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Liao Yiwu, born in the Chinese province of Sichuan, whose father was accused of opposing the Cultural Revolution, grew up in great poverty with his mother. In 1989, when he wrote his now famous poem „Massacre“ during the brutal suppression of the student-led protests on Tiananmen Square, Liao Yiwo had long been a well-known writer and poet, but his poetry was blacklisted in China. Two years after its worldwide distribution, the poem „Massacre“ led to a four-year prison sentence, which the writer only just survived. When he was awarded the Freedom to Write Award by the Independent Chinese P.E.N. Centre in 2007, the Chinese government prevented this recognition. For years, the poet was unable to leave the country and his book Fräulein Hallo und der Bauernkaiser – Chinas Gesellschaft von unten was banned in his country. It was only after his book For a Song and a Hundred Songs , Liao Yiwu’s unsparing testimony from Chinese prisons, was published in 2011 that he managed to escape to Germany.
His new book, Mr Wang, the man who stood in front of the tanks: Texts from Chinese reality , has now been published here by S. Fischer Verlag with previously unpublished texts. The title story is about the unknown man who stood in front of the approaching tanks in 1989 and thus stopped the massacre for a brief historical moment. To this day, it has not been established how many people were shot in the massacre around Tiananmen Square. In his 2012 book The Bullet and the Opium , Liao Yiwu published a list of the „Mothers of Tiananmen Square“ with the names and short biographies of 202 victims, including many children and young people.
To mark the publication of Liao Yiwu’s new book, we are publishing a conversation that historian Irmtrud Wojak had with the writer in June in Murnau am Staffelsee on the occasion of the performance of his poem „Massacre“.
We would like to thank the fighter for human rights and 2012 Peace Prize winner of the German Book Trade, Liao Yiwu, as well as Stefanie Speermann (Speermann Arts) for her hospitality and Stephan Knies (Hamburg) for his special support of our conversation and our film recordings of the only performance of the poem „Massacre“ 2019 in Germany in the garden of Speermann Arts in Murnau am Staffelsee. We were allowed to film the performance in the wonderful surroundings of the mountains, whose beauty Liao Yiwu chose for the performance and which left nothing to be desired on this day. The film recording of the performance will soon be available on the Fritz Bauer Blog. (Ed.)