Geremie Barmé on Liu Xiaobo

http://chinaheritage.net/journal/mourning/

I’ve been mourning Liu Xiaobo for a quarter of a century.

For five intense and eventful years in the late 1980s and early 1990s Xiaobo and I shared what I believe was a real friendship, something special to both of us. We weren’t pengyou 朋友 in that vacuous, Sino-American ‘everyone’s my friend’ kind of way; nor were we gemen’r 哥們兒, that smart ass Beijing version of buddy-buddiness. Much less, thank heavens, did we ever become lao pengyou 老朋友, an accursed expression that, in reality, indicates a long-term association reaffirmed by bonds of mutual benefit, imposing thereby an exploitative emotional burden on both parties. Nonetheless, we were, to use the Beijing argot, tie , iron-clad.

Comments

# 1.   

He is very much a symbol for free thinking/speaking one's mind. Sad that his wife is now paying much sadness for his strive of liberty...

susan, July 13, 2017, 5:25p.m.

# 2.   

"Xiaobo was ecstatic when Li Zehou 李澤厚, a revered reformist philosopher and his bête noire, attacked me for having defended him in the Chinese media. Among other things, I’d said that Li, as well as Liu Zaifu 劉再復 — the ‘godfather’ of then-progressive literary analysis — were the self-appointed gatekeepers of China’s new cultural orthodoxy, one that cloaked itself in threadbare artistic openness and rejected truly original voices like that of Liu Xiaobo. In response, in a published interview Li Zehou spluttered: ‘This Foreign Effendi Geremie Barmé will only be happy when All-Under-Heaven in China is in chaos’ 白傑明這個洋大人唯恐中國的天下不亂!We guffawed and chortled: no wonder Mao had it in for the intelligentsia!" I enjoyed reading this article. Thanks for posting the link!

susan, July 13, 2017, 7:53p.m.

# 3.   

"谢选骏指出上述观点有意无意地掩盖了,就是在共产党的领导下,私有化也同样不可阻挡,先富阶层已经垄断了中国的一切。刘晓波不是一个政治家,不是一个立法者,不是一个哲学家,不是一个历史学家,不是一个社会学家,他只是文艺青年,否则就不会考虑不周到如此地步。如果真的把政治家、立法者、哲学家、历史学家……这多么的大帽子都戴在他的头上,那就是不可承受的重量,连毛泽东都会因此沉沦,他的妻子为他坐牢到死。"...

susan, July 21, 2017, 2:39p.m.

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