Indian MP Mahua Moitra 7 sign of rising fascism speech wins plaudits

This and that

It's almost the end of January. We start the year with such hopes and lose steam somewhere in the middle of the first month. I realise that if I don't bother about results, if I just track my habits and see the ticks where ticks are supposed to be, I am more likely to climb back up on that bandwagon.

Today, I started out going to the gym and sweating profusely. Which made me feel saintly and flushed with ...I don't know, endorphins?

Anyway, I am listening to The Waves by Virginia Woolf on Audible:

I bind my hair with a white ribbon, so that when I leap across the court the ribbon will stream out in a flash, yet curl around my neck, perfectly in its place. Not a hair shall be out of place.

I listened to Wind in the Willows twice. Now I realise I luxuriate in the beauty of the descriptions, the whimsical flights of fancy, as well as the description of all that good food. It's what I listen for in The Christmas Carol as well. My favourite description there has to do with fat onions that resemble Spanish friars.

I think I may listen to The Secret Garden next. But I have yet to find a recording that I like.

This is my message from The Universe today.

Do you know what I'd really, really like, Jennifer?

For you to know that I think about you every moment of every day.

K?

The Universe

And that your happiness is the point of this all, Jennifer. And that chocolate was not an accidental discovery.

I'm back at work after a lovely four-day holiday. During that time, I went to Backyard to see in Mark's birthday with him and give him his presents, decided to make achari chicken tart (still haven't assembled all the ingredients - what on earth are nigella seeds?), visited my father twice, got back on the treadmill and exercise bike and made the 10,000 steps every day.

Read a book or two.

Went to Bookexcess to get a heap of presents (and wrapping paper).

Met Anita for tea to give her (finally) her Christmas present.

I've been a busy bee. And I thought I just spent my holiday sleeping.

Cha-no-yu

The four great qualities which the Seikasha -- the Tea Drinker -- was to celebrate and cultivate over the sacred cup were hospitality, courtesy, purity, and tranquility. The apartment must be plain, but elegant, with spotless mats and simple joinery; the utensils must be uncostly, but exquisite in shape and fitness. Temperance must be absolute; if food and wine mingled with the little feast nobody must exceed one bowl of rice and three saucers of sake. Nor was it solely for love of grace and the four chief virtues of the tearoom, Ka-kei-sei-jaku, that the famous tycoon inaugurated the cult of the tea leaf. His great mind saw that if he could give Japan a national and tranquil habit, easy of practice for the poor and attractive to the rich, he would do as much to sheathe the sword and humanise his people, and so it has turned out. Never, in truth, had a statesman's subtle device such grand success. The teacup, as I have said, is today the central fact of this fair and gentle land. It decides the architecture, binds together the societies, refreshes the fatigue, and rewards the day's work of high and low in Japan. The perspiring jinriksha man is satisfied with the warm infusion; the Minister and the Mikado himself are only happy when the "honourable tea" exhales its delicate fragrance from the hands of the kneeling musume. And there are little gracious ceremonies even about the most ordinary tea drinking in humblest houses, which everywhere elevate it above a mere beverage. Good manners in Japan prescribe a soft sort of solemnity whenever the little cup is being filled, and no hut is so lowly but it's kettle, it's teapot, and its tea equipage display something about them of distinction, taste, and the love of a chaste and perfect art.

But the Cha-no-yu, as Hideyoshi and Sen-no-rikiu settled it forever, carries these ceremonials to a grave perfection. To be quite orthodox the tearoom must be very small, one of but four and a half mats, roofed, if possible, with a single finely grained plank, or else thatched with bamboo grass. The few honoured guests should be called to the pavilion by wooden clappers, washing their hands first in pure water. No discontented person must be present, nor any scandal, or unkind words be heard. The host himself should mend the fire, light the incense, brush the mats, fill the white-pine ewer, and lay the ladle of red-pine; as well as see that the single picture is hung and the single flower-pot fairly set in its place. The tea should be of the finest green powder, from a beautiful but common little jar; placed in a cup of ancient design holding, perhaps, half a pint. The 'honourable' hot water is poured upon it, and then stirred in with a small bamboo whisk, which article itself, like the tiny spoon of the same material used for taking out the tea powder, must be of a certain form, and if possible, ancient, and famous for its artistic origin.

Even about the boiling of the water there is orthodox tradition, there is solemnity, I had almost said there is religion. The sumi in the brazier must be piled up in the outline of a glowing Fuji-san. The kettle of beaten iron must have no touch of modern vulgarity in its shape, the water must be drawn from the purest source, and -- at the moment of use -- in the third state of boiling. The first state is known by its low murmuring, and the appearance on the surface of the large slow bubbles distinguished as "fish eyes", gyo-moku; the second is when steam comes with quickly rising foam; the third is when the steam disappears in a tranquil, steady simmer, and the fluid is now "honourable old hot water." This is the propitious moment for the admixture, which being compounded appears in the guise of a light-green frothy compound, delicately fragrant and invigoratingly hot, contained in the antique cup, which, neatly folded in a fair cloth, should be handed now to the principal guest. Drinking reverently from it, he should tenderly wipe the rim at the spot where he has quaffed, but the next guest must drink at the very same place, for such is the "Kiss of brotherhood", in harmony with the friendly inspirations of this ceremony. The last guest must be heedful to drain the bowl to its dregs; then he passes it round to be examined, criticised, and made the subject of pleasant talk about the old days, the cannons of true art in pottery, or any other topic lightly arising from the graceful moment, as the tender fragrance of the tea leaf wafts itself about the air of the little spotless chamber and among the kneeling, happy, tranquil companions of the occasion.

At a glance, it will be seen how imperiously these elegant ceremonies, once established and received, have dictated to Japan the pure simplicity of her ceramic and metal work, and how they have passed down into all ranks of the people, constituting a standard of sweet and simple manners and of high-bred tastes which they were quicker to accept than any other nation. Perhaps nowhere except in Japan would it have been possible even for the great Hideyoshi and the astute Sen-no-rikiu to have indoctrinated a whole people with so pure and refined a passion. But the commonest Japanese have this charming tendency to a delicate sobriety of appetite and taste; they love the touch of art which elevates, the glimpse of grace, which dignifies. They have the nature rather of birds and butterflies than of ordinary human beings, and when you send out to your Kurumaya a cup of tea and a saucer of boiled rice, and hear afterwards his grateful words, you wonder whether he is of the same race as that which you left quaffing half-and-half and eating rump-steaks on the banks of the Thames. Of course the austere etiquette of the Cha-no-yu is special; but its spirit, as the central ceremony of tea drinking, has palpably passed through all Japan, where everything begins and ends with the tetsubin and the teacup. Nor is it too much to declare that to Buddhism, which brought in her religious ideas and the tea leaf, and to Hideyoshi, who taught her how to honour, enjoy, and infuse it, is due much, if not most, of the existing aspect of social and civic Japan.

(From Sake and Tea by Sir Edwin Arnold, Tokyo, Japan, Dec 19,1889)

The humanity of captors and torturers

China's most famous artist, Ai Weiwei, was arrested and detained for 81 days. When he was released from jail, he refused to talk to journalists. In fact, he refused all interviews about his experience inside, until he was approached by Barnaby Martin, who wrote, not an article, but a book, Hanging Man, named for one of  Weiwei's most famous pieces of art.

Here, at the end of the book, he talks about the humanity of his jailers and how they were victims themselves, trapped in a system they no longer believed in. 

It was a chastening realisation.

And so, the book ends on a note of hope.

"By the way," I say, "last night in the youth hostel, I went through all we said yesterday and I kept thinking that it would make a great play one day."

"Yes," says Weiwei. "When I was in there, I sometimes thought that too. The whole situation was so dramatic, it was so full of paradoxes. I was a prisoner of course but so were the guards who had to stand by me day and night, and so were the people watching me from outside, trying to figure out what to do with me. Everyone was stuck. It was a very dramatic situation. And we talked so much about the meaning of art, about politics, about freedom and all the time I tried to answer their questions but at the same time I had to be on my guard because you always have to be very cautious and very careful because you don't know what's really going on. You only know that you are in absolute danger but at the same time you are desperate to limit the danger and even though you are in absolute danger and cut off from reality, you must still make sure that you don't hurt somebody on the outside or make the problem even bigger by saying the wrong thing. And there was so much confrontation, so much hostility, and the interrogators were not allowed to get to know me or even to say anything that would make me a person. I was just a number. Number 1135. That's my room number. But even this becomes completely dramatic and surreal because the soldiers who are guarding me are young and they have their own past, their own lives, and nobody cares about them at all. They are just soldier A or B or C or D. So confusing. The situation really examines the very essential questions, the very philosophical questions. How this esoteric society maintains itself and how it will now work and what happens to human nature in those circumstances. It's significant that sooner or later all the soldiers, except one -- their leader didn't talk to me -- but all of the others all secretly talk to me. But though they all secretly talked to me none of them know that the other ones were also secretly talking to me because of course it's not allowed. They were so bored, wanting to pass the time somehow. They said, "Weiwei, can you tell us a joke?? This was such a crazy situation. How can I tell them a joke?  I am in jail; I have no idea what is about to happen to me -- I might end up in jail for twenty years. I said, "I'm very sorry. If I had known that I was going to be arrested I would have memorised two hundred jokes!"

"Time passes so slowly, for you and for them, and you try to memorise everything that happened  in your life but after twenty days you have nothing left, it's completely empty! You have remembered every detail, no one has more than that. I remembered every person, every occasion, every meeting, every conversation, from when you are very young right up to that day and then suddenly you are completely empty. It's crazy. Then I try to hold on to something, to think about my son, my wife, my mum. Just to hold on. But then that becomes so painful to think about because they are just as completely innocent as you are and it is unbearable and the outside world also seems like a jail because you can never really communicate to them. So then every time I think of them there were tears pouring down my face and the soldiers say, "Are you thinking about your wife, your son again? Don't do that. You have to forget about this. You have to forget it all." So I think I really do have to forget about this otherwise I cannot go on. It's so painful, thinking ten years in jail...You know, it's just like that...So many conflicts about reality, imagination, crime. The whole thing is a paradox. And it continues, even when you leave. It has infected your outside reality. So two of the soldiers were meant to go home by this 25 December. I gave them my number. They already called me.

"No. Really?"

"Yes. They said, "Are you out?" Because they don't know -- they don't have any news in the army. One day they are moved to guard another room and they would never know then what happened in this room. They said, 'We were so worried about you, we kept thinking about you, we are so happy you are out...' It was so shocking. And after my release, the interrogator sometimes comes to see me. It's very strange. I said to him, 'Why do you do this, you shouldn't monitor me now.'"

"But he is coming to check up on you?"

"Yes. And he says, 'Weiwei, just let this one year pass. Come on! You will not die if you don't say a word for one year. Let it pass, then everything will be fine.' And I wonder if that's how this nation will change because now there are a lot of individuals who have their own sensibilities and they have their own judgement. Even after all the kingdoms and dynasties of China, this has never happened before. But now people are beginning to have their own judgement, their own opinion."

"So this is partly to do with the passage of time. Twenty years ago the individual in those roles would still have had a belief in the ideology. Why is it that nowadays these relatively senior people, even if they are not actually in a revolution, they personally, don't want to tarnish their integrity? What is it that's changed?"

"I think that the only reason for the change is because there is so much more information. So much information happens every day and even with such censorship people can still receive a lot of news from the world. Basically I believe a person is a container of all this information, knowledge, judgements. The state of course is still so strong but the Party cannot limit the information any more. There are too many ways round. And with this information people start to form their own view of the world."....

"But you know, from the very first second I realise even here there is humanity. Even when they put the black hood on me, when the two soldiers were holding me, one soldier grabbed me very tight but the other just pretended to grab me but in fact he held me very loose. So even sitting there, they try to give me more space, not to really hurt me..."

"Really?"

"Yes! So then you realise that there are two people sitting here, two other human beings. One obeys the command, the other just tries to use his own judgement and thinks, 'I don't see why we have to do this.' And that small thing, that tiny sense of humanity, certainly made me much more comfortable in this one-hour road to that secret place. And every time, when they put a handcuff on me, some of them just did it so carefully, first one tooth, then two teeth, so it's very loose, still comfortable. So loose in fact that you even can take your hand out. And somebody would even very carefully put my shirtsleeve under the handcuff so that the metal would not directly touch my skin. They didn't have to do all those things. It's just a job, why should they care? I didn't even care. But they carefully did that. It shows a lot of humanity, it shows they're different. It shows they think and they decide that they don't believe in this. And some police would always say,"Do you want tea?" They would keep asking. I don't want tea at the start but they keep pouring tea, trying to make me feel good. There was a lot of nice or warm situations there. A lot of humanity."

Giorgio Morandi

Like so many Chinese artists and writers of his generation, Weiwei is very knowledgeable about the early Soviet experiments in art. We talked about Tatlin and the constructivists and the lives of Malevich and Lissitzky and then we moved onto Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter who died in 1964, whom Weiwei greatly admires. On the face of it, Morandi was not at all a political painter, nor was he involved in any kind of radical or conceptual work, so it would be easy to assume that Weiwei had no strong views on his work and that there was no connection between the two artists. Today, to most people, or rather to most non-painters, Morandi is not a household name and even within the international art world his reputation was not cemented until late in his career.

Perhaps his relatively modest standing has something to do with the obscure lifestyle that he forged for himself. By today's standards he appears at first glance to be thoroughly uncharismatic. He was neither a socialite nor a womaniser, he was never in the public eye and he wasn't particularly interested in commenting on anything that was happening in the outside world. His father died when he was eleven. He never married. He lived with his mother and his three sisters in the same house for fifty years. He habitually dressed in a formal suit; his hair was short, parted on the right. He was the sort of man whom one might expect to find in the same seat at the same restaurant every day, ordering the same meal. It is true that he was professor of etching at Bologna University for some years and that in the summers he would make it up into the hills of Grizzana, but there is nothing in his biography that would justify a biopic. Morandi was interested in one thing -- painting his next picture. When he was asked by a curator towards the end of his career about the whereabouts of some of his works, his reply captured his ethic perfectly:

I cannot give you any indication because I'm afraid I have never made a note of where my paintings have ended up ... I am always at work and work is my sole passion. And unfortunately I have become aware that I must always start from the beginning, and ought to burn what I've done in the past.

Consequently, for many years Morandi was mistaken for a dry, religious, almost insipid man of monkish habits and few outside interests. To make matters worse, his work appeared to some foreign curators and collectors to be thoroughly repetitious and provincial. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, he painted the same handful of pots, bottles, jars, clocks, compote bowls and mannequins, occasionally running off the odd landscape, though these were equally repetitious. Carefully, and over decades Morandi built up a collection of these humble objects, finding them in junk shops or making them himself, allowing them to stand for months to gather dust. Like Duchamp, Morandi believed in dust. Along with the elaborate system of curtains and blinds that he employed in order to create a uniform zenithal light, the dust dulled the edges of the objects and helped them on their way into the solitude and obscurity that he prized so highly. Eventually, after a lengthy period of repose, an object might finally be picked out from among the crowd and moved carefully onto a shelf, nearer to the drama of the stage, Selected objects were then arranged on a table, rearranged countless times, over weeks, until Morandi felt that the balance was right. Later in his life he worried that three weeks was never enough time to arrange a natura morte and he regretted his impatience, wishing that he had spent longer, months possibly or years, making sure that he had the light just right and the perfect selection of objects.

Here, it must have seemed, was a slightly weird, reclusive man of modest talents and little originality -- in short, a minor painter who would not leave any kind of mark on the world. Today however those who become acquainted with Morandi's work are usually astonished by what they discern within it.

Like Ai Weiwei, Morandi is a political artist in the sense that he was trying to capture his own vision of reality, a vision that was radically at odds with that of his time. And like Weiwei, he found inspiration in the ordinary or the banal. In Morandi's case, this exercise of his freedom of expression didn't put him in danger, it just meant that it took several decades for audiences to begin to fully appreciate his work, but his urge to paint springs from the same source as Ai Weiwei's -- from the urge to renovate our vision of the world and to find new meaning. And this gets to the heart of the inevitable conflict between artists and repressive regimes. In the past, I had talked with Weiwei about the great icon painters of Russia and Weiwei emphasised this same point. The forms of art are endless, what counts is the individual's engagement with the world, and their own personal attempt to find meaning.

For Ai Weiwei, or Morandi, or any other artist practising today, perspective, or realism in general, is of course a series of conventions. It is not reality. It is a schema and that is all. One schema among many. An orthography that we can choose to use, in the same way that for millennia the priests of Sais chose to use their own canonical orthography, with crocodile-headed deities and ibis beaks and the whole plethora of dynastic symbols all rendered without perspective but with something else, and some other fifth element. The cave painters of Lascaux or the conceptual artists of the late twentieth century used another. But the idea that realism is merely one way of seeing among many is anathema to Maoism.

Totalitarian regimes, like the regime in China (though it is rapidly becoming less totalitarian, not voluntarily but because its censorship mechanisms fail to cope with the internet and civil society continues to expand), cannot abide alternative articulations of reality. Mao, as an accomplished poet himself, understood very well the link between form and content, and that if you limit the forms of art you also limit the possible content. He knew full well that by controlling forms of artistic expression you are able to control people's inner lives. But it couldn't last forever. Art doesn't stand still. As time passes the old ways of seeing grow stale and only new ways of seeing will do, and there was nothing Mao nor any of his successors could do about this.

"I believe," said Morandi, "there is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality. What has value in art is an individual way of seeing things: nothing else counts at all."

"Morandi," began Weiwei, "has been very influential on so many artists, not only painters. There are so many characters in his painting. It's very -- how can you say -- religious. And also he is like Van Gogh. Because the act itself is so believable, so pure, so purified, so cut off from others. He paints what he sees. The reality he sees. We have to catch up. So he leaves us a perfect example. Yes. You can always take that kind of action as the perfect kind of quality, the most convincing quality. Everything is related to integrity. The persistence to believe, to never get confused."

"And so Morandi persisted but he wasn't in danger as you are. You find yourself in a different position because you're not just being ignored by a critical establishment, you are coming up against people who don't want to know about your way of looking at the world and instead of just traducing or ignoring your art, they are putting you in jail."

"We all somehow have to be honest enough to face our condition and of course the artist always, always is the one who recognises a certain kind of reality and tries to announce it. You know poets, writers or artists, at first they are the only ones who see it. They have to announce it. They hear a kind of voice or they see some possibilities so clearly. But that all comes from the inner core, from the kind of nature they have. If there is anything valuable then it comes out because their nature perfectly reflects everybody's nature or instinct at that time."

From Hanging Man, Barnaby Martin

 

Liao Yiwu

Liao Yiwu, the writer, has a lot in common with Ai Weiwei so I thought that by talking to him I might be better able to put Ai Weiwei and his fellow dissidents in some sort of context. For one thing Liao Yiwu has been arrested because of his writings and he has spent time in jail, in his case more than three years. He is also from the same generation as Ai Weiwei and so he and his family went through all the horrors of famine and the Cultural Revolution. And also like Weiwei, he understands the power of the most simple gestures and his unadorned writing, which is banned in China and which so infuriates the authorities that he has suffered imprisonment and torture, really consists of nothing more than pointing out: "Hey! Listen to what this perfectly ordinary person has to say about tehir experience of life in China today." He is like the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes; the Chinese Communist Party cannot bear it.

Like Ai Weiwei, he is constantly at loggerheads with the regime because he speaks his mind and rejects the Communist Party's view of reality, instead articulating his own vision of Chinese society and the vision of the people that he meets. He is indefatigable and personally courageous.

At the time I went to find him, in April 2011, Liao was living in Dali, an ancient and extremely beautiful city that sits on the shores of Lake Erhai, at the base of the sacred Mount Cangai. One of the most amazing things about China is its vastness and consequent incredible variety: variety of languages, of peoples, of landscapes. There are jungles, there are deserts, there are glaciers; there is the Tibetan Plateau, the oasis towns of the northwest; there are villages without electricity and then there is Shanghai's Bund. China is diverse in its diversity because it is one hundred countries yoked together.

Dali, in the province of Yunan, is as different from Beijing as a small town in Romania is from London or Frankfurt. Its city walls are short by Chinese standards, only six kilometres long. The landscape here is mountainous but the vegetation is subtropical -- forests of emerald green -- and the soil is as red as the face of Mars. Flying into Kunming, near Dali.

It was Liao Yiwu's epic poem 'Massacre', composed in response to the 1989 student uprising, that landed him in jail. A howling dirge -- part funeral oration, part shamanistic chant -- it was passed around literary circles in Beijing on old-fashioned magnetic cassette tapes. Magnitizdat, this was called in the Soviet Union: the technological extension of the samizdat culture. From the perspective of the internet age it was unbelievably labour-intensive.

When Liao finally got out of prison and made his way home to Chengdu, he discovered that his wife had left him and taken their infant son; his former friends were too frightened to speak to him; his registration permit had been cancelled, so he couldn't find work and he could at any moment he expelled to the countryside. He was penniless and his only possession was a wooden flute that he had made in prison. So began Liao's new life as an itinerant busker on the streets of Chengdu.

One of the characteristics that most defines Liao is his incredible resourcefulness, or rather not so much resourcefulness as his ability to continue his work without any resources at all. Just prior to his imprisonment, Liao's writing had taken a new turn: he had begun to interview ordinary Chinese people, people with poor chances in life, the diceng as the Chinese call them: those on the bottom rung of the ladder, the innumerable dispossessed and hopeless whose stories no one ever hears. The reality of everyday life for the mass of ordinary Chinese citizens is not something that the government wants to see portrayed. Prison was intended to bring to an end Liao's subversive activities but instead he simply began to interview his fellow inmates, and when he was finally released to wander the streets of Chengdu he quickly befriended the prostitutes, beggars and restaurateurs of his new milieu and set about interviewing them as well. It is a shared characteristic of many of the brave and inspiring people I met in China that even in the depths of despair they still attempted to preserve their individual voice (though I should point out that while in jail, Liao was subjected to such inhuman treatment that he did attempt to commit suicide on two occasions). One month before I met Liao the government had imposed yet another travel ban on him to prevent him from attending the International PEN Festival in New York.

Today, Liao's writing only has an audience at all because of the efforts of a handful of total strangers, devoted people who have ever even met Liao but who found themselves deeply moved by his work and who were determined that it should see the light of day. Wenguang Huang, a Chinese American, first heard of Liao's stories on public radio in 1990 and immediately recognised its freshness and significance. He wrote to Liao and offered to translate his work, and to find it a publisher in the west. For years, they collaborated without having a chance to meet. But they were both crystal clear about what they were trying to do: show China as it really is, not as it is presented in the government-controlled media. Then came Peter Bernstein, a New York literary agent and the son of Robert L. Bernstein, who founded Human Rights Watch and Human Rights Watch China. Though Wenguang Huang and Liao Yiwu were unknown in the US, Peter Bernstein took Wenguang's approach seriously and instantly recognised the quality of Liao's work. The third angel of serendipity was Philip Gourevitch, a New York-based writer who at the time had just been made editor of the Paris Review. Gourevitch read a story by Liao that Wenguang sent him and decided that it had to be published. None of these three men has met Liao but thanks to their efforts on his behalf, Liao's work has now been widely disseminated. His collection of interviews with diceng, with the translated title The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up, was published in the US in 2008 by Pantheon Books (a division of Random House), translated by Wenguang and with a foreword by Gourevitch. The interviewees include "the professional mourner", "the leper", "the peasant emperor", "the retired official", "the mortician", "the former red guard", "the Tianamen father", "the Falun Gong practitioner", "the illegal border crosser", "the grave robber", "the safecracker", "the migrant worker" and "the survivor". As Gourevitch writes in his foreword:

[Liao Yiwu] is a medium for whole muffled swathes of Chinese society that the Party would like to pretend do not exist: hustlers and 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 -- and every one of them speaks more honestly than the official chronicles of Chinese life that are put out by the state in the name of the "people."

It is no exaggeration to say that Liao is a totemic figure among certain sections of the community of Chinese writers. And thanks to Bernstein, Wenguang and Gourevitch, and others who have backed his work in the west, he is now rated, as Gourevitch explains, with writers "as diverse as Mark Twain and Jack London, Nikolai Gogol and George Orwell, Francois Rabelais and Primo Levi".

On the way to Dali I had been overtly followed and as we made our way to a cafe, we were joined by two secret service agents. It was only Liao Yiwu's aloofness and utter contempt for them that steeled my nerves. The interview, which I had hoped to conduct in the same way that Liao conducts his own interviews with the diceng -- that is to say, in an informal manner that encourages the interviewee to explore even the most troubling aspects of his or her life -- ended up being somewhat surreal, and not just because it was being overheard by two members of the secret police. 

Because Liao's English is even worse than my Chinese, and I didn't want to misrepresent his words in any way, I had decided that we would need a translator. There was no way to arrange this from Hong Kong so I had gambled on finding someone in Dali. It is a tourist resort, so I hoped there would be plenty of English speakers around. However, this was a risky strategy for two reasons: first, I only planned to be in Dali for a few hours. The light aircraft that I'd flown in on, bumping over mountain tops like a rollercoaster, was returning to Kunming at midday. The second problem was that there was a distinct possibility that as soon as anyone started translating Liao's words they would realise who he was and the risks they were taking in helping him to talk to a foreigner, and they would stop. The two secret policemen weren't helping either. We made a strange-looking group as we shuffled through the old city searching for a translator: Liao slightly hunched, with a permanent expression of weary defiance; myself tall, white, more and more paranoid as the minutes passed; and then the two policemen skulking along behind us.

Thankfully, as this was Yunan province and we were far from Beijing, the police were comparatively relaxed. Liao told me that occasionally, depending on who was tailing him, he could persuade them o have a drink with him. After half an hour, just as I was beginning to panic, we found a youth hostel in a large, elegant old Qing dynasty-style villa, threadbare but copiously decorated with carved wood and red lacquer. I approached the manager, a middle-aged man with a kind, sensitive face. Although the weather was mild he was wearing a heavy brown leather jacket. His English was excellent and he agreed to translate. However, at this point, he still didn't know who Liao Yiwu was, though I did try to explain, to give him the chance not to get involved if he didn't want to risk it.

We sat down at the coffee table. The police agents, who hadn't taken off their coats, sat down at the next table. "Can you tell me your earliest memory?" I asked Liao. It's a question that he often asked his own interviewees. The translator duly translated the question, Liao nodded and paused and then said something back in Chinese. The translator, looking a little shocked, turned to me:

"He says his earliest memory is almost dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Famine came and he was only four years old and he swelled up like a loaf of bread. Everyone thought he was going to die but then his mother took him to see a doctor and the doctor held him over a boiling cauldron filled with herbs. The herb steam cured him."

The translator glanced at Liao again -- who was sitting patiently, waiting for the next question -- and then he turned back to me and said, "Who is this guy?' I tried to explain again that he was a writer who had suffered at the hands of the government and whose work had been censored and suppressed. I thought that the interviewer would now call it a day but he didn't; he only became more interested, and he too was strangely unmoved by the presence of the secret police.

The questions continued and Liao's stories became more and more incredible. "The corpse walker," he said, "whose job it is to carry the dead body back to its final resting place in its home village, has a special code for communicating with hotel owners in rural Sichuan. They knock on the door and then shout out in a loud voice, "The god of happiness is here." That way the hotel is warned that the prospective guest has a dead body strapped to his back, hidden under a cloak, and he can either turn the corpse walker away quietly, or give him a room at the back and charge some extra dough. After the Cultural Revolution the Communists tried to crack down on this but of course it still goes on all the time because it is very important that they take their dead home for burial, whatever the Communists like to think."

I asked Liao about the people that he had interviewed. Several of his interviewees had made a particularly strong impression on me. Two of them he had met while in jail; one 'the peasant emperor', was an old man who claimed to be the emperor of China and insisted on everyone, prison staff included, addressing him as 'Your Highness'. He explained to Liao that he was in prison voluntarily as it was the only way for him to escape the constant and exhausting sexual demands that were otherwise made on him by the young women of his kingdom.

Another interviewee whose story had particularly compelled me was 'the safecracker'. His account of his own life was especially moving because it was quite clear that he was a highly intelligent, sensitive human being who had fallen into a life of crime because of a complete lack of opportunities. He was a very good safecracker and he was also charismatic and highly resourceful. At one point in his colourful career he was caught and sent to prison. It was one of the old prisons built by the Nationalists during the war and it had high, strong walls but the safecracker was determined to escape. Finally he figured out how to do it. Over the wall, he could hear the cleaners when they came to empty the prison toilets. He deduced that the cleaners didn't need to enter the compound because the cesspit beneath the toilet holes extended right under the walls, so that it could be accessed from the street outside. Unappealing as the prospect was, it was obvious to him what he would have to do to escape and so the next day, during the exercise period, he went to the toilet and then squirmed his way through the toilet hole and dropped like a bomb into the murk below. Luckily his theory was correct and he only had to swim for twenty feet, although he said that it felt like a lot further than that at the time and he thought he was going to go mad. He clambered out the other side onto the street, ran down the mountainside and eventually found his way into a student dormitory where he showered and stole some clothes. He went back to safecracking and became a rich man, with lots of villas in the north and more money than he knew what to o with. But he was bored and depressed. Because he was an intelligent, thoughtful man, he felt his life was shallow and worthless. Eventually, on a job in Beijing he had to crack the newest and best kind of safe. Naturally, he succeeded, but for some reason that he couldn't explain he just sat there with the safe door open, slowly setting fire to the bundles of money. When the police arrived, he went with them without complaining.

I asked Liao what had happened to the safecracker -- was he still in touch with him?

"He was executed," said Liao bluntly, drawing his finger across his throat.

As the interview went on, the translator became more and more involved. I would ask a question and he would translate it for Liao and then Liao would answer back in Chinese, but instead of immediately translating Liao's answer back into English, the translator would ask his own question and after a while the pair of them would be deep in conversation. Occasionally, they would remember my existence and the translator would turn round and summarise some aspect of Liao's life or thoughts for me.

"Lao Liao [lao means old and is a mark of friendly respect] says that many of the dissidents today start out as ordinary people with an ordinary gripe. Take for example the protests over the polluted baby formula milk. The parents who dared to complain and insist that the government do something were slapped down but they had lost their children and so they were angry and they didn't care any more about government threats and instead of being quiet they began to support other people's causes as well. You see the government creates dissidents out of people who have legitimate local grievances. Lao Liao says that they do this again and again because they can't handle even very minor criticism and so they end up turning anyone who opposes them into an extremist, even though all these people wanted in the first place was to complain that their cooking oil was full of shit or that the local Party had sold off a corner of their field to a property developer or something simple like that. It's the same with the case of Ai Weiwei. He was so shocked by the earthquake that he went down to Sichuan and spoke to the mothers and fathers. He heard about the poor-quality tofu-dregs houses and about the corruption and kickbacks to local politicians. He got involve and tried to help. Then the police attacked him and gave him a beating and he almost died and because of this he became even more of a rallying point and everyone wants to listen to his criticisms of the government. They are control freaks who can't handle criticism.

"Lao Liao says all he wanted to do, the only thing, was to describe what he saw around him every day. He wasn't calling for the overthrow of the Party, or demanding for the laws to be changed. He is just a historian a chronicler. A chronicler in cold blood who will say what he sees. But the government hated that so much that they threw him in jail. So then he wrote about what he saw in the jail. That made them even more mad. All he wanted was to be like Sima Qian, the old historial who wrote Records of the Grand Historian. Sima Qian was very objective and he wrote the first good history in China and he wrote lots of honest biographies of people. Nothing more. But the government can't bear Lao Liao saying out loud what is happening in front of everyone's noses. They are embarrassed  and ashamed. And when Ai Weiwei started to do it they couldn't bear him either. First they beat him, then when he doesn't stop but instead starts to criticise them for other things as well, they arrested him. But all they had to do was listen in the first place, then they wouldn't have created an international dissident."

Liao said he would show me his rented room, which was in a block a little way up the hillside. The translator came with us, but strangely the secret police didn't follow us there. When we left the cafe, I expected them to come along, but after a while I realised they had gone elsewhere. Liao's room was very peaceful, and from the balcony there was a view over the old city, all the way to Lake Erhai. At my request, Liao took out the bamboo flute that he had made in prison and played us a couple of tunes. I asked him how well he knew Weiwei and he said that he didn't know him well at all but he he met him in Chengdu in 2008, just after the Sichuan earthquake, when they had both gone there to investigate what lay behind the official government story. A mutual friend had introduced them.

"The mutual friend has since been disappeared," said Liao, matter-of-factly.

It was time for me to leave. I thanked Liao and then walked back with the translator to the youth hostel.

"He's an incredible man," said the translator. "That generation has been through so much."

With the help of a Chinese lawyer, Liao Yiwu is now suing the government for human rights abuses. His determination is undimmed: "I am trying to overcome, little by little, the fear that has been inflicted on me," he is quoted as saying in Wenguang Huang's translator's introduction to The Corpse Walker. "By doing so, I try to preserve my sanity and inner freedom."

Not long after our meeting, Liao left Dali and went by bus to a small village near the Chinese border with Vietnam. Following in the footsteps of one of his most famous interviewees, 'the border crosser', Liao packed a bag with supplies and headed off into the jungle. The border crosser had stumbled into a camp filled with remnants of the ultra-red Chinese forces, preparing for the next leg of a war that ended decades ago. He was forced to become a soldier until he finally managed to retreat back to China. Liao had obviously learned from this unfortunate man's blunder: after a journey the details of which have still not been fully clarified, though it includes transfers in Hanoi and Warsaw, Liao arrived in Berlin on 6 July 2011.

Artful

I've just finished reading Hanging Man by Barnaby Martin. It's about the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and it's utterly fascinating, especially if you would like to know about the art scene in China. Of course, this book was written in 2013 so much has happened since then. Over tea today, I learned that Weiwei has left China and is in exile. But this book introduced me to the sturdy spirits in China, who after a lifetime of Communism and being asked to subjugate their thoughts and feelings continue with heads bloody, but unbowed. Here, I excerpt some of my favourite parts of the book, which I will be running over the next few days.

The Stars group was founded by two factory workers, Ma Desheng and Huang Rui -- but to say that it was "founded" over-formalises its initial inception. It began as a small group of friends and acquaintances discussing the strange ideas that they held so dear, among them the possibility that there were better ways to gain access to reality than through revolutionary realism.

The story of the Stars group is an essential episode in the history of contemporary Chinese art. Although many of the Stars participants are still alive and can easily be tracked down and interviewed, and although many of the poets and writers who were part of the same extended social milieu are also happy to share their thoughts, it is nevertheless very difficult to piece together any kind of objective, reliable historical account of those early days. Over the intervening years many of the people involved have fallen out, some have travelled to the other end of the political spectrum and they all remember the key events very differently.

The group took their name from one of the concepts that regularly came up in their meetings, ziwo back into art after decades spent following the depersonalising rules of revolutionary realism. They believed above all else in the inalienable right of human beings to express themselves as they pleased. As Ma Desheng said: "Every artist is a star ... We called our group 'Stars' in order to emphasise our individuality. This was directed against the drab uniformity of the Cultural Revolution."

Together, they would meet and discuss their illegal counter-revolutionary ideas: their belief in the necessity of cultivating an individual outlook, of subjectivity and freedom of expression.