretical Theories
Take one mad cow and daub it with paint
so that passers by can get ‘closer to nature’.
Let the Great Leader’s statue sprout rabbit’s ears
so that he can hear the non-stop protests.
Take one politician and one wild beast
and throw them in a cage together.
Make Barbie scrub the stairs.
Let cigarettes go wild in women’s lips.
Love is just a corny song:
Everybody Knows.
The machine that runs the body
is just a blind bulb.
The streets reek of casual encounters –
nostalgic flesh recoils suspiciously.
Desire scars,
poisoning the body.
Let green sing like a bird again.
If only this shriek of anguish could become
a happy journey. If only stricken Superman
could come down to witness my crimes.
· Translated by Sarah Maguire and Heather Inwood
· Sarah Maguire is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
