刘晓波去世八周年：重温他留给中国人的精神遗产
The Man Who Stayed: Remembering Liu Xiaobo Eight Years After His Passing
By Ian Johnson
作者：张彦
The English original follows below.
编者按：
2025年7月13日是刘晓波逝世八周年的纪念日。本文是2018年张彦在柏林锡安教堂纪念刘晓波逝世一周年时所发表的演讲，作者近期又进行了补充。时至今日，刘晓波在中国历史上的重要性与象征意义不仅没有减弱，反而愈加凸显。这不仅是因为他留在中国并坚持抗争的勇气，更因为他对自我的深刻反省——一个曾颇为轻狂自负的知识分子，最终成长为一个思想者，并起而行之，示范给生活在专制体制下的人们，该如何诚实而有尊严地度过一生。
刘晓波去世八周年：重温他留给中国人的精神遗产
作者：张彦
1898年，一些中国最杰出的知识分子与光绪皇帝结盟，这位年轻的统治者试图“变法”以巩固自己的地位，改革触及当时的政治、经济和教育等各个层面。但朝廷顽固的保守势力迅速反击，变法失败，光绪被废黜，他的幕僚纷纷亡命天涯。
然而，并不是所有人都踏上了逃亡之路，其中一个人就是谭嗣同——一位祖籍湖南浏阳的年轻士子。谭嗣同知道留在北京意味着死亡，但他认为，真正的“变法”没有不流血而能成功的，“有之，请从嗣同始！”
谭嗣同是他那一代人中最优秀的学问家之一。他曾著《仁学》，批判“天不变，道亦不变”的顽固思想，论证改变社会的政治理想。他创办过学校、报纸，和当时有维新思想的官员和读书人广泛结交。在危险逼近的时刻，他完全有理由，也有条件保住自己，以图将来，继续投身变革的事业。但他终究决定留下来：挺身面对死亡，以自己的牺牲来唤醒当时沉睡中的民众。
在北京菜市口刑场被斩首前，谭嗣同轻声说出了一个半世纪以来，中国在建立一个现代化多元国家所作的努力中，广为人知的名言：“有心杀贼，无力回天，死得其所，快哉快哉！”
自从刘晓波2017年因癌症在囚禁中去世，我经常想起谭嗣同的命运。癌症和刽子手的刀不是一回事，但跨越120年，他们两人的死，仍有相通之处。和谭嗣同投身“变法”一样，刘晓波也为一项最终似乎以无望收场的事业付出了沉重代价——这就是1989年的天安门抗议运动。时间流逝，历史证明了谭嗣同无罪；而我不禁想，历史能不能也给刘晓波这样一个交代？
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1989年天安门运动爆发时，刘晓波人在国外，但选择了回到中国，后来他成为著名的“天安门四君子”之一。而当“六四”血腥镇压开始，他锒铛入狱之后，虽然还有机会离开中国，但他依然再次选择留下。后来，是更严厉的监禁，他依然决定留下，继续抗争。和1989年的天安门不一样，他所冒的风险，不再是军队的立刻到来，而是今天所有挑战国家权力的人可能面临的牢狱之灾。
于刘晓波而言，这不是一个求死的决定，而是一种对命运毫不回避、甘愿领受的承担。
讽刺的是，尽管随着时间的推移，他的思想变得更为温和、内省，他所遭受的打压却变本加厉。在2024年出版的刘晓波传记《我没有敌人：刘晓波的生平和遗产》一书中，作者林培瑞与吴大志指出，刘晓波曾是一个充满激情、语言尖锐、喜欢折腾出“大动静”的浪漫主义者。早年的他，也时常疏远朋友，沉溺于一些戏剧性的表达。年轻时的他，在某种意义上也像谭嗣同，一直试图用自己的声音震醒国民。
1990年代，在反复失去自由的生活中，他一直没有停止严厉的自我反省。而这种省思促成了他思想与行为的改变。在一篇文章中，他曾坦承：
“现在，回头仔细检视才发现，我的整个青春期生长于文化沙漠之中，我所赖以写作的文化滋养，除了仇恨、暴力、狂妄，就是说谎、无赖、犬儒，这些党文化的毒素喂养了整整几代人，我便是其中之一。”
这种省思并不意味着他放弃抗争的道路，而是将注意力转向更现实的路径。他依然支持全盘西化，但也开始强调一个极具儒家色彩的观念：通过个体的生活与行为来推动社会变革。他曾经说过，中国人需要认真检视“我们这种不民主的生活方式”，并且“有意识地努力把民主价值观带到我们自己的个人关系中（老师与学生、父亲与儿子、丈夫与妻子、朋友之间）”。
他也关注普通人面临的问题——那些被他的朋友、作家王小波称之为“沉默的大多数”——他们不仅是政治异议者，还有权利被剥夺的性少数人群，童工、农民以及工人。
他将注意力投向沉默的大多数，但起初并不清楚该如何着手。1990年代，他仍延续着传统异议者的模式，不断发起请愿、发表声明，但收效甚微，几乎只换来再次入狱。1999年，他三年劳教期满获释。与此同时，一个面向更广大群体的新平台在中国出现，那就是互联网。
当时的中国互联网远未受到今日如此严密的审查，觉醒的公民在网上揭露社会弊病，引发公共关注。刘晓波则是这一浪潮中最具思想力的倡导者与分析者之一。他结识并连接了许多草根的维权者，也经常撰文支持他们的行动。
这也是“维权运动”最活跃的时期之一——公民尝试通过互联网，阻击党权的无度扩张。而其行动逻辑简单明了：发现不公，揭发真相，借助公众舆论施压，逼迫政府回应。
这些理念受到崔卫平翻译的哈维尔与米奇尼克著作的影响。这些作品无法在官方出版，却在网络上广泛传播，激发了许多中国人相信，变革可以通过日常生活、践行常识，以去中心化与渐进的方式实现。刘晓波的文章回应了这些理念。他呼吁中国人“有尊严地过一种诚实的生活”（源于哈维尔），并主张“从边缘渗透至中心”（来自米奇尼克）。
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最终，给刘晓波带来又一场牢狱之灾的，却是一项当时对他而言，已属“非典型”的行动。2005年，一些中国的知识分子开始酝酿一份政治宣言，希望对维权运动的核心价值观予以一个总结。2008年，他们决意发布一份宪章，借用捷克的《七七宪章》，命名为《零八宪章》。刘晓波起初并不热衷于再参与签名活动，但当“天安门母亲”丁子霖教授找到他，希望他负责编辑与组织签署时，他答应了。
他不仅润色了宪章文本，还凭借自身的声誉与信用，成功动员了很多人参与署名。第一批有303位知识分子与行动者参与联署。彼时的他，知道自己要冒极大的风险——作为中国最知名的异见人士之一，他发布宪章后，必然会成为当局的重点打击对象。2008年12月8日，警方将他从家中蒙眼带走。次日，《零八宪章》在网上发布，部分签署人被短暂拘捕，但刘晓波被正式逮捕，自此再未获得自由。
刘晓波终究于2017年7月13日去世。他去世的过程，我们或许永远无法完全知晓。但可以确定的是，刘晓波之死，很可能与政府渎职和回避责任有关。
一位多年与刘晓波家人保持联系的朋友透露，直到2017年6月初，家人才被正式告知刘晓波患有癌症。但此消息直到当年的6月26日才向外界公布。我怀疑，实际情况可能是当局意识到他病情危急，即将去世，而若他死于狱中，后果将极其严重——显而易见，历史上唯一一位在国家监禁中去世的诺贝尔和平奖得主，是德国的和平主义者卡尔·冯·奥西茨基（Carl von Ossietzky），他于1935年获奖，三年后死于纳粹的牢狱之中。
当局迅速将刘晓波转送至一家设有安保的医院，并向外发布了一份看似人道的声明，宣称他“保外就医”。但事实是，他在那里仍然被严密看守，只不过从监狱转移到了肿瘤病房。
面对外界的质疑，中国当局开始全方位为自己辩解。政府开始罕见地定期公布刘晓波的病情通报，甚至允许外国医生前往探视。《环球时报》作为中共对外宣传的主要喉舌，则一连发表多篇文章攻击刘晓波，并完全撇掉政府的责任。
其中一篇发表于刘晓波的病情公开两天之后，语气严厉。文章暗示刘晓波不会被允许出国就医，理由完全是政治性的：出国后，他可能利用诺奖得主身份“为中国制造麻烦”。至于他的癌症，文章毫不掩饰地归咎于他本人：“咎由自取”。
这篇英文社论语气冰冷，写道：
“中国并没有如西方在上世纪八九十年代预测的那样崩溃，反而创造了世界经济奇迹。一批民主运动者和异议分子赌输了，毁了自己的一生。刘晓波即使获得诺贝尔和平奖，最终的命运依然可能是悲剧性的。”
文章还预测他将被人遗忘，声称只有在“个人奋斗和坚持……顺应了中国发展和时代潮流”的情况下，才能成就一个英雄的诞生。
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某种意义上，这正是问题的核心所在：中国的历史走向究竟是什么？中共一直用某种历史宿命论为其统治辩护，声称自己是“历史选择的结果”，肩负“救中国于危难”的使命。但在经历了几十年的动荡后，1970年代末期，共产党又把自己扮演成缔造发展的独裁者角色：它带来了发展，所以它有理由统治这个国家。
然而，在过去的十年里，随着经济增长放缓，以及许多中国人习惯了繁荣，这种逻辑已经在减弱。现在中国的统治者开始使用其它理由：执政者正在努力恢复20世纪被摧毁的传统，并发誓要创造一种更加道德的政治和社会秩序。这正是习近平执政理念的核心之一：宣称他的统治是对稳定与传统的回归。
然而，“进谏”——即提出建设性批评这一深植于中国政治文化的传统，则是被习拒绝的。中国历史绵长，许多皇帝虽拒绝忠谏，甚至残杀谏臣，但在后来的史书中都被视为暴君。如果今天的中国真在尝试重建一种道德政治秩序，那么，仅因思想与言论就严厉打击一位知识分子，怎能令人信服？
这就是刘晓波的重要之处：他的一生和死亡，代表了过去一个世纪以来，那些中国改革的倡导者们要面对的根本难题：不是如何提高GDP或收复失去的领土，而是如何创造一个更人道、更公正的政治制度。
和谭嗣同一样，刘晓波知道他在历史里的责任。谭嗣同目睹中国被一个必须打破的因果恶性循环所困。对于刘晓波，他作为公共知识分子的角色是看到未来，并把他所见的描述出来，不管付出什么代价。正如他在1988年的文章《论孤独》中写道的一样：
“他的最重要的、甚至是唯一的使命就是为时代、为民族、为人类提供‘超前意识’。知识分子的视野必须在现存的观念、秩序之外，必须是冒险者，孤独地前行，直到他走出很远之后，人们才可能发现其价值……他能在盛世中透视出危机的预兆，在自信中体验到即将光临的幻灭。”
本期推荐档案：
林培瑞、吴大志：《我没有敌人：刘晓波的生平和遗产》（英文）
蔡楚（主编）：《刘晓波纪念文集》
This is adapted from a speech that Ian Johnson gave at Berlin’s Zion Church commemorating the first anniversary of the death of Liu Xiaobo. July 13, 2025, is the eighth anniversary of Liu’s passing and, instead of his importance fading, it only grows. In this essay, Johnson hints at some of the reasons for his enduring relevance—partly because of his courage for staying and fighting, but mainly for his self-reflection, which allowed a callow, arrogant intellectual to develop into a thoughtful person with sophisticated ideas for how people can live a decent live in an authoritarian regime.
The Man Who Stayed: Remembering Liu Xiaobo Eight Years After His Passing
By Ian Johnson
In 1898, some of China’s most brilliant minds allied themselves with the Emperor Guangxu, a young ruler who was trying to assert himself by forcing through reforms to open up China’s political, economic, and educational systems. But opponents quickly struck back, deposing the emperor and causing his advisors to flee for their lives.
Among those who stayed was a young scholar named Tan Sitong. Tan knew that remaining in Beijing meant death but hoped that his execution might shock his fellow citizens awake.
It wasn’t a modest decision. Tan was one of the most provocative essayists of his generation. He had published an influential book decrying the effects of absolutism. He had founded schools and newspapers and advised other political figures on how to change the system. There was every justification for him to save himself so he could contribute to future battles. But these arguments also made Tan realize how valuable it was that he remain in the imperial capital: facing death proudly, at the hands of those resisting reforms, could make a difference; people might pay attention to China’s plight.
So as his friends boarded ships to Japan or fled to the provinces, Tan went to a small hotel in Beijing and waited for the imperial troops. They soon arrived and quickly condemned him to death.
Before his decapitation at Beijing’s Caishikou execution grounds, Tan was able to utter what today are some of the most famous words in China’s century-and-a-half effort to form a modern, pluralistic state: “I wanted to kill the robbers but lacked the strength to transform the world. This is the place where I should die. Rejoice, rejoice!”
In the years since Liu Xiaobo died of cancer in a hospital prison, I’ve often thought of how his fate and Tan’s are so similar. Death comes to all people and cancer is not the same as an executioner’s sword. But the deaths of the two seemed somehow to connect across the hundred and nineteen years that separate their fates. Like Tan, Liu threw his weight behind a cause that in its immediate aftermath seemed hopeless—in Liu’s case, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. But with time, history vindicated Tan; I wonder if it will do the same for Liu.
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When the Tiananmen protests erupted, Liu was abroad but chose to return. After the protesters were bloodily suppressed, many Tiananmen leaders left the country; Liu, too, after a brief stint in prison, had opportunities to leave. But like Tan Sitong, he chose to stay in China, where he mattered most. Even after a second, harsher stint in jail, Liu was determined to remain and keep pushing for basic political rights. He was risking not the immediate arrival of soldiers, but the inevitable and life-threatening imprisonment that befalls all people who challenge state power in China today.
This was not an active decision to die, but a willingness to do so.
The perversion was that his punishments grew even as his ideas became more nuanced and moderate. In their major biography of Liu Xiaobo, I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo, Perry Link and Wu Dazhi describe how Liu had once been prone to extreme positions—enamored with grand gestures and outrageously rude statements that alienated friends. In a way, the early Liu was like Tan Sitong, hoping to shock China awake.
But Liu’s rigorous self-reflection helped him change his views and actions. In one of his essays, he wrote:
“I realize that my entire youth was spent in a cultural desert and that my early writings had all been nurtured in hatred, violence, and arrogance—or, alternatively, in lies, cynicism, and loutish sarcasm. These poisons of Party culture had been soaked into several generations of Chinese and into me too.”
This didn’t mean shunning protests or direct action but prioritizing the more realistic and—even though Liu often provocatively said he was in favor of complete westernization—very Confucian idea of promoting social change through one’s own life and actions. He said Chinese should study “the non-democratic way we live,” and “consciously attempt to put democratic ideals into practice in our own personal relationships (between teachers and students, fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and between friends).”
He also focused on the problems faced by ordinary people—those who his friend, the writer Wang Xiaobo, called “The Silent Majority”: not just the politically oppressed, but people with different sexual orientation, child laborers, rural residents, and workers with no rights.
Liu decided to focus on this silent majority but was not sure how. In the 1990s, he continued the old-style dissident approach of issuing petitions and statements, but that achieved little other than more prison time. When he was released from a three-year stint in a labor camp in 1999, however, a new method to reach broader groups of people presented itself: the Internet.
Twenty years ago China’s Internet was less censored than it is today, allowing citizen activists to uncover malfeasance in society and publicize it. Liu was one of the most thoughtful advocates and analysts of this trend. He befriended, advised, and wrote about people at the center of these movements.
This was the heyday of one of the most significant citizen efforts to contain the Chinese Communist Party’s unchecked power, the Rights Defense Movement. Its campaigns often followed a pattern: advocates would find an injustice, publicize it, and wait for popular opinion to push the government toward reform.
These ideas were influenced by the Beijing writer Cui Weiping’s translations of works by Václav Havel and Adam Michnik. State publishing houses would not issue them, but they spread on the Internet. Many Chinese were inspired by the idea that change could happen by focusing on daily life, common sense, decentered efforts, and gradual progress. Liu’s own writings echoed these concepts. He urged Chinese “to live an honest life in dignity” (an idea from Havel) and to “start at the margins and permeate toward the center” (an idea from Michnik).
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Ironically, Liu was imprisoned for involvement in what by then had become an atypical cause for him. In 2005 Chinese intellectuals began debating the need for a political treatise that would codify the kind of open and humane society that the Rights Defense Movement was promoting. By 2008 they were eager to publish their statement, named Charter 08 in homage to Charter 77, which leading Czechoslovak writers had issued in 1977. Liu had given up drafting and signing these kinds of documents, but he agreed to participate when Professor Ding Zilin from the Tiananmen Mothers told him that it needed his editing and his help in gathering signatures. Liu began to polish the text and used his prestige and credibility to recruit a stellar list of 303 public intellectuals and activists to sign it.
Liu was taking a huge risk. He was easily China’s best-known dissident and, just like after Tiananmen, would be an obvious target once the charter was released. On December 8, 2008, police dragged Liu blindfolded out of his apartment. The next day the group released the charter on Chinese websites. Some participants were detained, but only Liu was imprisoned. He would never walk free again.
The exact sequence of events surrounding his death in 2017 may never be understood. But it is clear that Liu fell victim to circumstances that strongly suggest government malfeasance.
According to a friend of Liu’s who had been in regular touch with the family over the years, Liu’s family was told he had cancer in early June. But this was only made public on June 26, 2017. I suspect what happened was that authorities suddenly realized that Liu was close to death and how bad it would look if he died in jail—immediately, people began pointing out that, previously, the only Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in state custody was the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who died in a Nazi jail three years after winning the 1935 prize.
And so Liu’s captors quickly sent him to a secure hospital—and decided it would be in their interest to make this public, issuing the misleadingly benevolent statement that it was granting Liu “medical parole” (when he fact he was simply under guard in a cancer ward).
Does this sequence of events imply neglect? Authorities have gone to great lengths to rebut these allegations. They took the unprecedented step of issuing fairly regular health bulletins about his condition, and of allowing foreign doctors to visit Liu. One of their favorite media outlets aimed at foreign audiences, The Global Times, also wrote several articles attacking Liu and blaming him for his illness.
One, published two days after his condition became public, set the nervous and accusatory tone. The article implied that Liu would not be allowed to seek treatment abroad. The reasons given were purely political: if allowed abroad he might seek to use his position as a Nobel laureate to cause trouble for China. As for his illness, the English article darkly said that Liu had himself to blame:
China has not collapsed as the West forecast in the 1980s and 1990s, but has created a global economic miracle. A group of pro-democracy activists and dissidents lost a bet and ruined their lives. Although Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he is likely to face tragedy in the end.
After Liu died the newspaper predicted that Liu would be forgotten with time. It said that heroes are only created if their “endeavors and persistence have value to the country’s development and historical trends.”
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In a way, this is in fact the crux of the issue: what is China’s historical arc? The Communist Party has always justified its rule through mysticism: that the forces of history chose it to save China. But after thirty years of political upheaval ended in the late 1970s, the Party adopted the role of a development dictatorship: it developed, therefore it ruled.
For about the past decade, however, this rationale has faded as growth has slowed, and many Chinese grow used to prosperity. Now China’s rulers use other justifications: they are helping to restore traditions destroyed during the twentieth century, and vow to create a more moral political and social order. This has been the promise of Xi Jinping, who in part justifies his rule as a return to stability and traditions.
The idea of remonstrating—of offering constructive criticism—has been an accepted part of China’s political system for thousands of years, but Xi has now apparently rejected this tradition. China has a long history, and many emperors have rejected advice and executed officials for daring to offer it. But they always went down in history as the bad guys. If China is trying to recreate some sort of traditional moral order then how can it justify such harsh treatment of people just for their ideas?
This is why Liu matters: his life and death stand for the fundamental conundrum of Chinese reformers over the past century—not how to boost GDP or recover lost territories, but how to create a more humane and just political system.
Like Tan, Liu knew his place in history. Tan saw China plagued by a cycle of karmic evil that had to be broken. For Liu, his role as a public intellectual was to see the future and report back, whatever the costs. As he wrote in the 1988 essay “On Solitude”:
“Their most important, indeed their sole destiny…is to enunciate thoughts that are ahead of their time. The vision of the intellectual must stretch beyond the range of accepted ideas and concepts of order; he must be adventurous, a lonely forerunner; only after he has moved on far ahead do others discover his worth…he can discern the portents of disaster at a time of prosperity, and in his self-confidence experience the approaching obliteration.”*
* Translated by Geremie Barmé, “Confession, Redemption, and Death: Liu Xiaobo and the Protest Movement of 1989,” in The Broken Mirror: China After Tiananmen, edited by George Hicks (Longman, 1990).
http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/017/features/ConfessionRedemptionDeath.pdf
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Perry Link & Wu Dazhi: I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo
Cai Chu: Liu Xiaobo Memorial Anthology