Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison

The Guardian

Lean Left

Mixed Factuality

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Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison

My poems were written in anger after Tiananmen Square. But what motivates most prison writing is a fear of forgetting. Today I am free, but the regime has never stopped its war on wordsMost of my manuscripts are locked up in the filing cabinets of the ministry of security, and the agents there study and ponder them repeatedly, more carefully than the creator himself. The guys working this racket have superb memories; a certain chief of the Cheng…