The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in history, political science, China studies, sociology, human rights, literature, philosophy, and related subjects.

I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo is by Professor Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton University and Wu Dazhi, a longtime friend of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese literary critic, human rights activist, philosopher and Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

The TU Library collection includes other books about many different aspects of human rights in China.

Liu Xiaobo called for political reforms and was involved in campaigns to end communist one-party rule in China.

He was arrested many times, and was described as China’s most prominent dissident and the country’s most famous political prisoner.

Liu Xiaobo was a professor at Peking University, writing books on Chinese society and culture. During the Tiananmen Square protests, he helped his university students conduct the protests in a peaceful manner, but in turn was sentenced to prison by the Chinese authorities for 21 months.

The authors explore Liu’s upbringing, involvement in classical Chinese poetry, philosophy, and democratic movements.

They trace the evolution of his thinking as well as his imprisonments and death.

I Have No Enemies emphasizes Liu’s principled commitment to dissent and the significance of the example he set in China and around the world.

Liu stated that his goal was to change a regime by changing a society.

In daily life, he looked for ways to build a more democratic culture.

When he died in 2017, The Economist noted:

He not only made an enemy of the government, but also riled fellow intellectuals and activists with his acerbic, rough, often coarse, observations of their weaknesses.

The obituary added:

As a writer and lecturer, deeply read in both Chinese and Western philosophy, from the 1980s he tirelessly attacked China’s boring cultural consensus.

A poem by Liu posted online, “One Letter,” reads in part:

…two sets of iron rails

unexpectedly overlap

moths flap toward lamp

light, an eternal sign

that traces your shadow.

The website of Amnesty International Thailand (also known as Amnesty Thailand and AI Thailand) a non-governmental organization focused on protecting human rights in Thailand and worldwide, states:

Liu Xiaobo was a professor at Peking University, writing books on Chinese society and culture. During the Tiananmen square protests, he helped his university students conduct the protests in a peaceful manner, but in turn was sentenced to prison by the Chinese authorities for 21 months.

Following that, Liu Xiaobo continued to work as an academic on the topics of democracy and human rights. However, he found himself jailed for three years to a labour camp, for his criticisim of the Chinese government’s policies towards the Dalai Lama, a renowned spiritual leader in Taiwan and Tibet.

Liu Xiaobo po calls for political reform in China, but has been sentenced to 11 years in charge of “inciting subversion of state power” due to his involvement in the “Charter 08” manifesto.

Whilst Liu Xiaobo was imprisoned, he learnt through his attorney that he had received the Nobel Peace Prize, but was unable to attend the ceremony personally. He was the first Chinese citizen to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, with the committee stating that “although he has been severely punished, Liu has become one of the boldest symbols in the fight for human rights in China.”

Other than that, the Human Rights Watch organization awarded Liu Xiabo the Alison Des Forges Award in recognition of his unrelenting bravery in the battle for freedom of expression and the right to protest in China.

The Nobel Prize website observed:

Sentenced for the Crime of Speaking

Liu Xiaobo, a prominent independent intellectual in China, is a long-time advocate of political reform and human rights in China and an outspoken critic of the Chinese communist regime; Liu has been detained, put under house arrest and imprisoned many times for his writing and activism. According to his lawyers’ defence statement in his 2009 trial, Liu has written nearly 800 essays, 499 of them since 2005. Liu is a drafter and a key proponent of Charter 08.

Liu was born on December 28, 1955 in Changchun, Jilin. He received a BA in literature from Jilin University, and an MA and PhD from Beijing Normal University, where he also taught.

In April 1989, he left his position as a visiting scholar at Columbia University to return to Beijing to participate in the 1989 Democracy Movement. On June 2, Liu, along with Hou Dejian, Zhou Duo, and Gao Xin, went on a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square to protest martial law and appeal for peaceful negotiations between the students and the government. In the early morning of June 4, 1989, the four attempted to persuade the students to leave Tiananmen Square. After the crackdown, Liu was held in Beijing’s Qincheng Prison until January 1991, when he was found guilty of “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” but exempted from punishment.

In 1996, he was sentenced to three years of Reeducation-Through-Labour on charges of “rumor-mongering and slander” and “disturbing social order” after drafting the “Anti-Corruption Proposals” and letters appealing for official reassessment of the June Fourth crackdown.

On December 8, 2008, Liu was taken away from his Beijing home and detained by the Beijing police, and on December 25, 2009, more than a year later; he was found guilty of “inciting subversion of state power.” By early March 2010, more than 600 co-signatories of Charter 08 signed an online “statement of shared responsibility” with Liu for his “crime”.

Liu served as President of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre from 2003 to 2007. In addition to Columbia University, he was a visiting scholar at the University of Oslo and the University of Hawaii.

Liu is married to Liu Xia, a poet and visual artist. […]

As a young man he studied literature and philosophy, and worked as a literary critic and university lecturer in Beijing. He took a doctorate in 1988, after which he was a guest lecturer at universities in Europe and the USA.

Liu Xiaobo took part in the student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. For that he was sentenced to two years in prison. Later he served three years in a labour camp for having criticised China’s one-party system.

For over twenty years, Liu has fought for a more open and democratic China. He demands that the Chinese authorities comply with Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution, which lays down that the country’s citizens enjoy “freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration”.

In 2008, Liu was a co-author of Charta 08, a manifesto which advocates the gradual shifting of China’s political and legal system in the direction of democracy. He was arrested in December 2008, and sentenced a year later to eleven years’ imprisonment for undermining the state authorities. Liu has constantly denied the charges. “Opposition is not the same as undermining”, he points out.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)