Liu Xiaobo (intellectual)

Liu Xiaobo (Chinese: 刘晓波; Pinyin: Liú Xiǎobō; born 1955 in Changchun) is a critical intellectual and human rights activist in reform-era China. Liu is now (2007) President of [http://www.penchinese.net/en/enindex.htm Chinese Independent PEN] .

Reporters Without Borders published the following statement: "Reporters without Borders, a group that promotes freedom of the press, has honored Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo as a 'defender of press freedom.' A former Beijing Normal University teacher, Mr. Liu heads the Independent Chinese PEN Center, an association of writers that describes itself as dedicated to the protection of freedom of expression and the defense of writers suffering from governmental repression."

According to Reporters without Borders, Liu Xiaobo "is determined that the Chinese media should become a counterweight to the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party. He is tirelessly fighting for the universal ideal of press freedom [and] calling for the release of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents."

Mr. Liu is a human rights activist who has called on the Chinese government to be accountable for its actions. He has been detained, arrested, and sentenced repeatedly for his peaceful political activities, including participating in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 that ended when the People's Liberation Army violence against peaceful demonstrators at Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other places in June 1989.

In 1996, Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to three years in a forced-labor camp for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party. And earlier this month, he was briefly detained and questioned about articles he wrote for Internet sites outside China.

By speaking out for an open society in China, says Vincent Brossel of Reporters without Borders, Liu Xiaobo continues to risk his personal freedom: "He's facing a real risk. He has been fighting for freedom of expression for years."

In recent years, the Chinese government has taken some positive steps on fighting corruption and extending social security, among other issues. But China's human rights record remains poor and people speaking out on issues that the government deems sensitive do so at risk of arrest. Michael Kozak is U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He says it is "a very discouraging development [that] we continue to see detentions and arrests of those seeking to take advantage of the space created by reforms."

The U.S. is committed to standing with those people in China, including Liu Xiaobo, who are struggling for human rights."'

Jon Solomon, University of Washington, published the following: "Liu Xiaobo’s writings on philosophy, literature and politics before and after the 1989 Democracy Movement form an extremely significant but insufficiently understood effort to redefine the philosophical and political discourse of sovereignty in modern China."

Liu Xiaobo’s attempt to initiate an internal dialectic of exile and a concomitant deconstruction of sovereignty makes his brand of dissident politics and philosophy nuanced in a way significantly different from that of other Chinese intellectuals committed to the cause of Democracy. By joining a critique of domestic Chinese production of knowledge to an historical position that questions exteriority, Liu is able to link his resistance to the "sovereign police" in Beijing with the possibility of critiquing Western neo-Liberalism. To read Liu’s work is above all to rethink the politics of knowledge about China in a way that goes beyond the representation of social order to emphasize the open-ended performativity of social relations. Our goal in reading Liu is thus not to disqualify the courageous stance of well-known dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng or Fang Lizhi, but to broaden our understanding of the possibilities of resistance to the "sovereign police" in Beijing and the ethical ramifications of "our" understanding.

The methodology behind this presentation may be broadly summarized under the notion of the "Social Construction of State Sovereignty." To place Liu Xiaobo within this global context—a new era in the construction of sovereignty—means to continue beyond the collapse of the Qing Dynasty our concern with China’s forced entry into the "family of nations," the European system of nation-States.

External links

* [http://www.chinaherald.net/uploaded_images/Xiaobo-754601.jpgPortrait of Liu Xiaobo]
* [http://www.boxun.com/my-cgi/post/display_all.cgi?cat=liuxb Writings by Liu Xiaobo]