The Journey of Liu Xiaobo: From Dark Horse to Nobel Laureate ed. by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman et al. (review)

A decade has passed since Liu Xiaobo was granted the Nobel Peace Prize. The most important achievement of the collection of reflections and testimonies of more than 70 colleagues and close observers of the most renown critic of Chinese Communist Party rule was to be inclusive. The project was necessary because on some points our memory has begun to fade. The blocking of international access to data on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Xi Jinping regime¹ is relevant to the central challenge of Liu, and makes this book timely. Charter 08, his culminating project, for which he was convicted for subversion, called for rule of law and transparency.

Readers will better understand his accomplishments by reflecting thoughtfully on early failings and false starts that a number of the contributors have, again, in this volume, brought to our attention. Credit goes to the editors for bringing this useful discussion forward because the contradictions and the internal struggle to resolve them (successfully, with time and hard experience) are not just about the story of one opposition leader. The difficult evolution in Liu's thinking and activism stands as a lesson, today, for the movement that in 2010 received, in many different ways, the prize on his behalf. The pre-Tiananmen errors haunted him long after they were rectified.² More importantly (and because it is unfair, in some respects, to dwell upon them), the lack of clarity, today, on the underlying origin of these errors has continued to hobble the movement for democracy. Pointedly, the first through fourth sections of the book (pp. 3-230) divide the trajectory of the young literary dark horse of the 1980s at a turning point: before and after June 1989. At the time, we might have expected, following the repression, that Liu's previous provocative orientation would only deepen. But the account of his comrades in these pages shows that the exact opposite occurred, one explanation being that he could not accept the opportunity to go into exile.

Immersed during the 1980s in Nietzsche and Foucault, on one side, and the regime's texts of class struggle and enemy mentality on the other, we should not be surprised when we read the translations from Chinese—an "arrogance" that was "extraordinarily shocking" in the words of his colleague, former editor of Democratic China, Su Xiaokang (p. 171). Readers of China Review International are probably familiar with the strident remarks that characterized the 1988 Hong Kong interviews. Contributors Yu, Yang, and Shao recall the occasions and put them into context (pp. 63, 89, and 139).

It was perhaps the unexpected scale of the violence of June 4 and 5, 1989, that shocked Liu into seeing, without any further hesitation, the necessity of throwing his support to the most responsible of the student leaders on the square. The day-by-day and hour-by-hour eyewitness accounts from the different sources are well worth a close reading for understanding this turning point in his thinking. The details are revealing. Returning as soon as he could from New York, he joined the leadership of the movement, beginning to recognize as early as May the need to mediate between party hardliners and the student representatives. On the night of June 4, he formed part of the delegation that negotiated with the martial law troops to allow for the organization of an orderly retreat of the students from the square, including the physical disarming of some, to live another day.

Today, the lessons of Tiananmen and its aftermath still apply. Aside from the Chinese democracy movement proper, peripheral currents marked by intransigence and sectarianism present serious distractions within (1) the struggle for human rights and authentic autonomy in Tibet and Xinjiang; (2) the overwhelming, and politically heterogeneous, consensus in...