What to read after Fifteen Years of Darkness NO COMPLAINS AND PAIN?

Xiaobo received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, during a lengthy prison sentence for his political opposition. During this detention, he also published the poetry collection June Fourth Elegies (Graywolf Press, 2012) and the essay collection No Enemies, No Hatred (Harvard University Press, 2012). He died, still in custody, on July 13, 2017.

In fact, though, Liu had become frustrated with the protesters, whom he found to display authoritarian behavior patterns themselves and who did not much warm to his counsel of pacifism and tolerance. After the June Fourth massacre he blamed himself for taking temporary refuge with a foreign friend in the diplomatic quarter while many other people—mostly workers, not students—remained in danger on the streets, trying to help others. For the rest of his life he felt ashamed of himself for fleeing to safety and haunted by the “lost souls” of people who died that night. . . .

Liu Xiaobo’s essays between 1999, when he left the labor camp, and 2008, when he entered prison for the third and final time, show his mature thought and are the heart of his intellectual legacy. He produced this writing under the constant strain of police surveillance and harassment. Police cars parked at his door regularly. Any essay he published on the internet or in an overseas magazine was held against him—and he knew it would be—but he kept writing anyway. Most remarkably, he continually maintained his political activism as well as his writing. He often left home to encourage and aid groups who were protesting, to visit the Tiananmen Mothers, or to promote petitions and open letters including, in his last fateful effort, Charter 08. During the same years most other dissident intellectuals chose to go abroad or, if they stayed in China, to write quietly at home, keeping a distance from the dangers of taking action. Liu Xiaobo went ahead with both writing and activism as if the immense pressures in the environment simply were not there. This characteristic was unique among his peers; it is what people meant by “iron” in calling him the “iron man of democracy.”