Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. xxii, 366 pp. US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-06147-7.
In his 1989 “Epilogue” to Chinese Politics and China’s Modern Intellectuals, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo refers to himself as a common person who stands out in China because he speaks up, but as “no great mind” on the world stage. This statement touches themes that run through the writings collected in this important volume: Liu Xiaobo’s constant introspection and effort to remain humble; China’s need for truth tellers; and his sharp awareness of the features of Chinese society relative to the rest of the world, especially the West.
One discovers in these writings a man whose battle with China’s authoritarian system has all along also been a spiritual struggle with himself, a self-conscious effort to confront his own limitations, to interrogate his motivations, and to will himself forward. It is the combination of insights into the man himself conveyed by these writings and the trenchant quality of the political and social critiques that they contain that makes No Enemies, No Hatred such powerful reading. Liu comes across as a tortured soul, at once disgusted by the Communist Party’s pervasive corruption and cold-heartedness, distraught by the numbed and apathetic quality of Chinese society, and heavily burdened by his sense of personal responsibility.
But Liu also radiates much light. If it is possible to summarize the greater thrust of his writings, one might say he is striving always to stand up to power based on unwavering fidelity to truth as he understands it. Liu writes often of his desire to live with dignity, and of how that requires that he refuse to deny, to hide, to become apathetic, to hedge, to grow cynical, to lie, to collude, or to be beaten down by the system. As he is aware, the cumulative effect of this approach bursts the bubble of triumphalist nationalism that has seduced the Chinese people and much of the world into the belief that history is witnessing in China the “rise of a great nation” (108). If one throws off such feel-good nonsense and speaks honestly, what one sees clearly, says Liu, are the overwhelming number of gross injustices that disease Chinese society.
Liu is as focused on the Chinese people themselves as he is on the Communist Party. The people are not evil, certainly no more so than any other, but the system itself, he maintains, leads them to do evil things to one another. Communist authoritarianism has created a sick and spiritually bankrupt society. The Party’s power—exercised through its monopolies over the right to appoint officials, the media, and the judicial process, all backed up by its ability to wield violence—is out of touch with the currents of the modern world, immoral in its denial of legally protected rights to the people, and indisputably responsible for the out-of-control corruption and systematic human rights abuses that blight Chinese society.
Liu is at his best when discussing the kinds of concrete social problems that cause very real human suffering in China. Examples include his essays on land confiscation, child slavery and the cover-up of egregious crimes by officials; in these pieces Liu masterfully traces the roots of particular local scandals to the logic of the authoritarian political system. He does not hold back: “when it comes to preserving its grip on power, pursuing its privileges, suppressing people’s civil rights, monitoring dissent, controlling the media, converting public property into its own property, or smoothly pulling off corruption, the government and its officials are not just competent but supercompetent” (97). Liu observes multiple times that the Communist Party is unsupervised by any legally constituted independent entity, and that it will always seek to protect its own power at the expense of all other just causes. As a result, it has become an unconstrained mafia-like organization: “criminal elements have become officialized,” he writes, “as officials have become criminalized” (102). In the face of this reality, the Chinese people have grown cynical and been spiritually brutalized, and in the face of judgments such as these, it is little wonder that the Communist Party feels threatened by Liu Xiaobo.
In spite of his personal suffering and the despair he feels over the state of Chinese society, Liu Xiaobo is buoyed by optimism that fundamental change is inevitable. Communist authoritarianism is based on bluster and lies and is bound to collapse, he believes. At a tactical level, Liu’s faith is rooted in the conviction that the Internet—which he calls “God’s gift to the Chinese people” (103)—enables transmission of information untainted by Party propaganda, and serves as a tool for the organization of public opinion that frequently manifests itself in activism on the ground. In his view, the advantage provided by the Internet, combined with consciousness of rights on the part of an ever-larger number of Chinese people, has spawned a multi-faceted “popular rights-defense movement” that is, step by step, challenging the Party’s claim to total power.
Although Liu Xiaobo traverses the ways, means and ugly consequences of unbridled authoritarian power at the national level, his prescription for change focuses on individuals and the power of choice they have in their daily lives. Sounding a theme common to enlightenment-oriented intellectuals throughout modern Chinese history, Liu holds that China’s regime will give way only when society itself changes. The ultimate responsibility lies with the people themselves. Individuals will be able to fulfill their responsibility if they develop their own spiritual resources, which will give them the strength to stand, rooted in dignity, against the howling winds of deceit and cynicism unleashed by the corrupt society in which they live. People cannot wait for the regime to change from within. That will not happen. They must make change themselves, gradually and peacefully, based on the “moral intuition that is native to human beings” (7). When they realize their full human dignity, standing for truth, love and tolerance even when it requires extreme personal sacrifice, then, and only then, will the regime have lost.
Timothy Weston
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
pp. 149-151