The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo died today, a few short weeks after the Chinese government revealed that he was suffering from cancer that had progressed beyond treatment during his political imprisonment. The course of his life was forever altered by the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, and, as Perry Link notes at NYR Daily, Liu felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, “the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died.” His widow Liu Xia reports that he dedicated his Nobel Prize to them in 2010, as he’d done in 2003 after receiving an award from the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation. In the following passage from his statement of thanks for that award, excerpted from No Enemies, No Hatred, a volume of Liu’s essays and poems edited by Link, Liu Xia, and Tienchi Martin-Liao, Liu Xiaobo declares his acceptance of the honor “in the names of the souls of the dead,” and speaks of the responsibility of the living.
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I receive this award today, May 31, 2003, only four days before the anniversary of that bloody morning in June fourteen years ago. I do not know whether my work has been worthy of the people who died and cannot claim to deserve this award. I can understand the honor only as a tribute to those who continue to speak the truth inside a system built on lies and as an offering to the souls of the dead, delivered through me, of memory that refuses to be erased.
I feel that those who perished that day are looking down on me from above. They look down on a person privileged still to be alive. They have been looking down for fourteen years now. I was a participant in the 1989 movement and observed how, in that dark night and early dawn, it was sliced by bayonets, pierced by bullets, and crushed by tanks. The glinting tips of the bayonets still stab in the recesses of my memory. As one of the survivors, I see before my eyes two things—the souls of those who died for a free China and the violence, the lies, and the bribery of the killers—and I am haunted by the grave responsibility of being still alive. I do my best to make every word from my pen a cry from the heart for the souls of the dead. I use my memory of their graves to combat the Chinese government’s pressure to erase memory; my searing desire to atone for having survived helps me resist the temptations to join the world of lies.
We may feel contempt for a regime that kills people and disgust when it lies to explain its killing, but we can feel only despair if a nation makes allowances for such a regime and forgets the people who were killed. How much more is this the case when the killings were on open display to the world and when the physical deaths of the victims have so well proven the moral deaths of the killers?
The crimes of the Communist dictatorship are many, and the victims whom we do not know about are far, far too numerous—both the souls of the dead from killings and the prisoners of conscience who remain behind bars. One way to compensate for their suffering is to be sure that we reflect upon it scrupulously in memory, and one of the moral preconditions of honest memory is that we utterly refuse the regime’s indoctrination and refuse as individuals to repeat its lies. We fortunate survivors, and anyone who lives outside the regime’s metal bars, must, each of us as an independent person, hold fast to memory of the victims and refuse to sell out to the material comforts that participation in the official lies can bring. To do anything less is to surrender the meaning of life, to sell one’s personal dignity, and to lose sight of what it means to be a human being. Nothing can substitute for individual responsibility.
