No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems
A prominent Chinese intellectual and activist, Liu won international renown when he received the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. Currently, he is serving an 11-year sentence, his fourth imprisonment in the past 22 years. Originally selected by his wife, Liu Xia, this collection of essays and a sprinkling of poems covers two decades of Liu’s writings about politics, culture, and human and civil rights in contemporary China and details his transformation from bystander to observer to advocate. Though he is an equal in many respects to Václav Havel, who contributed a foreword to this volume, Liu is not as literary a figure. Instead, his voice is humble and inelegant, if vigorous. Liu’s style reflects his enthusiastic adoption of the Internet and his strong identification with netizens everywhere. His writing would be simply informative if his subjects were not so urgent and the clarity of his moral stance not so gem hard, crystal clear, and necessary, as when he writes, Let’s face it, the only way to live in dignity, inside this depraved society that we inhabit, is to resist. --Michael Autrey