Liao Yiwu
Poet
Liao Yiwu (August 4, 1958 - ), a renowned poet, writer and folk artist, was arrested in 1990 for his poem memorializing the victims of June 4th Massacre, and eventually sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for “counter-revolutionary crimes”.
This profile is part of a cooperation with Independent Chinese PEN Center. It has been written by Secretary-General Yu Zhang and was first published in From Wang Shiwei to Liu Xiaobo - Prisoners of Literary Inquisition Under Communist Rule in China (1947-2010). It’s part of our ongoing effort to support freedom of speech and human rights.
From street urchin to poet
Liao Yiwu was born in Yanting County, Sichuan Province, and left to wander the streets after his parents became targets of the Cultural Revolution when he was eight years old.
Liao resumed his schooling in the 1970s, but just before graduating from secondary school in 1976, he came under criticism and reprimand for writing a “reactionary poem” on a wall. On April 5 that year, he was arrested for distributing a leaflet entitled “Please Don’t Believe Them”. He signed up unsuccessfully for the college entrance exam four times from 1977 to 1980.
At the end of 1980, Liao began working as a truck driver on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. He joined the underground literature movement in 1982, editing and contributing poetry to publications such as Modernism Alliance and Modern Chinese Experimental Poetry. Long poems such as “Our Children’s Generation”, “Big Basin” and “The People” gained him an enthusiastic following as well as more than 20 official poetry prizes.
From 1983 to 1989, he continued to publish a series of rebellious poems that triggered debate in literary circles and made him a representative figure of New Wave Poetry. His activities attracted surveillance by the police, and he came under heavy criticism during the Campaign to Eliminate Spiritual Pollution in1983 and the Anti-Liberalism Campaign in 1987, after which he was banned from any form of publication. In 1986, he joined protests against the CWA’s closure of the literary magazine China. Through the introduction of the writer Fang Fang, Liao was admitted to the writer’s course at Wuhan University in summer 1988, only to be expelled three months later.
From “Slaughter” to Requiem
When the death of former CPC General Secretary Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, triggered student protests in Beijing and elsewhere, Liao refused to take part in any “mass movements”, and left Beijing for his native Fuling, Sichuan Province. Upon hearing of the slaughter in Beijing in June, however, Liao penned a long poem “Slaughter”, protesting the violent crackdown and then read it out on a tape recording that he handed over to the Canadian Sinologist Michael Day. In March 1990, Liao organized, wrote and performed Requiem, a poetic television documentary memorializing the victims of the June 4th Massacre. He was arrested on March 16 along with the poet Wan Xia and 20 others, all of whom were subsequently released. Michael Day was expelled in November 1991 as a “cultural spy”.
In May 1992, Liao was secretly tried and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement”. While in prison, he spent 23 days with his hands shackled behind him for “violating prison rules”, and he attempted suicide twice in protest over his brutal treatment. From 1992 until January 1994, he wrote the initial draft of a long literary piece, Survival, and learned the bamboo flute from an elderly monk.
Because of international concern, in particular intervention from then British Prime Minister John Major, Liao was released 43 days before completion of his sentence, on January 31, 1994.
Interviewing the marginalized
After leaving prison, Liao supported himself by playing his bamboo flute in Chengdu’s bars, then ran a teashop and worked at a magazine and a newspaper from 1995 to 1998. He signed many petitions calling for human rights and democracy, and repeatedly petitioned local police departments over being deprived of a decent living. This resulted in his being detained several times, and he lost manuscripts totaling more than two million characters during searches of his home. He was arrested at his wedding for “illegal reporting” on February 26, 1999. That same year, he published Desecrated Temple: A Portrait of China’s Underground Poetry in the 1970s, which described the history of Beijing’s Xidan Democracy Wall. While many scholars judged it one of the “ten best books” of that year, it was banned by the CPC Propaganda Department, and its publisher, Xinjiang Youth Publishing House, was reorganized. That same year, under the penname Lao Wei, Liao published Adrift: Interviews with the Marginalized, which was reprinted five times in three months before being banned. On the eve of June 4, 1999, Liao was interviewed by Radio Free Asia and read out his poem “Slaughter”.
In early 2000, Liao joined a veteran of the Today poetry movement, Mang Ke, in producing Fei Ya Fei (Flying), an underground film financed by a Japanese company, in which he reenacted his living situation since his release from prison. The film was shown at the 2000 Berlin International Film Festival.
Interviewing the Lower Strata of Chinese Society
Using the penname Lao Wei again in 2001, Liao published Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society in two volumes. More than 50 publications published excerpts or reports, and a symposium on the book drew such a large crowd that it had to be moved from Beijing’s Guolinfeng Book Store to the Dajue Temple in the Beijing suburbs. Liao read out “Slaughter” and played his flute, and afterwards Southern Weekend devoted a full page to a dialog between Liao and the famous journalist Lu Yuegang. Soon afterward, Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society was banned, unsold copies of the book were ordered destroyed, and the publisher, Changjiang Literary Arts Publishing House, was reorganized at great financial loss. Southern Weekend also suffered a major upheaval, with several senior executives dismissed. After that, the CPC Propaganda Department, General Administration of Press and Publication and public security organs explicitly banned publication of Liao’s works under his real name or penname. His books nevertheless remained popular in illegally circulated pirated editions.
In 2001, Liao helped establish the Independent Chinese PEN Center, and was elected to its first board of directors in October 2003. He won the Freedom to Write Award in 2007, and in October 2009 was elected an honorary director.
The authorities denied Liao the right to leave China on 16 occasions. A storm of international protest arose when he was again denied an exit visa to attend the Cologne Literary Festival on March 1, 2010, and German PEN and more than 100 Western authors signed a “global appeal” for the victims of the June 4th Massacre to be commemorated by a worldwide reading of Liao’s works. Tens of thousands of people, including several Nobel laureates, took part in the reading in more than 30 Western cities and on more than 100 radio and television stations. In September that year, Liao was allowed to leave China for the first time to attend the International Literature Festival in Berlin.
After again being refused permission to leave China in early 2011, Liao escaped his Chengdu home and made his way across the border to Vietnam on July 2, 2011, flying to Germany on July 6. The following year he was awarded a special artist grant by the German Academic Exchange Service, and he has been living in Berlin ever since.
Several volumes of Liao Yiwu’s works have been published in Taiwan, and have also been translated into English, German, French, Japanese and other languages. Among his best-known works in English are The Corpse Walker (2008), a translation of his Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society, and God is Red (2011), a book about Christians in China.
Liao has won many international awards, including Christianity Today’s Best Book Award (2011), the German Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (2011), Poland’s Ryszard Kapuściński Prize (2011), and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2012).
Bibliography
1. Lao Wei, Interviews with China’s Underclass (vol. 1), 2001.
2. Liao Yiwu, “The File of Liao Yiwu”, 2001.
3. Yan Zi, “An Interview with Liao Yiwu: Regarding Interviews with China’s Underclass”, 2004.
4. Wu Yu, “Liao Yiwu Chronology: He Came from China’s Underclass”, 2012.
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