Geremie R. Barmé

I’ve found New Ghosts, Old Dreams by Gernemie Barme and Linda Jaivin after I leaned about Linda Jaivin when I read 《末日幸存者的独白》by Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2010, about his experience of the '89 Democracy Movement, in which Liu mentioned that he’d declined Linda Jaivin’s suggestion to hide in the Australian Embassy in Beijing after he helped organize the students to withdraw from the Tiananmen Square protests on June the 4th, 1989. New Ghosts, Old Dreams is a marvelous book that records the Chinese views of the Tiananmen Square protests before and during the Tiananmen Square protests. It’s an anthology of fiction and nonfiction pieces and poems by well-known and little-known authors. Without the editors’ insightfulness and efforts, those Chinese thoughts wouldn’t have been spread out of China. I’m especially fond of some of Liu’s lines: “because throughout our long feudal history, Chinses intellectuals were never independent thinkers, but ‘court literati.’” It’s a heavy-hearted history and reality; however, at least some of the intellectuals have gotten themselves out of the “court literati.” Liu Xiaobo was one of them, who was definitely a dependent thinker and fought for a democratic China but died because of his dependent thoughts.… (mais)