“What I demanded of myself was this: whether as a person or as a writer, I would lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity.” – Liu Xiabo

Liu Xiaobo, writer, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and China’s most well-known dissident and prisoner, has died today from cancer at a hospital in China. The Chinese authorities diagnosed his liver cancer only when it had advanced possibly beyond cure. And as could be expected, they refused Liu to travel abroad for treatment of his choice. They were certainly criminally negligent, but they allowed Liu to leave jail so that he could die in relative dignity under the watchful eyes of police guards. Thank communists for small mercies.

Liu was born in Jilin in north-east China. The Guardian writes: “His parents were devoted to the party, but from his youth Liu struck an independent course. After studying Chinese literature at Jilin University, he began an MA in 1982 at Beijing Normal University, where he stayed on as a lecturer. His keen intelligence and razor tongue soon established his reputation: hundreds watched his dissertation defence, while students from other universities packed out his electrifying lectures. He was also a visiting lecturer at the universities of Oslo and Hawaii, and Columbia University in New York.”

Since 1989, he was given four prison sentences, the last of which he couldn’t complete as he died at the age of 61. But his biography could have been different.

Liu was at Columbia University in New York as a visiting lecturer just before Tiananmen Square happened. He could have lived in peace and prosperity and written lofty pro-democracy articles if he had chosen to appeal for citizenship or political asylum in a First World country. Instead, he returned early to China in May 1989 to join and lead – he was one of the four foremost organisers – the movement that was sweeping the country. It culminated in the pro-democracy movement we know as Tiananmen Square protest which was brutally crushed at the cost of no-one-knows how many thousand human lives.

The Indian Express reports:

“After spending nearly two years in detention following the Tiananmen crackdown, Liu was detained for the second time in 1995 after drafting a plea for political reform. Later that year, he was detained a third time after co-drafting “Opinion on Some Major Issues Concerning our Country Today.” That resulted in a three-year sentence to a labour camp, during which time he married [poet] Liu Xia. …

“Released in 1999, he joined the international literary and human rights organization PEN and continued advocating for human rights and democracy.”
His final prison sentence was for “Charter 08,” a document he co-authored and circulated in 2008. It called for more freedom of expression, human rights, and an independent judiciary in China in the line of “Charter 77”, which had been a civic initiative in Czechoslovakia in 1977 that partly led to the Velvet Revolution 12 years later.

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Liu Xiaobo was just 61 when he died. As I read the news of his death, a deep sense of personal gloom gripped me. I do not know why. Maybe, because he was younger than me. I have developed a completely irrational belief that people who came to the world after me should leave it later.

Maybe, because we in India have started living in a strange version of democracy which looks increasingly like the repressive Chinese regime in many ways, although its characteristics are vastly different. If our present masters are allowed a free hand, we cannot but reach a situation

Where the mind lives in constant fear and the head isn’t held high

Where knowledge isn’t free

Where the world has been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls …

I couldn’t but wonder … what inspired Liu Xiaobo to stand up – again and again – and take on a vicious regime that doesn’t care a fig for human rights. That brooks no dissent. That doesn’t think twice before sending people to jail just because they think differently or rolling down columns of tanks to physically crush unarmed and peaceful protestors. What makes people like Liu Xiabo sacrifice everything and suffer so terribly to uphold the honour and dignity of humanity?

Liu Xiaobo is dead. But the values that he stood for do not die.

Human desire to “lead a life of honesty, responsibility, and dignity” is an inalienable fundamental right. There will be setbacks, like it has been happening in India today, but ultimately, Liu Xiaobos are going to win.

We are going to win.

13 July 2017

Photo courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54542145