Liao Yiwu (; also known as Lao Wei) (born 1958 in Sichuan), is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is acritic of the Chinese regime, for which he has been imprisoned. His books, several of which are collections of interviews with ordinary people from the lower rungs of Chinese society, were published in Taiwan and Hong Kong and are banned in mainland China; some have been translated into English, French and German.
Liao was born in 1958, the same year as The Great Leap Forward. During the famine of The Great Leap Forward, he suffered from oedema and was close to dying. In 1966 his father was branded a counter-revolutionary during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His parents filed for divorce to protect the children. His mother was arrested for attempting to sell government issued coupons on the black market.
After High School, Liao traveled around the country. In his spare time he read banned Western poets such as John Keats and Charles Baudelaire. He also started composing his own poems and was getting published in literary magazines.He failed the university entrance exams and began to work for a newspaper. When his poetry was noticed, the Chinese Ministry of Culture gave him a paid position as state writer.
Criticism of the system and imprisonment
In Spring 1989, two magazine companies took advantage of the relaxed politics and carried Liao's long poems "The Yellow City" and "Idol." In the poems, he criticized the system, calling it paralyzed and eaten away by a collective leukemia. The poems were deemed anti-communist and he was questioned and detained and his home was searched.
On June 3, 1989, after hearing about the Tiananmen Square protests, Liao composed a long poem entitled "Massacre." Knowing that it would never be published, he made an audiotape and recited the poem by using Chinese ritualistic chanting and howling, invoking the spirits of the dead. Liao and friends made a movie, the sequel of Massacre, "Requiem."
He was arrested in February 1990 as he was boarding a train with six friends and his pregnant wife, all of whom were arrested also. Liao received a four year sentence. He was placed on the government's permanent blacklist. While in prison, due to torture and abusive punishment, he suffered several mental breakdowns and twice attempted suicide. He was known as "the big lunatic". From a fellow prisoner, an elderly monk, he learned to play the Xiao. He then began to interview other prisoners about their lives.
When he was released from prison, his wife and their daughter had left him, and his former literary friends kept their distance. He lived for a while as a homeless street musician in Chengdu, collecting stories.
Work after his release, and international success
He processed the time in prison with his book Testimonials. A German translation of this work is planned for 2010.
In 1998 he compiled "The Fall of the Holy Temple" an anthology of underground poems from the 1970s, mainly from Chinese dissidents. One of China's vice premiers called it a "premeditated attempt to overthrow the government, and is supported by powerful anti-China groups."
In 2001 his multi-volume Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society was published in Taiwan. In it he interviews people from "hustlers to drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped, those who deal with human waste and with the wasting of humans, artists and shamans, crooks, even cannibals." It is currently banned in China, like most of his works. He was arrested several times for conducting "illegal interviews" and for exposing the dark side of the Communist Party.
A French translation of some of these interviews titled L'Empire des bas-fonds appeared in 2003. An English translation of 27 of the interviews was published under the name The Corpse Walker in 2008. A German translation, Fräulein Hallo und der Bauernkaiser, appeared in 2009.
In 2008 he signed the Charter 08 of his friend Liu Xiaobo, although he says of himself that he is not really interested in politics, just in his stories.
In May 2008, after the Sichuan earthquake, Liao went to the disaster region and interviewed survivors fighting corrupt officials. This material was published as Chronicles of the Big Earthquake in Hong Kong in 2009. The French translation Quand la terre s’est ouverte au Sichuan : Journal d’une tragédie appeared in 2010.After having been denied permission to leave the country many times, he wrote an open letter to Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel in February 2010. Later that year he was allowed to leave the country for the first time. He visited Germany accepting invitations to the literary festivals in Hamburg and Berlin as well as to an event in Cologne. Some of his interviews were read, and he sang songs, played the flute and drank hard liquor.
He lives with his wife in Chengdu, supporting himself with the royalties from his books published abroad. He remains under police surveillance.
In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Authorities prevented him from attending the award ceremony in Beijing.
In Engish, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, hardcover: Pantheon (April 15, 2008), 336 pages, ISBN 978-0375425424; trade paperback: Anchor; Reprint edition (May 5, 2009) 352 pages, ISBN 978-0307388377
The Fall of the Holy Temple (1998)
Report on China’s Victims of Injustice
Testimonials (??)
Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society ??????? 2 volumes, Changjiang Publishing House, China (when published this book was banned by the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department and the PRC Government's Publications Office.)
Interviews with the Lower Strata of Chinese Society ??????? 3 volumes, Maitian Publishing House of Taiwan ???????.
China's Unjust Court Cases ????? Volume 1, Laogai Foundation, 2003, Washington, D.C. (www.laogai.org) Black Literary Treasury, Edited by Liao Tianqi.
China's Petitioner Villages ????? Mirror Publishing Co., 2005, USA
China's Unjust Court Cases ????? Volume 2, Laogai Foundation, Washington, 2005 D.C. Black Literary Treasury, Edited by Liao Tianqi.
The Last of China's Landlords ????? (two volumes) printed in Hong Kong, published by The Laogai Research Foundation, Washington D.C. in April 2008. Website www.laogai.org ISBN 978-1-931550-19-2
Earthquake Insane Asylum ????? in Taiwan 2009; French edition 2010.
