Perhaps the most eloquent blog entry ever made, and it consisted of 2 characters. [View all]

[Jim__]

“” - I didn't put the characters in the title because I couldn't get them to be an opening and closing quote - I think that has more effect.

This is from a review of 3 books in the Ocotber 24th edition of the New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, it requires a subscription to read the complete article.


For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison
by Liao Yiwu, translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 404 pp., $26.00

This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver)
by Han Han, edited and translated from the Chinese by Allan H. Barr
Simon and Schuster, 265 pp., $24.00

Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009
by Ai Weiwei, edited and translated from the Chinese by Lee Ambrozy
MIT Press, 307 pp., $24.95 (paper)

The books are all translations of works by Chinese authors - you know, China, our trading partner. I'll take excerpts from 3 different parts of the story.

The first excerpt talks a little about Liu Xiaobo, a nobel laureate, currently a political prisoner in Jinzhou, Liaoning:

The book shows what happens to people who ignore the regime’s gentler advice against causing trouble. Penalties increase as resistance increases. First permits of all kinds—business or law licenses, passports, and the like—are canceled. Next come loss of employment and placement under surveillance. Dare you persist? Next comes house arrest (which Liu Xia, wife of China’s Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, now endures). If that fails, then detention, then prison. At each stage the choice is clear: “Capitulate or things will get worse.” Inside prisons, the gradations continue. There are fairly comfortable prisons, middling ones, and awful ones. Within each there are social hierarchies: the wardens rule the inmates, but among inmates there are chiefs who help the wardens and “enforcers” who help the chiefs. Even the people at the very bottom are ranked by those who must, and those who need not, for example, sleep next to the toilets or have last chance at the food.

The 2nd excerpt is about Liao Yiwu's book:

The extremes of both cynicism and ruthlessness are illustrated in the nicknames that prison authorities give to tortures. They liken them to cuisine. At the Song Mountain Detention Center in Chongqing, “the menu,” which Liao annotates for his readers, includes:

• Tofu Fried on Both Sides: Two enforcers punch the inmate on the chest and back. The sustained blows sometimes cause the inmate to go into shock….
  
  
• Stewed Ox Nose: The enforcer rams two fingers up the inmate’s nose until it bleeds….
  
  
• Sichuan-style Smoked Duck: The enforcer burns the inmate’s pubic hair, pulls back his foreskin and blackens the head of the penis with fire….
  
  
• Noodles in a Clear Broth: Strings of toilet papers are soaked in a bowl of urine, and the inmate is forced to eat the toilet paper and drink the urine.

The menu is hard to read, and it is lengthy. Liao lists thirty-eight dishes and comments on which of them could end in permanent injury or death for the inmate. Elsewhere, he notes how death-row prisoners live with the awareness that their organs will be harvested and sold after their executions. Somehow, though, Liao’s square look at painful and degrading treatment does not cloud his poet’s eye. Riding in a police car, he observes “the shops on both sides of the street blurring into a colorful sliding stage”; famished inmates “crammed chunks of rice into their mouths, stretching their necks like crowing roosters to help swallow.” The translator, Wenguang Huang, deserves much credit for keeping Liao’s art alive.

The 3rd excerpt is about Han Han and talks a little bit about his blog entry:

Born in 1982, Han Han failed high school examinations repeatedly and eventually dropped out, but not before he wrote a searing indictment of the Chinese education system in a novel called San chong men (Triple Door). Published in China in 2000, that book was an immediate hit and eventually sold more than two million copies. Han also became a prize-winning race car driver and, in part because of his good looks, began to appear on magazine covers as well. He started blogging in 2005, and as of today his website has received more than 600 million hits. The blog essays collected in This Generation appeared between 2006 and 2012.

Han’s Internet hits would reach an even higher total if cyberpolice didn’t delete his more provocative posts shortly after they appear. Seeking to minimize the deletions, Han watches his words and frankly admits to his readers that “every essay has undergone self-censorship.” Foreign journalists sometimes frustrate him, he says, because they do not understand that he cannot—“at least, not now”—be as candid as he would like to be. He actually is “more expansive when responding to questions from Chinese reporters” because he knows he can trust them to do the requisite self-censorship for him. Yet he still gets his points across, and censorship sometimes even magnifies their force. The day after Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize was announced in Oslo, for example, Han posted a blog entry that consisted only of a pair of quotation marks: “”. A flood of comment followed. His readers had figured out that this was an open invitation to comment on something that was officially unspeakable.

The human spirit! And people understood.

Han Han: [center][/center]