Dark matter

By G.e.

A long way from his rightful place

EVERY year at this time The Economist publishes an annual almanac predicting big events and trends to watch out for in the year coming. 

I’m publishing below a companion piece of the sort you won’t find in The World in 2014, because it is about the absence of change. 

For Liu Xiaobo, 2014 does not figure to be a special year. 

He is expected to endure it in the same way as he has this year. 

The same may be true for his wife, Liu Xia, though she manages on occasion to make herself heard, including a recent request for some basic freedoms.
Mr Liu was arrested five years ago this week, and he was sentenced four years ago this month. 

He has not been heard from directly since. 

At the ceremony awarding him the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize (pictured) his absence was marked by the empty chair he should have been sitting in. 

Uttering his name is in itself a political act. 

Perry Link, an eminent American China scholar long blacklisted from re-entering the country, writes that academic colleagues do not mention Mr Liu for fear of jeopardising their ability to work in China. 

I wanted to write about the absence of Mr Liu from the daily conversation, for in another sense he is ever-present:
Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, once wrote that intellectuals are “the soul of a nation”. 

He saw this as a tragic assignation. 

The intellectual he describes is a “lonely forerunner” who “can discern the portents of disaster at a time of prosperity, and in his self-confidence experience the approaching obliteration.”
Mr Liu is fulfilling his own prophecy. 

He is unlikely to be heard from in 2014. 

He remains in a Chinese prison cell, in the north-eastern city of Jinzhou—not terribly far from Changchun, the city in neighbouring Jilin province, where he was born in 1955. 

He is less than halfway through an 11-year prison sentence for his intellectual crimes (officially, “inciting subversion of state power”). 

His wife, Liu Xia, may not be heard from either in 2014; she is under strict house arrest despite not having been charged with any crime, and has had only rare contact with foreign reporters. 

Her brother, Liu Hui, too will not be heard from; he was sentenced in 2013 to a harsh prison term for alleged financial fraud, a punishment, some believe, meant to cow the family into total silence. 

Obliteration indeed.
But to the Communist Party’s enduring frustration, the Nobel prize assures that Mr Liu cannot be totally annihilated. 

He is the dark matter in every earnest discussion about China’s future, the invisible antagonist in any talk of progress and reform.
That would suit Mr Liu. 

Before he was a dissident of government, he was a dissident of his own flock, antagonising most anybody. 

In the late 1980s Mr Liu, a philosopher by training, reveled so much in attacking fellow writers and thinkers that he all but isolated himself without the help of any authorities. 

He dismissed the literature of the post-Mao era as mostly worthless (in a speech to its most celebrated practitioners); he dismissed an older set of intellectuals as “cultural pets” of their foreign Sinologist “discoverers”. 

By the time he was arrested and made an example of, in June 1989 after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, he had made himself a rather convenient target. 

“He is an ideal sacrifice,” wrote Geremie Barmé, an Australian Sinologist, after Mr Liu’s arrest in 1989. 

“Many will make pro forma protestations at his treatment, but few will feel any real sympathy for this irascible and unrelenting critic.” 

And yet the official denunciations of Mr Liu and his refusal to give in—his continued, conscientious defiance not just in 1989 but through years of all sorts of detention afterward—earned him fame and admiration. 

In attempting to obliterate the man, the authorities created Liu Xiaobo, the symbol of individual bravery and defiance.
The irony is that many of Mr Liu’s peers deemed him not radical enough. 

He was by the standards of other activists a moderate who advocated “rational” and deliberate action on democracy, and he always resolutely espoused nonviolence. 

His most radical feature was a stubborn romanticism about his cause. 

In 2008 he co-authored a document, Charter 08, that called for an end to one-party rule. 

It was an echo of Charter 77, co-authored by Vaclav Havel in resistance to Soviet rule, and it resulted in Mr Liu’s arrest and current imprisonment. 

For his trial on December 23rd 2009, Mr Liu wrote a statement that would be read aloud at his Nobel ceremony the following year: “I have no enemies, and no hatred”, he declared, even for the individuals who carried out the state’s will against him. 

As the statement was read an empty chair denoted Mr Liu’s absence, the dark matter in the room.
Others share Mr Liu’s fate without the fame. 

Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer, was disappeared and tortured, and disappeared again, before authorities acknowledged imprisoning him in remote north-western China. 

He has to an extent been obliterated. 

Still other prisoners of conscience languish unremembered. 

In their absence the earnest conversations about China’s reforms continue.