Chinese Crackdown on Domestic Critics Extends to Writer Barred From Traveling

By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
May 09, 2011

In the latest sign of China's continuing crackdown on domestic critics, a prominent Chinese writer has been barred from leaving China to attend a literary festival next week in Australia, the writer and festival officials said Monday.

The writer, Liao Yiwu, is a poet, author and musician who went to prison for four years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989 for composing a strongly worded eulogy for the fallen. Some of his more recent writings on people at the margins of life in China, including a professional funeral mourner and a grave robber, have been compiled in a translated book, "The Corpse Walker."

Mr. Liao said in a telephone interview that security officials had invited him to a teahouse in his hometown of Chengdu and informed him that he had not been granted permission to leave the country to attend the Sydney Writers' Festival. The officials did not provide a reason, Mr. Liao said, adding, "I was politely treated."

The travel ban on Mr. Liao is a reminder that China restricts free speech beyond the more widely reported detentions and disappearances of bloggers, writers and lawyers this spring, the biggest such crackdown in years.

Mr. Liao was also denied permission last month to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York, where he had been scheduled to speak on April 25. The chairman of that festival, Salman Rushdie, criticized the travel prohibition as "an extremely unfortunate statement on the part of Chinese authorities about its willingness to engage in free and open cultural exchange."

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