BEIJING, July 29 – Three Chinese who have been arrested or persecuted for their writings about China have been awarded the prestigious Hellman/Hammett grant, a US-based rights group said Tuesday.
Liao Yiwu, Liu Binyan, and Wang Lixiong were among 28 writers from 13 countries to receive the grant in recognition of the courage with which they faced political repression, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement.
The annual grant was set up in 1989 when executors of the estate of American playwright Lillian Hellman asked HRW to design a program in her name and that of her long-time companion Dashiell Hammett, a novelist, to provide assistance to writers in financial need as a result of expressing their views.
This year’s grants totaled 170,000 US dollars.
Liao, a poet, novelist, and film scriptwriter, has been arrested repeatedly over the past 14 years.
The first arrest was in 1990 while he was working on a movie dedicated to victims of the June 4, 1989 massacre of pro-democracy protesters by troops in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Over the next four years, he was frequently confined to detention centers and prisons where he was subjected to abusive treatment, once being handcuffed for 23 consecutive days causing abscesses in his armpits, HRW said.
He tried to commit suicide twice. In 1995, police searched his home, confiscated his writings, and held him under house arrest for 20 days. In 1998, he was arrested for compiling The Underground Poems of the Seventies in China.
In December 2002, Liao was detained again after he posted his writings on the Internet and signed a petition to the 16th Communist Party Congress which ushered in a new Chinese leadership.
Liu is a journalist whose work has criticized Chinese Communist Party officials for corruption, repression of press freedom, and suppression of people’s basic rights.
In 1957, the government labeled Liu an “extreme rightist,” sent him to work in a labor camp and prohibited him from writing for 20 years.
From 1978 to 1988, he was a special correspondent for the People’s Daily newspaper before going to the United States on a Nieman Fellowship in 1989 and being barred from returning to China.
He continues to write about current developments in China for numerous newspapers and magazines.
Wang writes political fiction and essays which make the censors frown. He has written about Tibet’s independence movement and in 1999, while traveling in predominantly Muslim Xinjiang in northwest China, was accused of leaking state secrets and detained for more than a month.
On release, he continued writing about political reform. Since then, he has been under heavy surveillance and his writing is banned, HRW said.
