The expatriate Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, who spent four years in prison for a poem condemning the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, says that China autocrat Xi Jinping is “an idiot” and “my biggest promoter.”
When a Chinese ambassador in Germany warned Yiwu that he risked causing trouble for his family back in China by publishing China-unapproved views, he replied, “I have published so many books abroad that if you keep harassing me, if you keep this up, you might as well go build me a bank. Every time you do something to me now, it’s an international incident with news headlines everywhere.”
The occasion for this recollection was Ian Johnson’s on-stage interview with Yiwu, reported by Jonathan Landreth at The China Project.
At the same event, an audience member asked about the role of technology in enabling the Chinese Communist Party to expand its power to censor. What this would mean “for future dissident voices? Will they be silenced?”
Yiwu thinks that despite the tech-assisted expansion of its reach, the Chinese government won’t necessarily succeed in all of its totalitarian aims.
In China right now, the surveillance that began in Xinjiang with 12 million Uyghurs has since spread like a virus to the whole. The surveillance has become nationwide. It’s very high tech and, at this point, it’s even being pushed abroad internationally with programs like WeChat. On the other side of this is the idiot leader at the top. Xi Jinping is someone who would carry a bushel of barley on his shoulders for five kilometers and not change shoulders. So it could be any day that he could just fall on his face. You never know. China right now is quite a perverse society in the sense that it has an idiotic ruler but, at the same time, incredibly severe control. So there are two very severe extremes.
Liao Yiwu also says that after the white-paper rebellion of 2022, he realized that he had “underestimated the youth” of China, “and now I recognize that they have their way and their wisdom in how they approach a revolution.”
His books include The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up.
