‘I Try to Talk Less’: A Conversation with Ai Weiwei and Liao Yiwu
from New York Review of BooksIn late July, Chinese authorities renewed travel privileges for conceptual artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, ending a five-year prohibition following his arrest in 2011. He promptly flew to Munich and then Berlin, where he has accepted a...
China: “Capitulate or Things Will Get Worse”
from New York Review of BooksThe massacre of protesters in Beijing on June 4, 1989, and the harsh repression during the months immediately following put China into a foul mood. Among ordinary Chinese, the prestige of the Communist Party, whose leaders had ordered the brutal...
For a Song and a Hundred Songs
In June 1989, news of the Tiananmen Square protests and its bloody resolution reverberated throughout the world. A young poet named Liao Yiwu, who had until then led an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment. Like the solitary man who stood firmly in front of a line of tanks, Liao proclaimed his outrage—and his words would be his weapon.
Prison Of The Mind: A Chinese Poet’s Memoir of Incarceration
Liao Yiwu, in his extraordinary prison memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs,” describes the case of a schizophrenic woodcutter who had axed his own wife, because she was so emaciated that he took her for a bundle of wood.
Prison of the Mind
Observing the Chinese prison system from the inside, as a “counterrevolutionary” inmate, Liao Yiwu tells us a great deal about Chinese society, both traditional and Communist. He ends his account by saying that “China remains a prison of the mind...
A Hundred Songs: Exiled Chinese Writer Liao Yiwu’s Rare U.S. Visit
Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, recently performed at the New York Public Library for his book's U.S. release. His years in prison are the subject of his book “For a Song and a Hundred Songs,” and is a dizzying, and often gruesomely graphic, testimony...
Poet’s Nightmare In Chinese Prison
Chinese author and poet Liao Yiwu on his reluctant dissent, his years in a Chinese prison, his relatively new celebrity status, and living with the torturous memories of his violent experiences.
Mo Yan Grants First Interview Since Winning Nobel Prize
A look at the highlights from a Der Spiegel interview with Mo, covering Ai Weiwei’s and Liao Yiwu’s criticism of the author, his comments on the Cultural Revolution, and his relationship with the government.
‘I’m Not Interested in Them; I Wish They Weren’t Interested in Me’
from New York Review of BooksAmid the recent crackdown on dissidents by the Chinese government, the case of Liao Yiwu, the well-known poet and chronicler of contemporary China, is particularly interesting. For years, Liao’s work, which draws on extensive interviews with...