In New Book From Dissident, a Warning on China

Now a new book is about to fill in the silence.

“No Enemies, No Hatred,” to be published by Harvard University Press in January, is the first English-language collection of works by Mr. Liu, a former university professor sentenced in December 2009 to 11 years in prison for “incitement to subvert state power.”

In two dozen essays and 15 poems written between 1989 and 2009 and a document collection showing Mr. Liu’s path through the courts and into jail, the book offers “one of the most impressive analyses of China today,” as well as an important warning to those hoping the cash-rich country can “save” the world economy, Perry Link, one of three editors, said by telephone.

“The image of China in the West is superficial compared to Liu Xiaobo’s,” said Mr. Link, a leading scholar of modern Chinese literature at the University of California, Riverside.

“He sees the problems, the corruption, the bullying. There is the China that the Communist Party runs, that has so much money and might try to save the euro, and wants to take over the South China Sea, and then what he’s really talking about, the ordinary people and the ordinary problems from below,” he said.

“He really does have a broad range of interests. And he reasons from humanistic fundamental principles in a way I find very admirable. There are other Chinese dissidents I admire who’ve been in and out of prison, like Wei Jingsheng, Xu Wenli and Wang Dan, but none of them are as impressive an intellectual as he is,” Mr. Link said.

Mr. Liu, whose final statement to the court in December 2009 provided the title of the book, sits in Jinzhou Prison in the northeastern province of Liaoning. His wife, Liu Xia, who chose the poems, is under house arrest in Beijing. Mr. Link has been barred from China for nearly 17 years, and Tienchi Martin-Liao, president of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, who selected the essays, was refused entry earlier this year. These bannings may illustrate a main tenet of Mr. Liu’s writings: that China today is “post-totalitarian,” but still a dictatorship. It’s in urgent need of reform, he writes.

Saying so has landed Mr. Liu in jail four times since the suppressed 1989 democracy protests, in which he was a prominent participant and which he has called a “turning point” in his life.

His most recent sentence was for posting essays on the Internet that his judges said showed “deep subjective malice” towards the “people’s democratic dictatorship,” and for helping to write Charter 08, a call for political freedom modeled on Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77. (Vaclav Havel, a co-author of the Czech charter, wrote the book’s foreword.)

Mr. Liu’s output is prodigious — 17 books, including collections of articles and poems, and hundreds of essays — and the editors said choosing texts wasn’t easy. Yet they flow naturally, grouped into four thematic parts.

In “Bellicose and Thuggish,” Mr. Liu offers a disturbing analysis of the imperial and Maoist roots of today’s ultranationalism, sprung from China’s “underlying arrogance and self-centeredness,” which, faced with Western technological superiority, is trapped “in a vicious cycle between self-abasement and self-aggrandizement.”

In “The Spiritual Landscape of Post-Totalitarian China” he examines a “gaping disconnect” in values, where people curse the United States one moment and happily hop on a plane to study there the next. In this Age of Cynicism, people have “split personalities,” scorning the state in private and praising it in public, hoping for material benefit, he says. “Both postures have become second nature.” He blames the party, but also the “small-mindedness” of Confucius’s teachings.

In “Yesterday’s Stray Dog Becomes Today’s Guard Dog,” he criticizes China’s intellectuals for their failure to think independently.