China bars author and poet from festival

Kathleen E. McLaughlin

May 9, 2011

China has barred a prominent author and poet from attending a literary festival in Australia, the Guardian and others report.

Liao Yiwu, known for searing poetry and prose often critical of the Chinese regime, was blocked last month from attending a PEN literary event in New York, apparently another casualty of China's ongoing crackdown on critical voices.

Liao spent four years in prison after China's bloody crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, and has been monitored closely in the two decades since.

His current book, "The Corpse Walker," explores China's darker sides, with revealing, deeply personal stories and interviews of people who live on the fringes on society — from a professional mourner to a human trafficker.

In a forward to the English translation of the book, journalist Philip Gourevitch calls Liao "a ringmaster of the human cirus."

BACKGROUND ON ASIA

Extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh, ethnic violence in Burma and lack of free press in Cambodia are all indicators of a drift toward authoritarianism in many Asian nations. Some countries, though, have bucked this trend; except in conflict areas like Kashmir widespread rights violations in India are the exception rather than the rule. Still the region is home perhaps the globe’s worst human rights offender aging dictator, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, who has set the standard for state repression with prison camps of hundreds of thousands and a strangle-hold on resources.

As other Asian states like the Philippines and Thailand make halting progress toward protecting human rights, China stands out for a lack of fundamental freedoms and routine human rights violations against its population of 1.3 billion. The research scholar Li Xiaorong commented bluntly that “after a generation of economic development, after many rounds of US-China human rights dialogues and after millions of dollars of assistance to promote ‘rule of law and other ’reforms’,” still, “The human rights situation in China has not fundamentally improved.”

Large swaths of Chinese minority groups, such as Uighurs and Tibetans have few guaranteed rights amid ongoing and continuous state oppression that includes lethal indiscriminate force. The country heavily censors press, lawyers have “disappeared” indefinitely and at least 26 Chinese journalists are in prison. Human rights activists are also regularly silenced by imprisonment. An estimated 500,000 people have been imprisoned without charge or trial. In bureaucratic double-speak China amended the constitution in 2004 to read that, “the state respects and preserves human rights,” but continued imprisoning high-profile dissidents such as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo on "subversion" charges.??China’s human rights record threatens the popular belief that global economic interdependence will bring consensus that states should, if not protect human rights, at least value them.