China Through the Eyes of its Most Famous Dissident

In 2010, human rights activist Liu Xiaobo became the first Chinese dissident ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Jailed at the time of his award, he delivered his speech in absentia. “I have no enemies and no hatred,” his statement read, reiterating a famous line from his June Second Hunger Strike Declaration on the eve of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Liu would die in jail seven years later, at the age of 61, a symbol of resistance to Chinese authoritarianism and of the fight for free expression. 

Though Liu is hardly a household name in America, he is a pivotal figure for understanding modern China, argues Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson, who has covered China for 35 years. 

Writing for the New York Review of Books, Johnson reviewed a comprehensive biography of Liu that had been largely ignored by the mainstream press. His review of I Have No Enemies, by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi (Columbia University Press 2024), won the Washington Monthly’s 2025 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing for large publications. In this episode of the Washington Monthly’s podcast, Johnson discusses the significance of Liu’s life and what Americans misunderstand about China. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available on Spotify, YouTube and iTunes.

***

Anne Kim: Welcome, Ian, and congratulations!

You chose to review a 550-page biography that you noted had been “all but shunned by the mainstream media with substantive reviews only appearing in two publications, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the China Books Review. And there was a one paragraph review in Foreign Affairs.” Why did you choose this book and what did you see as its significance?

Ian Johnson: Well, I thought the topic itself was in some ways a slam dunk because the topic of the biography, Liu Xiaobo, is the only Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate, excluding the Dalai Lama. So in that sense, he’s an important historical figure. He died in custody in prison, making him the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die since a German journalist died during the Nazi era.

The biographers include Perry Link, who’s probably one of the most distinguished and important scholars of Chinese literature and dissent over the past century, as well as a Chinese colleague who went by a pseudonym but is also a well-known person. So I thought the combination of subject and authors just made this a really important book, an inherently important book. 

It’s the kind of book that, whether it’s good or bad, should be reviewed. There haven’t been really very many biographies of Liu Xiaobo, and no major comprehensive biographies. 

Anne Kim: One of the interesting things about your review is that you spend the first two thirds actually talking about the details of Liu’s life. And there are a lot of things that I didn’t know—and probably a lot of Americans didn’t—about his life. I’m wondering if that was part of the goal of your review—simply to educate Americans about this really remarkable figure who is not as well-known as he should be in America.

Ian Johnson: Absolutely. I think that one of the tragedies of the Chinese dissident movement is that on the one hand, some people do take it very seriously, but I think that it’s often been kind of overshadowed or ignored in our view of China.

For the past 40 years, the story has been of China becoming an economic juggernaut. When I was in China starting out as a correspondent in the 1990s, that was the story. Later, I joined the Wall Street Journal as a macroeconomics reporter and covered China’s accession to the WTO. And it was all about “China’s rising, China’s rising, and they’re going to eat our lunch.” People would go to China like Tom Friedman every once in a while and say, “My goodness, a Shanghai taxi driver told me they’re going to eat our lunch.” I’m joking, but I think that’s been the dominant story. 

Now it’s China, the big scary superpower that’s got hypersonic missiles and is threatening Taiwan and secretly backing Putin in Ukraine. 

Those are all perfectly valid and important stories. But there is also a missed story, which is the universality of Chinese thought and that there are Chinese people, just like everywhere in the world, who want to be able to express themselves, who want to participate in their government.

It irked me that people like Liu Xiaobo were not better known in the West, whereas a generation or two ago, their equivalents in the Soviet Union were very well known and were taken much more seriously.

Anne Kim: Well, I’m wondering if Americans are going to be more interested now in the techniques of dissidence, if nothing else, given everything that’s happening in America today. 

Ian Johnson: I think that one of the inspiring things about China and Chinese people like Liu Xiaobo is how they pushed for ideals even in the darkest of hours—that in the hardest of times, people like this still stood up and still wanted to be counted. I think that’s inspiring no matter where you come from on the political spectrum and no matter what era or what culture you come from.

Anne Kim: Another interesting aspect about your review is the fact that you talk about how much Liu knew a lot about America, even though Americans don’t know much about him. He studied at Columbia University and at the University of Hawaii. He was an advocate of the Westernization of China. 

You also talk about misperceptions of Chinese history in American eyes. Talk a little bit about how Liu’s life explains the arc of Chinese history in 20th century through today and why he is the right prism for understanding China.

Ian Johnson: Liu was born about a decade after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. He grew up in a communist party ecosystem when China was closed off to the outside world. His father was an academic who worked for a state-run university. And they suffered a little bit in the Mao era, but he grew up with the offspring of generals and so forth. After Mao died in the late 1970s and China embarked on what’s known as the “reform era,” when they turned their back on planned economics and so on, Liu really embraced that period and became probably China’s best known public intellectual. He was a bit naïve, and his life story follows this arc of how Chinese intellectuals dealt with the outside world over the past half century. 

He was, as you said, an advocate of full-scale westernization of China. At times he said there’s nothing of value in Chinese culture, and he was a bit of an iconoclast. He liked to exaggerate. But I think he really embraced the idea that we need to throw ourselves open to the outside world. We have to learn from the West and so on. 

But the Chinese system proved to be more durable than perhaps he had hoped, especially after the Tiananmen massacre when the party put a stake in the ground and said, “No way are we going to have political reform like that. We’re not going to have a Gorbachev-style revolution with the Communist Party folding.” Then he had to think of other ways to challenge the party. He was really influenced by a very famous Chinese novelist, Wang Xiaobo, who talked about the silent majority of people in China who are victims of the system. People who may be farmers, who may be miners, who don’t have workers’ rights, who don’t have freedom of speech, who may be of a different sexual orientation. 

Liu Xiaobo embraced the idea of trying to improve things at the local level for these people. So instead of big grandiose statements about freedom of expression and democracy, he began to work for the rights of these people on a smaller level. And that became his modus operandi from the late 1990s until his imprisonment after the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I think that’s a really interesting trajectory. 

Anne Kim: How did he actually do this grassroots work? What were the mechanisms he used to spread his message, and how did that bubble up into a nationwide movement?

Ian Johnson: This was not just Liu but a group of public intellectuals at the time who were drawing on ideas from Eastern and Central Europe. But the way they did it in the late 1990s was to make use of the Internet. Now we know that the Internet can be easily controlled and manipulated and can create these echo chambers where people are not being informed.

But at that time in the late 1990s, there was a lot of optimism about the Internet and it wasn’t so tightly censored in China. So, say, somebody in a local town would find a factory that was egregiously polluting the local water supply, just turning it black with pollution, killing all the fish, destroying irrigation network and causing crops to fail. They would take videos and post it on blogs or on social media, and this would create pressure on the government to change things. 

This was a tactic that these activists used time and again, and these cases became celebrated national cases as a way of pushing the government for some sort of change. That was Liu’s contribution for about a decade.

Anne Kim: But then there was his imprisonment, which was also a catalyst.

Ian Johnson: So his arc does unfortunately does continue on into the 2010s, by which time the government is no longer so open.

There was a golden age for Chinese civil society from the mid 1990s until about 2010. But this was a time when there was interesting independent Chinese journalism, there were bloggers, there were social media activists, there was a great independent movement for documentary films. About 200 independent documentary films are made at this time, sometimes detailing and dissecting issues such as pollution in a local area or problems with policies toward ethnic minorities in China. This all was done by people making use of digital technologies like digital cameras and PDFs in order to write books or to resurrect books that had been banned in the past. They could reprint them as a PDF and email them to get around censorship. 

So there was this great period, but it came to an end when the party felt that the pendulum had gone too far, and they saw what had happened in the Soviet Union. And Xi Jinping epitomizes that trend. He has spoken very openly about the fall of the Soviet Union being a great catastrophe and that it was basically because it was undermined by too much civil society. So the party collectively decided in the late 2000s to change this.

So in 2008—this is before Xi Jinping took power, but as part of that overall trend–Liu Xiaobo was detained and then eventually sentenced.

Anne Kim: After he passed away in 2017, what’s happened to the Chinese dissident movement since then?

Ian Johnson: Well, it’s a dark period for people inside China who are pushing for political change. It’s not as bad as in the Mao era, let’s say, but it’s still a time when these channels that I talked about during that golden era—somewhat independent journalism, the internet—have all been closed down systematically by the government, which has made a full court press to rein these in.

And yet there are still people working and trying. There are still people making movies and editing books and publishing underground journals. It’s just that they don’t have a public platform anymore. These independent documentary films that I mentioned before—there used to be independent film festivals, and people would go watch these films. Now it’s impossible. 

I spend a lot of my effort actually in running a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) that I put together called the China Unofficial Archives, which is a platform for this kind of independent thought in China. We have over a thousand items, including films, books, and magazines that we’re trying to preserve from vanishing. We digitize movies and magazines and put it up there for free, no paywall or registration required. We have a newsletter, and about a third of our readers come from inside China, which is heartening. 

Anne Kim: That’s a really cool project. I do want to go back to this question of American perceptions of China, because so few people know about the fact of the existence of Chinese dissidents and the arc of the life of someone like Liu. You wrote in your review that “many people view China as deserving little more than opprobrium,” and that “many political leaders and commentators treat China as a country to be contained, but not engaged.”

What do you mean by “engagement”?

Ian Johnson: This word has become almost taboo in the United States. It’s been viewed as some sort of appeasement policy that failed in the 2000s or 2010s. 

But I think engagement is important on several levels.

It’s been the policy of various organizations, including at times the US government, to see China in three dimensions: As a systemic rival to the United States, which it is in many ways; as an economic competitor, which it definitely is; but also as a potential partner for cooperation in certain areas, such as terrorism or drugs or the climate.

Regardless of how you view China, you have to engage with the country. 

It’s a country that I think demands our attention. We can’t just wish it away and hope that putting up trade sanctions and tariffs will somehow contain it. It’s much more sophisticated than, say, the Soviet Union was half a century ago. It’s not something that you can simply call an “evil empire” and use military means to isolate. China is a really successful economic player, and it’s going to be dominating major technologies through the 21st century. 

We have to understand it better. And that requires encouraging young people to study Chinese. It’s very depressing to see how few people now are studying Chinese.

And I think that Chinese should be something that people should want to study, not just for some realpolitik point of view, but because it’s a really important and interesting country that offers solutions to problems that we all grapple with. 

The way that they are rolling out renewable energy, for example, is interesting and impressive. And it’s not just some “Hitler built the Autobahn” explanation of an authoritarian state doing whatever it wants. There’s more to it. There’s a dynamism in China that’s very real and still has to be understood and experienced. 

Anne Kim: And China did just make this remarkable announcement at the United Nations about making a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Ian Johnson: Yes, it was quite a contrast. Trump was basically saying it’s all hokum and that if you follow green policies, you’re entirely wrong. 

China, meanwhile, is charging down the path of renewables. Admittedly, they’re still the world’s largest polluter and emitter of greenhouse gases, so there’s a bit of conundrum there, but they are going to potentially own these technologies, especially because they’re subsidizing them.

China is brutal and harsh, but the people running the country are not deluded. They understand what’s happening. They’ll still build coal-fired power plants because they need the energy, they want to keep producing, and they can’t afford to have unemployment. But they know where the future is and they want to own the future.

I think in that sense, it’s another example of how China embraces the future, whereas in the United States, you get the feeling that the future is just a big, horrible, scary thing that we’ve got to somehow avoid one way or another, whether it’s sticking our head in the sand or what. 

But in China, there’s this idea that they’re going to own the 21st century. I think America had that last century, but it doesn’t feel like the United States has that mojo anymore.

Anne Kim: Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us and for your review of a remarkable figure in history. Really appreciate the chance to talk with you.

The post China Through the Eyes of its Most Famous Dissident appeared first on Washington Monthly.