Xiaobo has been gone from us for nine years. Today, we remember him. What spiritual traits should we remember? What is the Chinese Communist Party afraid of him, but what historical role does he fear? I think we can start from two traits that set him apart from many other intellectuals and rebels
the first is his passion
Today’s Chinese intellectuals have more reason than passion, lacking “a passionate and uninhibited spirit.” Passion or reason? This is a struggle many people struggle with, because most people, even intellectuals, judge their value by external standards, and society, as an established system, naturally favors order and rationality. This has led our intellectuals to often regard rationality as their basic professional ethics, consciously training themselves thoroughly and rigorously; few dare to raise the banner of passion as their compass. And this is what makes Liu Xiaobo stand out from this crowd.
the second is that he highlights anti-communist sentiment from an aesthetic perspective
When Liu Xiaobo was pursuing a PhD in aesthetics at Beijing Normal University, his dissertation was titled “Aesthetics and Freedom.” Xiaobo saw that someone who pursues beauty inevitably tends to cherish freedom. This is why humanist intellectuals are often the main force of the liberal movement: their professional nature means they need freedoms like sunlight, air, and water as conditions for professional development; At the same time, because this pursuit stems from the enjoyment of beauty or from human nature, we can also see that those who pursue freedom are always very difficult to be tamed by power. Because you can take away their external freedom, but this only fuels their accumulation of inner freedom and their greater appreciation for it.
I believe that the CCP, as a totalitarian monster, has the most unacceptable traits. Besides the tyranny and deception we are familiar with, another trait is extremely ugly—ugly inside and out, and unacceptable from an aesthetic perspective. From this perspective, the CCP can resonate with more people. Perhaps this is another necessity we should remember Xiaobo