Wisdom Through Suffering: The Journey of Liu Xiaobo

The Economist’s cover page (15 July 2017) led with the headline ‘China’s Conscience.’ The leader article ran ‘The suffering of a remarkable political prisoner holds a message for China and the West.’ Liu Xiaobo was an academic, author and literary critic specializing in Chinese literature. His crime was to write ‘words.’ On June 26th, 2017, the prison authorities announced that he was being transferred from prison to a nearby hospital. His wife and family pleaded to them to allow him go abroad for special medical treatment. All to no avail. American and German doctors were eventually at the last minute permitted to visit him, but it was all too late. Use of words is not maybe a popular notion of a revolutionary’s identikit. But it has a message for us about the ‘power of words.’ Obviously, the Chinese authorities were not afraid of Liu because of fear of an armed insurrection. They were far more frightened of what he wrote, scared of the sway of words themselves. In the final statement he prepared during his trial on December 23, 2009, he remarked how