The Sovereign Police and Knowledgeable Bodies: Liu Xiaobo's Exilic Critique of Politics and Knowledge

The questions I will raise in this essay concern the status of the exile-refugee. This constellation of questions, which concerns the limits of the nation-state and the discourse of national sovereignty, is by no means exclusive to modern China, yet the historical specificity of Chinese experiences of exile, in all their unrecordable multiplicity, demands our attention—our attention, because none of us, with or without claims to Chinese identity, can stand completely outside this problematic, and not just simply because of the modern “Chinese diaspora” or the massive proportion of people on the planet claiming Chinese ethnicity. As difficult as it may be to offer a definition of exile, the term always concerns at least a certain notion of exteriority and claims to being home. The construction of this exteriority, like the institutional protocols that operate (through) it, necessarily brings into play the subjectivity of agents on both sides of the division assumed by the practices of “exile.”

In the United States of America we ought to know that exile carries an unmistakable poignancy for contemporary intellectuals in the People's Republic of China in their relation to the nation-state. After the series of events now condensed into the single date 4 June 1989, many Chinese intellectuals overseas suddenly found themselves denied the possibility of a “return” to China and began uncertain careers in “exile” in countries such as the United States. The years after the 1989 protest movement that culminated in the June Fourth Massacre saw everything from formal requests for asylum to conferences organized around the theme of exile.¹ I will situate a discussion of these events and their relation to the specific phenomenon of exile in China around the written and lived texts of Liu Xiaobo, one of China's leading activist-intellectuals and a personal friend of this writer. A limited reading of Liu Xiaobo's excessive text will, if not raise all the crucial questions (let alone provide some definitive answers), at least endow us with a preliminary means to broach this exorbitant relationship between the discourse of sovereignty and exile.

Judgment Day

Liu's critics, joined by many of his defenders, ask (either implicitly or explicitly), Should we judge Liu Xiaobo? This question of judgment is deeply implicated in a geopolitical rhetoric of location (If there is a process of judgment, where does this process take place?) and a theological rhetoric of moralism and the “soul.” The notion of a savior generically demands a corresponding object of the savior's saving action. One of the theological names for the objectivity of human essence is the “soul,” but whose soul? Would, or could, we be publicly concerned about the “private individual” named Liu Xiaobo were it not for the fact that behind him stands the deeply politicized question of an onto-theo-logical judgment upon nothing less—and nothing more—than China's soul? I cannot possibly undertake the dense and meticulous reading of modern history required to unwork this massive, generalized inscription of modern China into the ideological figure of onto-theo-logical politics, much less the equally urgent task of reading premodern history to unwork the inscription of classical China into the equally ideological figure of onto-theo-logical aesthetics. I will be content, however dryly, to cite titles in two separate, recent works—which are, significantly, both collaborative efforts between Chinese and non-Chinese—on the 1989 protest movement as evidence of this problem. The first is “Human Flesh versus Tanks.”

² This formula is not new to Asia; it goes back at least a century to the idea of “human bullets” and the spiritual superiority of the Imperial Japanese Army. Beyond that, of course, there are a host of European references articulating the relationship of modern war to popular sovereignty and national spirit. The second title...