by Liao Yiwu
History has proven on countless occasions that rumors disguising the truth spread faster than the truth. Some people say these days are like the 1930s—that China, rising like some monster, is reminiscent of the Nazis. On September 2, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Ai Weiwei, an “exiled dissident” who has repeatedly returned to China over the years. “Until his death, Liu Xiaobo seems to have been well treated in the hospital,” said Ai Weiwei. “Liu Xia, who’d been allowed to stay by his side, was also in a good mood.” Ai also said that Liu’s detention conditions were obviously much better than that of others. This was of course a trick of the Chinese authorities, meant to give the impression that they had been treating Liu Xiaobo well all along.
On Chinese Twitter, Ai Weiwei posted several comments that closely resembled pronouncements by Chinese officials. On July 16, he wrote: “People deliberately ignore the fact that Liu Xiaobo and his wife maintained communication with the outside world until the last days of his life . . . From the look of it, the couple’s last days were spent in good spirits, thank God. There are pictures, written words, and voice recordings of this. Liu Xia kept the funeral simple of her own free will, invited no friends, a quick burial at sea . . .”
But there is proof. On the afternoon of August 31, 2017, I called Liu Xia again. I understood that someone must be eavesdropping, but I also felt—in the face of these rumors—that indelible testimony must be left.
“On June 6, I received a message and immediately rushed to Jinzhou from Beijing,” Liu Xia told me. “As always, we gazed at each other through glass. He was still in prison and not yet hospitalized, but feeling very sick. His high fever had not abated for half a month, and there was no strength in his entire body. He said he had never felt this way before.”
“Still no outside medical treatment?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Do you think this is a routine visit?”
“No. They phoned. I had a sense: they’re letting me come when it isn’t prison visit time, something that has never happened before.
“Then he was transferred from prison to Shenyang Hospital, several hundred miles away. We also went to Shenyang to stay; we couldn’t leave. At this time there was still no medical parole. It was just like the visits in prison: each time you meet for twenty minutes, at most twenty-five, police all around, unblinking stares, no human feeling.”
“Did he have trouble speaking?”
“He could speak very feebly. Later the doctors and I talked it over and decided to tell him about his illness, since it would be awkward to perform such a complicated treatment without informing the patient. So I told him. He said don’t treat it. ‘But if you don’t treat it, you can’t leave,’ I coaxed him, saying that on returning to Beijing, before going abroad, it would be best to undergo treatment. He listened to me . . . but, really, I didn’t want it treated, either! I was also naïve at the start. Even if it was incurable, they should have let us go, whatever stage the treatment was at; when it was over our friends would be with us. But there was no choice, no way, I felt I was useless, no use at all.”
“Once in the hospital, there was no getting out . . .”
“Round the clock, intubation all over, but the cancer cells kept spreading . . .”
“I’ll tell you one thing. During the day on the twelfth, the German embassy wanted passport photos of you, Liu Hui, and Xiaobo, to prepare visas in anticipation of you all being let go. I really believed you and Liu Hui would come with Xiaobo.”
“At first they said they’d deal with it, then that there’d be a wait of two or three months, and then he died. Xiaobo never wanted treatment; he accepted it all for me and Liu Hui.”
“Was it any use?”
“I have no idea. Anyway, each day was worse than the last. You’re just watching a person waste away bit by bit.”
“How long were you and Xiaobo allowed to be together?”
“Not long. After the medical parole paperwork was done, there wasn’t even a month left. People were with us all the time.”
“Space to move?”
“Just the ward.”
“Like being in a cage.”
“Not just the two of us. There were others around us continuously. I counted every day over a hundred doctors, nurses, all kinds of assistants. But still, in other words, no choice.”
“You two were never alone together.”
“Right. There was little time for us to really be able to speak a few words, even. Xiaobo said it was like we were living together. He kidded me, saying I should take him out to tea, take him to the countryside to play, but actually at the time he already couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t eat anything. At the time he was always saying to people, ‘This is my wife, this is my wife.’ Of course, the whole room full of doctors and nurses knew I was his wife, but he’d still say it to everybody he saw. Too silly.”
“There’s a photo of him sitting, with you feeding him soup.”
“One day good, one day bad; one day he could eat a little, the next he couldn’t. When he was finished eating, he couldn’t even piss; he had to do dialysis.”
“There’s another photo, of the two of you walking in the ward.”
“While walking in the ward, he wouldn’t allow anybody to support him; he wanted to walk on his own. Every morning he’d make a nurse wait as he washed himself in the bathroom, and he’d be as clean as a whistle, waiting for me there.”
“Would he walk a bit after washing?”
“After washing, there were all sorts of IV bags to reattach. Most of the time he was lying in bed.”
“He was able to write a foreword for your photo album. I read it and felt that if he could still write, he could still hold on.”
“Later he couldn’t write. He was done. Whatever he ate he vomited up.”
“The day before yesterday you said, just before he died, that he told you ‘Go out, go out.’ I couldn’t sleep that night because of that.”
“That was on the twelfth, he tried to drive me away from his bedside. He knew he couldn’t leave, so he pushed me to leave.”
“Could he still get up from the bed then?”
“No, he couldn’t any longer.”
“That German expert said Xiaobo still particularly wanted to get out of China. We’d already talked this over.”
“Right. Who knows. Anyway, I don’t know.”
“At the time, I still thought you and Liu Hui would be able to get out, carrying his ashes.”
“He’s at peace, waiting for me. I definitely want to die now.”
“No matter what, you can’t think this way. You are an extension of his life. You haven’t left China yet. What sort of extension is that? You’re wrong to think like that.”
“Give me time. I can’t leave now. You have to understand: it’s not that I don’t want to go; it’s that I’m not allowed to. You have to understand this. You pressure me and pressure me, but it’s useless: you’ll pressure me to death. What can I do locked up alone at home? Think about it. I told you, and I also told them: in a few months, in a few months . . . Isn’t this clear enough? I’ve fought for all I can fight for, and your pressuring me makes me even more anxious. No one would put themselves through days like these! Last night I came upstairs with a cigarette. I don’t know how I did it, but I burned the quilt. I’m still in a daze, feel nothing.”
“You have to be careful, alone at home.”
“I won’t take a cigarette upstairs in the future.”
“Two days ago, you said his death was still . . .”
“He was unconscious for a few hours at the end. His life was entirely supported by drugs and a beating heart.”
“I don’t dare think about it.”
“I feel like it wasn’t real even now.”
“So live a better life.”
“I persevere, but he couldn’t. I didn’t want to see him plugged into machines, either, living as a vegetable.”
“You did
n’t agree to the throat intubation?”
“If he had the tube in, he would never have woken up again. And it wouldn’t have lasted long, because it all depended on drugs. As long as a tube was inserted, much of what we said to each other couldn’t have been said. When it’s inserted, there are a lot of anesthetics, then a coma, maintaining a heartbeat. I couldn’t bear to watch him lying there like that, so I said to Xiaobo that he shouldn’t agree to it. Xiaobo said: ‘Oh, I understand.’ As final discretionary power was given to me, if I’d wanted him to live with tubes, he’d be living, but I didn’t want him lying in a bed like that, on the surface unconscious, but with the body still suffering.”
“Would he still be able to speak with you?”
“Not in a coma.”
“When did he go completely into a coma?”
“The afternoon of the thirteenth, he couldn’t communicate with me; he was just lying there, talking especially fast; you couldn’t hear clearly what he was saying. He continued speaking for over an hour, especially fast. Because he had a nose tube, his voice was changed. Once the speed at which he spoke increased, you couldn’t understand what he was saying.”
“You must have been able to make sense of a few sentences, no?”
“No. In the end he stopped speaking, just moved his legs. His legs were going nonstop, as if he were walking, continuous. More than an hour went by . . . Nonstop, nonstop . . .”
“After he died, how have you gotten by?”
“I don’t know how I’ve done it. I have no idea even now. The time spent crying is more than the time I’ve spent sleeping.”
“How was it that the sea burial happened so quickly?”
No response.
“Liu Xia. Liu Xia.”
No response.
The line went dead, and I couldn’t reconnect. On September 1 and again on September 4, I called Liu Xia again, and we were careful to avoid speaking of the sea burial, as if that windy and sun-drenched sea was Tiananmen Square itself, with Xiaobo standing between the sea of people, as he had twenty-eight years earlier, and the sea of waves. Liu Xia said she was just about to go to the hospital for a checkup, meaning she was going to “disappear” until the close of the Nineteenth Party Congress.
Having experienced all of what happened surrounding Liu Xiaobo, nothing in this world will ever shock me again.
August 28, 2018, in Charlottenburg [Berlin]
APPENDIX ONE
* * *
A Guide to What Really Happened
By Ding Zilin and Jiang Peikun
In 1989, Jiang Jielian—son of Professors Ding Zilin and Jiang Peikun—was only seventeen. A high school student swept up in the fervor of the patriotic student movement, he gave himself over to the street protests. On the night of June 3, he was shot in the chest and died before reaching the emergency room. His grieving parents decided to speak out and publicly accused the government of their son’s murder. With Ding and Jiang in the lead, some of those who had lost loved ones in the massacre came forth one by one and formed the Tiananmen Mothers movement. The murderers still govern the country, while the parents who lost their children grow old and die under the gaze of the secret police. But the Tiananmen Mothers bear witness.
* * *
For many years, friends would ask us: “How many people were actually killed in the June Fourth massacre?” We cannot yet answer that question. At the time—according to the report that Chen Xitong, mayor of Beijing, gave the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, for example—the government openly acknowledged that more than 200 people had been killed, including 36 university students and some soldiers. That figure clearly conceals a great deal. At the time of the massacre, the Chinese Red Cross Society announced that the real number of the dead was between 2,600 and 3,000. That figure was soon buried by official government figures and people never mentioned it again.
We believe even if the Red Cross number is not completely accurate, it is an important reference point. This view was verified in the course of our own work of searching for and interviewing victims’ families. When the massacre occurred, we, the families of the victims, visiting hospitals throughout Beijing, saw with our own eyes the dead bodies of the victims and the lists of the dead posted by the various hospitals. (The majority of victims were quickly cremated, as is common practice today in China.) What we witnessed firsthand far, far exceeds the official numbers. When the family of the massacre victim Du Guangxue collected his remains from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, the serial number on his body was “No. 30.” Who, then, were numbers 1 through 29? How many more were there after number 30? We have recorded fewer than ten victims from Peking Union Medical College Hospital. How many more dead were “disposed of” and never sent to the hospital? How many so-called missing people were there? We know even less about those cases.
The following two lists are the names of 202 people killed and 49 wounded in the June Fourth massacres. They are the fruit of twenty-two years of perseverance by the Tiananmen Mothers group, which has conducted extensive interviews. The lists are soaked with the blood, tears, and suffering of these fellow victims. In an article written on the tenth anniversary of June Fourth, Ding Zilin wrote: “Over the past decade, I have been crawling in the pile of the victims’ ‘corpses’ and floating on the deep sea of tears of the victims’ families. The feelings of suffocation and the overwhelming grief I have felt these days and nights have made me understand what death is.” These are not only the personal feelings of Ding Zilin, but of everyone who took part in the work of locating and interviewing the families of the victims of June Fourth.
Recording the names of the dead is a sacred and heavy responsibility. The process is not only about the lives and deaths of individuals but also about bearing witness to history. We are determined to avoid the slightest negligence or error. We remember how in 1996, the seventh anniversary of the massacre, a document from our group proclaimed, “Up to this point, we have already found nearly 200 people killed in the June Fourth massacres.” But in the months and year that followed, these numbers did not increase; on the contrary, they decreased. Twenty-two years after June 4, 1989, our list of the June Fourth dead has only 202 names. The reason for this is that the people who provided us with clues about the names of the dead gave us neither the names of eyewitnesses nor any other necessary evidence.
We put our best efforts into searching for evidence and confirming information about the victims, but until we have definite proof, there must be reservations. Following initial leads, we proceeded to confirm the information. For example, it took us a total of eight years to find the family of the June Fourth victim Wu Guofeng. Some leads about the June Fourth dead we were not able to verify, despite repeated investigation, and so we decided to remove those names from the list. In 1998 alone, we eliminated ten names.
Searching for families and interviewing them was a long process that advanced slowly as more information accumulated. Even with those killed or injured whose information was already on record, it was still a tedious process to verify such facts—from piecemeal to complete, from sketchy to precisely correct—as the place where they were killed or injured, where the bullets hit them, the hospital where they died, and the way in which their families are getting by in the aftermath. Regardless, this list will have gaps that need to be filled in and mistakes that need to be corrected. We earnestly hope that our readers will provide new evidence that will make the list more accurate.
Some of the families of the June Fourth victims (including the wounded and disabled), intimidated by pressure from the Chinese authorities, were afraid to provide relevant information. Some of the people with knowledge of the cases, from an instinct for self-preservation, would not cooperate and refused to provide information. The addresses of some of the people involved changed constantly over the months and years, so that some of the leads we originally had became useless.
At the same time, we have received tremendous sympathy and help, inc
luding from Chinese students overseas who have provided us with valuable leads. Here we express our profound gratitude to them and hope that they will continue to support us.
This list of names has been provided to the outside world five times over the years:
• In 1993, the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights was held in Vienna. Ding Zilin was invited but in the end was unable to attend because of obstacles set up by the Chinese authorities. Instead, she provided a written statement to the conference providing the names she had already found of sixteen massacre victims.
• In 1994, Ding Zilin published the “List of the June Fourth Victims” in Japanese, Chinese, and English. In those three editions, Ding Zilin in her personal capacity released the names of ninety-six dead and forty-nine wounded.
• In 1999, on the tenth anniversary of June Fourth, our group, with the assistance of the New York–based organization Human Rights in China, edited and published a booklet called Witness to the Massacre—the Search for Justice. In the booklet were the names of 155 of the dead who had been confirmed as June Fourth victims.
• In 2005, the Hong Kong magazine Kaifang (Open) published Ding Zilin’s book In Search of the Victims of June Fourth. The number of names of the dead published in that book increased by 31 to 186.
• In 2010, a list was released that included 201 people killed in the June Fourth massacre, including some people whose full names or first names were not known. There are two reasons for this missing information. The first is that family members did not wish to publicize the names of the deceased. The second is that the whereabouts of the deceased’s family members had not been found. In these cases, at least two eyewitness accounts were needed for them to be included. We obtained the names of many people rumored to have been killed, but we did not include them without reliable eyewitness testimony. The last six names on the list were provided in the book The Explosion of History by the Xinhua Press Agency journalist Zhang Wanshu. Zhang listed the names of twenty-three dead in his book, seventeen of whom we had already found prior to the publishing of the book, but six of whom we had not found. We added those six names to the list. The names that Zhang provided are very credible. Zhang said that at five a.m. on June Fourth, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications hospital listed twenty-nine dead. Jiang Peikun had gone to the hospital at almost the same time and got a number of twenty-eight, a difference of only one name.
