No Enemies, No Grave:The Unfinished Letter of Liu Xiaobo
Luna Tian
Prologue — Winter Without a Monument
It is February, and Berlin is grey. The kind of grey that dulls everything except memory. On a street not far from the Tiergarten, Liu Xia walks quietly through a sparse patch of park, her scarf pulled tight against the wind. She has been here for six months, but her steps still carry the weight of eleven years — not her own imprisonment, but her husband’s.
Liu Xiaobo is gone. He died eighteen months ago in a guarded hospital room in Shenyang, a city where the sky always seemed heavy. His liver had been devoured by cancer. His name, long unspoken in his home country, was never uttered at the moment of his death by those in power. There was no public mourning. No national eulogy. Not even a grave for people to visit. The authorities scattered his ashes into the sea, as if a body of water could erase a memory.
In China, his name remains unsearchable. Try typing it into a phone, and you’ll find yourself corrected, redirected, or simply frozen. Mention him online, and your post disappears in seconds. In textbooks, he is absent. In television archives, he never existed. For a country obsessed with its past, China has become an expert in selective amnesia.
But outside — in Oslo, in Taipei, in Berlin — people still remember the man who once said, “I have no enemies.” They remember not because they were told to, but because forgetting would feel like complicity.
There is no monument to Liu Xiaobo. No statue, no museum wing, no official day of remembrance. And yet, his absence has become a kind of monument in itself — an empty chair, echoing through time.
In the winter light, Liu Xia sometimes sketches trees, birds, women without faces. Her art remains haunted, as if always on the verge of vanishing. Like her husband’s words, like the idea of China he still believed in.
She once wrote: “Your death has frozen me.”
In a world where silence is often enforced, the mere act of remembering becomes an act of resistance. And on days like this — cold, quiet, and grey — memory feels like the only thing that still breathes.
II. The Man Who Believed in Words
Before he became a prisoner, Liu Xiaobo was a man of letters. He taught literature at Beijing Normal University and wrote essays that were sharp, unflinching, sometimes scathing — but always rooted in the belief that China could be more than what it was.
In the late 1980s, when China’s economy was beginning to open but its politics remained tightly sealed, Liu was already a critic of complacency. He read Nietzsche and Kafka. He questioned national myths. He took moral responsibility seriously, in a country where the collective had long erased the individual.
When the student protests erupted in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Liu Xiaobo was in New York as a visiting scholar. He could have stayed there. Instead, he returned — just weeks before the tanks arrived — believing it was his duty. Not to lead, but to help.
In those final days before the massacre, he negotiated with soldiers. He tried to prevent bloodshed. He helped students leave the square safely in the hours before dawn broke and the gunfire began. Years later, he would be jailed for “counter-revolutionary propaganda,” though what he really practiced was moral clarity.
Liu was no romantic. He knew the odds. He knew the weight of history. But still, he believed that words — if honest, if brave — could change the course of a country. In 2008, nearly twenty years after Tiananmen, he became the chief drafter of Charter 08, a bold call for political reform in China.
The charter asked for what many nations take for granted: an independent judiciary, the freedom to speak, the right to choose one’s leaders. It echoed the language of universal rights, but its tone was calm, reasoned — a conversation, not a provocation.
It was also, in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party, unforgivable.
Liu Xiaobo was arrested just days before the charter’s release. He knew what was coming. He had written that he was ready to “pay any price” for his convictions. To him, freedom was not an abstract concept — it was a moral necessity.
He once said, “Hatred can rot away at a person’s intelligence and conscience.” His resistance was not born of rage, but of a stubborn, defiant hope — the kind of hope that writes poems in prison, even when no one is allowed to read them.
III. I Have No Enemies
On December 25, 2009, Liu Xiaobo stood trial in Beijing. It lasted less than fifteen minutes.
The charge: inciting subversion of state power. The evidence: essays he had written, and his involvement in Charter 08. The outcome was already decided. He would be sentenced to eleven years in prison — the longest term ever given to a Chinese dissident since the 1989 crackdown.
But Liu had prepared a statement. He wasn’t allowed to read it in court, yet it would travel far beyond the courtroom’s walls. Later, it was smuggled out, translated, and read aloud in Oslo. It began plainly, with words that still astonish in their grace:
“I have no enemies and no hatred.”
He had every reason to be bitter. He had been jailed multiple times. His wife had been placed under house arrest. His name had become a digital taboo. And yet, he refused to let hatred define his resistance. To him, the greater danger was not repression — it was what repression could do to the human heart.
In that statement, Liu Xiaobo spoke like a man who had already made peace with suffering. He declared his love for his country. He spoke tenderly of Liu Xia, the woman who had endured everything with him. And then he closed with a promise:
“Even if I am crushed into powder, I will still use my ashes to embrace you.”
The courtroom transcript never published those lines. State media never quoted him. But the world heard them. When the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 2010, they cited his “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” He became the first Chinese citizen awarded a Nobel while still in the country — and the first laureate not allowed to attend the ceremony.
At the awards ceremony in Oslo, a single object sat on the stage in his place: an empty chair.
It was a small gesture, but it pierced through censorship like light through a crack. For a moment, the world was reminded that behind all politics lies a human being — fragile, principled, alone.
In China, the event was blacked out. News anchors read scripts in silence. Foreign broadcasts went dark. The Party responded not with rebuttals, but with deletion.
Liu Xiaobo would spend the next seven years in prison. The world would not hear his voice again.
But those five words — “I have no enemies” — would outlive him.
IV. The Nobel Chair and the Vanishing Man
When the spotlight turned to Oslo in December 2010, the ceremony was not what anyone expected. There were no speeches from the laureate, no acceptance remarks, no appearance via video. Just a quiet chair — empty, draped in soft light, placed where Liu Xiaobo should have sat.
The symbolism was unbearable and undeniable. It became one of the most powerful images of the decade: a Nobel Peace Prize awarded not only to a man, but to the very idea of moral courage in the face of enforced silence.
In Norway, the room stood in reverence. In China, the screens went dark.
The Chinese government denounced the award as “an obscenity.” It called Liu a “criminal” and summoned international ambassadors to lodge protests. The broadcast of the ceremony was blocked nationwide. Internet searches for “Nobel” were censored. Foreign media channels went black. In classrooms and universities, professors were instructed not to discuss it. Students — even literature students — were never told his name.
Liu Xia, meanwhile, was placed under unofficial house arrest in Beijing. She had done nothing more than love a man the state deemed dangerous. There were no formal charges, no public hearings, no trial. Just a sealed apartment, constant surveillance, and the weight of unspoken grief. Her phone line was cut. Friends who tried to visit were turned away or detained.
Inside that apartment, she wrote poetry — aching, disoriented, almost whispered into the void. She painted faces without eyes, birds without wings. Every act of expression became a form of resistance. Her husband was in prison; she was in a quieter kind of cell.
Outside of China, Liu Xiaobo’s name was becoming more widely known. Human rights groups lobbied for his release. World leaders issued statements. Writers, academics, exiles — they all spoke his name. And yet, the louder the voices grew abroad, the more suffocating the silence became within China.
Liu was disappearing not in body, but in record. Textbooks omitted him. Television archives erased him. Online encyclopedias removed references. In the country of his birth, Liu Xiaobo was becoming a man who had never existed.
This wasn’t censorship in its crude form — it was unremembering. The state wasn’t just suppressing knowledge; it was preemptively stripping it of meaning.
And in a society where truth is constantly overwritten, what is the cost of forgetting?
V. A Death Foretold
The end came quietly, and with ruthless efficiency.
In June 2017, news broke that Liu Xiaobo had been diagnosed with late-stage liver cancer. He had been in prison for nearly eight years. The disease, like the man, had been hidden from the public. By the time the announcement was made, the cancer was already terminal.
The Chinese government allowed Liu a medical parole — a rare move that seemed more about optics than mercy. But the parole came with limits: no freedom of movement, no uncensored contact, no exit from the country. Requests from abroad to let Liu seek treatment overseas — in Germany, in the United States, even in Taiwan — were all denied.
Physicians from Germany and the United States were eventually permitted to see him. Their assessment was clear: Liu could be moved and should be moved, immediately. But by then, it was already too late. The window for healing had closed. The only question left was where, and how, he would die.
Inside the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, Liu Xiaobo was surrounded not by friends or fellow writers, but by security agents. His hospital room was effectively a detention cell. Footage leaked from the scene showed a frail, barely conscious man, his face sunken, his voice weak. Even then, he was under surveillance.
He died on July 13, 2017. No final words were broadcast. No bedside vigil was permitted. There was no moment for farewell. His body was quickly cremated, and his ashes scattered at sea — not by family tradition, but by political design.
The authorities said it was what the family wanted. But many suspected the real reason: no grave, no pilgrimage, no place for remembrance.
Liu Xiaobo was not just buried — he was erased.
For the Chinese government, his death solved a problem. A living dissident might inspire. A martyr might mobilize. But a man without a body, without a tombstone, without a name in the textbooks? That man could be forgotten — or so they hoped.
But the world noticed. Candlelight vigils were held in Hong Kong and Taipei. Writers and journalists mourned him across continents. The empty chair from the Nobel ceremony resurfaced in obituaries, a haunting reminder of what had been lost.
And somewhere in Beijing, Liu Xia — still under house arrest, still without charges — sat alone with her grief. Her husband was gone. Her country had turned its face away. And outside her window, a city of twenty million moved on, as if nothing had happened.
VI. The Woman Who Carried His Silence
In the aftermath of Liu Xiaobo’s death, Liu Xia did not cry in public. Not because she had no tears left, but because there was no public to witness them. The state kept her hidden, a widow without a voice, a poet without a page.
For more than eight years — beginning in 2010 — Liu Xia lived in a kind of domestic exile, under de facto house arrest. Her only crime was being married to a man who dared to speak. She was watched, followed, cut off from the outside world. Her phone was disconnected. Her mail was censored. Her friends were turned away at the door.
She was not charged. She was not tried. She simply ceased to be visible.
Inside that apartment, she wrote. Her poetry was not political in the conventional sense, but each line trembled with pain. “Living is a punishment,” she once wrote. “Why am I not dead?” She painted too — blurred figures, faceless women, birds in motionless flight. The images were spare, but raw. They spoke of grief without resolution, fear without sound.
International advocates campaigned relentlessly for her release. German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up her name in meetings with Chinese officials. Human rights groups launched petitions, letter-writing drives, online vigils. For years, the answer was silence.
And then, suddenly, in July 2018, Liu Xia was allowed to leave.
She boarded a flight to Berlin — no press, no ceremony, just a seat in economy and a final glance at the country that had tried to erase her. There was no explanation, no formal lifting of charges (because there had never been any). Some speculated that it was a diplomatic gesture ahead of trade talks. Others believed her deteriorating mental health had become a liability for the regime.
In Berlin, Liu Xia smiled for the cameras. The image spread quickly: the poet, free at last. But those who knew her saw something else. Behind the smile was a body unaccustomed to safety, a woman still flinching at every sudden sound.
She lives now in quiet exile. No longer watched, but still haunted. The grief has not softened — it has simply learned to travel.
“I’m like a feather,” she once told a friend. “Blown to Germany by a storm.”
But even a feather can carry the weight of memory. Liu Xia does not give speeches. She does not attend conferences. But her mere presence — walking through Berlin, sketching in solitude, writing when she can — is its own kind of testimony.
She survived, and in surviving, she preserves the silence her husband was forced to leave behind.
VII. The Sound of Absence
In today’s China, Liu Xiaobo’s name is not remembered — it is removed. Not violently, but thoroughly, almost politely. Like sweeping dust beneath a rug, the state ensures he is neither seen nor spoken of, not in schools, not in newspapers, not in dinner conversations.
Ask a student born after 2000 who Liu Xiaobo was, and you’re likely to meet a blank stare. Some may hesitate, sensing the name is “sensitive.” Others will shrug. The erasure is working.
This is not the silence of unawareness, but of un-permission. Search engines yield little. Archives have been combed clean. Even VPNs strain to retrieve the articles, poems, and essays that once marked Liu’s life. His Nobel Prize — a fact in any other country that would live forever in textbooks — is simply unmentioned. The image of the empty chair in Oslo? Absent from memory, absent from record.
And yet, silence is not absence. Not entirely.
Outside China, Liu Xiaobo still speaks, through the words he left behind. His courtroom statement — “I have no enemies” — is recited at vigils in Hong Kong, at lectures in Taiwan, at university readings in Europe. His poems circulate in translation, delicate as breath. A line here. A fragment there. Enough to resist forgetting.
“I firmly believe that China’s political progress will not stop,” he wrote.
“I, filled with optimism, await the dawn.”
But the dawn did not arrive in time for him. And for those still inside China, dawn feels further away than ever.
Since his death, the crackdown on dissent has only intensified. Human rights lawyers have been detained. Journalists have vanished. Surveillance grows more sophisticated, more silent. The cost of saying what Liu Xiaobo once said has risen — and yet, what he stood for still flickers beneath the surface.
In whispered conversations. In anonymous essays. In the quiet act of remembering what the state has tried to unwrite.
Perhaps that is what Liu understood better than anyone: tyranny thrives not just by controlling speech, but by burying memory.
And so, in the places where he cannot be named, his absence makes noise. Not loud, not sharp — but constant, like the wind under a door.
To remember him now is not nostalgia. It is resistance.
Epilogue — A Letter That Was Never Delivered
If Liu Xiaobo could have written one last letter, it would not have been bitter.
He would have addressed it to his wife, Liu Xia — not as a farewell, but as a quiet promise: that her solitude was never abandonment, and that the silence imposed upon them was not the end of their story.
He might have addressed it to China, too — not the state, but the people. The young man on the subway reading banned books on a smuggled Kindle. The poet who never publishes but keeps writing anyway. The student who whispers questions after class. The mother who tells her child, just once, what really happened in June 1989.
And maybe, just maybe, he would have written to the future — to the version of China he spent his life believing in. One not afraid of dissent, not built on forgetting. A China where words are not weapons, and where no one is jailed for dreaming in public.
“I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes.”
That line, from his courtroom statement, now feels both prophetic and unbearably hopeful. He knew he would not live to see the change he believed in. But he wrote as if others would.
Today, Liu Xiaobo is gone. His ashes scattered. His chair remains empty.
But the letter — the one he never got to send — has not been lost. It is carried forward by those who remember, passed hand to hand in the dark, read aloud when the risk is low and the heart is strong. It is written in poems, in essays, in the refusal to forget.
His legacy is not carved in stone. It is carried in breath.
And perhaps that is what power still fears most: not rebellion, but memory. Not rage, but resolve. The quiet conviction of a man who once stood before a court, facing prison, and chose to speak love instead of anger.
Not many people could do that.
Liu Xiaobo did.