MICHAEL MORRIS | Alan Paton’s liberalism echoes in Liu Xiaobo’s story - Business Day

Michael Morris

A recent collegial contest was prompted by French television journalist David Pujadas asking a panel of top media figures in France if they could name three living Chinese people beyond Xi Jinping (which they couldn’t).

My colleagues did well. I managed just one name after Xi, but had to Google the spelling, and even then it didn’t count because Liu Xiaobo is dead. Yet what’s always redemptive is dwelling on the almost unimaginable life of another and remembering why that matters.

Liu was a Nobel peace prize laureate, literary critic, dissident and prisoner who died of cancer in 2017 just weeks after being granted medical parole. He lived and fought for the ordinary things we understand as constituting the good society.

There’s a personal reason why Liu Xiaobo resonates. I was honoured in November 2012 to be invited by writers’ organisation PEN South Africa to participate in an event at Kalk Bay Books to mark the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer.

My daunting company included fellow Business Day columnist Tom Eaton, novelists Henrietta Rose-Innes and Lauren Beukes, journalist and author Tim Butcher, and poets Gus Ferguson and Beatrice Willoughby. Each of us was asked to read from the work of an imprisoned writer and respond with something of our own.

Liu Xiaobo was assigned to me. Before reading one of the many prison poems he dedicated to his wife (which included the spare, despairing lines “daybreak a vast emptiness / you in a far place”), I offered what I called “a note on the pathos of power” from the 2009 verdict of Beijing’s “Municipal No 1 Intermediate People’s Court”.

It began: “Defendant Liu Xiaobo has committed the crime of inciting subversion of state power.” This line is a monument all its own, symbolising Liu, but China, too.

What I chose to “read back to” Liu in 2012 was a brief account of a security guard trying to deal with a drunk sprawled on a traffic island. It was not without comedy, but the essence was an acknowledgement, I hoped, of the primacy of humaneness as the marker of a society that does not jail people for their thoughts.

In the piece, the security guard is an obvious figure of force, with his lime bib and truncheon, yet as he is watched by “us”, motorists in the slowed rush-hour traffic, the most he can do is nudge the trespasser with the toe of his boot.

“Words pass between the two,” I wrote, “the frown of the guard suggesting the drunk has failed the simple test of eloquence, intelligibility or persuasion. We can almost hear the slurring incoherence of his sincerity.”

Yet, even as “we” share the guard’s impatience and “imagine the kicking impulse throbbing in [his] limber joints, our presence somehow guarantees there will be no application of force. We’re doing it together … we’re in it together. It’s a small thing, not bruising a drunk who won’t move, who’s not meant to be there, sprawled on the grass of the traffic island, but it is something.”

That “something” counts for more than we may realise.

I’m immediately reminded of Alan Paton saying in the last decade of his life that “by liberalism I do not mean the creed of any party or of any country. I mean a generosity of spirit, a tolerance of others, an attempt to comprehend otherness, a love of liberty and therefore a commitment to the rule of law, a repugnance for authoritarianism, and a high ideal of the worth and dignity of man”.

Morris is head of media at the South African Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businessday.co.za/opinion/2026-06-08-michael-morris-alan-patons-liberalism-echoes-in-liu-xiaobos-story/