Chinese dissident at Patrick Henry College 10/11

Chinese Dissident to Speak at PHC, Oct. 17

October 11th, 2011

CONTACT: 
David Halbrook

Patrick Henry College

(540) 441-8722

OfficeOfCommunications@phc.edu

 

Liao Yiwu, witness against Chinese Communism

Patrick Henry College continues its Coffeehouse Lectures with a special
visit from a man whom PHC's Professor of History and Writer in
Residence, Dr. David Aikman, calls "a Chinese version of Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn." Liao Yiwu, who has suffered at the hands of Communist
China because of his commitment to writing and speaking about its
atrocities, will speak in the Barbara Hodel Center Coffee Shop on Monday, October 17 at 7:00 p.m.

Liao, 53, escaped from China earlier this year. Before his departure
from China he had been under almost constant surveillance and harassment
from the Chinese authorities. Liao had first come to prominence by
writing a long poem, "Massacre" in 1989 about the Tiananmen Square
massacre in Beijing in 1989. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1990 and
suffered grievously from torture and psychological mistreatment.

Like the Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, however, he used his prison
time creatively, interviewing dozens of fellow-inmates, just as
Solzhenitsyn did in the Soviet Gulag, to document their various grim
experiences. His account, published as Testimonials, was predictably banned in China.

Liao's most recent book translated into English is God is Red,
an account of several heroic and saintly Chinese Christians whom he met
and interview in China's remote and impoverished south-west. Liao,
though obviously admiring the Christians he met, was not himself a
Christian. Dr. Aikman wrote in Christianity Today, "If you want
to read one book that sums up the glory of the Christian witness under
persecution and the tragic 20th-century story of China's Christians,
read God Is Red. Brilliant and immensely moving, it will, if anything can, inject new backbone into your own Christian life."

Liao Yiwu will also perform on the Xiao (a Chinese flute) and recite his own gripping Chinese poetry (with translation).