1991年获释后，刘晓波写下了一首诗，表达了他对自己此前所作供述及“电视证言”的愧疚之情——这些内容曾在他获释后经由中央电视台和公共广播电台播出；想必您还记得，他当时曾谎称天安门广场上无人丧生。您或许也记得他那首献给“十七岁的蒋捷连”的诗中的字句：
“当你擎旗倒下时，
你年仅十七岁；
而我却活了下来，
如今已三十六岁。
面对你逝去的灵魂，
活着竟成了一种罪过，
为你写诗更是一种耻辱。
生者理当缄默，
静听坟茔的诉说。
我不配为你写诗。
十七岁的你，已超越了一切语言与人为的创造。”
根据他的朋友兼传记作者、独立中文笔会联合创办人贝岭所述，这种对威权主义受害者的罪恶感，后来成了刘晓波生命中的一个核心主题，甚至让他对自己产生了深深的厌恶与痛恨。刘晓波曾在文章《我们这一代的残酷》中讲述过一段感人的童年往事，回忆起自己曾对一位旧邻居做过的残忍行径。那位以拾荒为生的老人曾被视为“反革命”而遭排挤，晓波和其他孩子曾以戏弄、羞辱这位可怜的老人为乐。这不过是模仿成人世界仪式的童年游戏：刘晓波的成长岁月正值“文革”时期，他自己也曾在无数次的批斗会上被迫进行自我检讨，而所谓的“罪行”无非是偷偷抽烟、在校园打架或逃课。
在阅读关于刘晓波的文章时，人们常以“英雄”、“殉道者”或“牺牲者”来形容这位高贵的人，并将他与圣雄甘地、纳尔逊·曼德拉或瓦茨拉夫·哈维尔等楷模相提并论。这些称谓恰恰揭示了他真正的悲剧所在：与上述人物不同，他在有生之年未能亲眼见证自己理念的胜利。不过，谁又能断言呢？或许鉴于当时的历史境况，他的一些理念本身便与中国的历史与社会并不契合。
2010年10月，德国记者兼作家克里斯蒂安·Y·施密特（Christian Y. Schmidt）——他自称曾是毛主义者——在《日报》（taz）上发表文章，批评了《零八宪章》中提出的一些观点，特别是其中的经济纲领（如出售私有农地），他将其称为“制造贫困计划”（Armprogram）的。施密特也批评了刘晓波那番极具争议的言论：即中国需要经历大约300年的殖民统治，才能像前英国皇家殖民地香港那样成为一个民主社会——这一观点刘晓波曾在1988年的采访中提出，并于2006年重申。
然而耐人寻味的是，刘晓波在法庭上受到的指控并非针对这些观点。正如德国笔会（PEN）前主席、现任名誉主席约瑟夫·哈斯林格（Josef Haslinger）所指出的，法院在判决书中甚至未提及关于私有财产或农田私有化的诉求。真正触动当局敏感神经的，是刘晓波关于建立“中华联邦共和国”的构想。这个构想很容易被解读为旨在保护香港或澳门免受共产党控制的企图；而这正是当局不愿看到被公开讨论的议题。
刘晓波在2008年那篇著名的辩护演讲中表示，他的行为符合中国宪法，而宪法自2004年起保障了包括言论自由在内的各项人权（见第三十五条）。对刘晓波本人以及整个中国社会而言，这都是一个悲剧：零八宪章的概念没有机会得到广泛的讨论，更遑论在未来的岁月中得到修正、完善和进一步发展。我认为，如果他有机会参与公开讨论，他一定会是第一个接受更充分论证的人。
苏晓康在题为《刘晓波将激进的苦难转化为平静》的文章中问道：“我们如何衡量刘晓波的《中国需要300年的殖民统治》与《我没有敌人》之间的距离？”他的解释如下：“这是文化与政治、尼采与甘地、以及对一切的反叛和傲慢与自我反省、谦逊和甘愿地狱、地狱之间的距离。
悔恨与忏悔、抗争与反叛，以及随之而来的责任担当──晓波这些性格特质深深打动了我；身为一名在西德天主教环境中长大的新教徒，我对此有着深刻的共鸣。我们俩同生于1955年，但各自的人生际遇却截然不同。年轻时，我那一代人中有些人热衷于引用那本被称为“毛泽东语录”（即“毛圣经”）的红宝书。他们的言行让我感到厌烦，而他们或许也因视我为“资产阶级自由派”而鄙夷我，但这并未影响我的生活。 1988年11月，我随一个记者团前往中国，专注于妇女状况。我们的行程涵盖北京、西安、哈尔滨和上海，参观了托儿所、学校、一家由女性经营的电脑公司、一家生产精美圣诞装饰品的工厂、医院的产科病房以及女子监狱。当时我们一行人共有十五位记者和作家，却无人预见到仅仅六个月后天安门广场会发生什么事。我们当时是多么天真。我曾采访中国作家王安忆，并为德国周刊撰写了关于她的特写文章，但这篇稿件最终未能发表。
刘晓波，当你离世时，
你年仅六十一岁。
如今我已年长你十岁，依然活着，且安然无恙——大抵如此。
面对你的在天之灵，
活着或许并非罪过，
但若以你的标准为你写诗，那倒可能是一种耻辱。
是的，你说得对，生者必须闭口不言，
静听坟茔的诉说。
Regula Venske：Listen to the Grave – Notes on Liu Xiaobo
Leipzig, July 13, 2026
After Liu Xiaobo was released from prison in 1991, he wrote a poem in which he expressed his feelings of guilt about his confession and “on-air testimony” which had been broadcast by CCTV and public radio. He dedicated this poem To the Seventeen-Year-Old Jiang Jielian:
“When you fell carrying the flag
You were only 17
But I survived
And now I’m 36.
Facing your departed soul,
Living is a crime,
And writing a poem to you is a disgrace.
The living must shut up
And listen to the grave.
I am unworthy
To write a poem for you.
At 17 you surpassed all language and man-made creation.”
According to his friend and biographer Bei Ling, co-founder of the Independent Chinese PEN-Center, this feeling of guilt towards the victims of authoritarianism was to become a central theme of Liu Xiaobo’s life, even to a point that he deeply loathed and hated himself. There is a moving childhood episode which Liu Xiaobo narrated in an article about “The cruelty of the Children of Our Time”, remembering his own deeds of cruelty towards a former neighbor of his family’s. This old man who made a living collecting garbage had been ostracized as counter-revolutionary, and Xiaobo along with other children had had fun harassing and deeply humiliating the poor man. A childhood game, copying the rituals of the adult world: The Cultural Revolution took place during Liu Xiaobo’s formative years, and Xiaobo himself had to practice self-criticism in struggle-sessions uncounted times, his ‘crimes’ being secretly smoking, participating in schoolyard fights, or skipping classes.
When you read articles about Liu Xiaobo, recurrent words to describe this noble man are “hero”, “martyr”, or “sacrifice”, and he is being compared to his role models such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or Václav Havel. These denominations denote his real tragedy, for unlike them, he was not to see the victory of his ideas in his lifetime. And who knows, maybe some of his ideas did not fit with Chinese history and society, given the historical situation.
In an article published by taz newspaper in October 2010, the German journalist and author Christian Y. Schmidt, who at that time lived in China, criticized some ideas expressed in the Charter 08, especially the economic program such as the selling of private farmland which Schmidt calls an “Armutsbeschaffungsprogramm”, a program to increase poverty. Schmidt also criticized Liu Xiaobo’s provocative statement that China would need some 300 years of colonialism in order to become as democratic a community as Hongkong, the former British Crown Colony, an opinion Liu Xiaobo expressed in an interview in 1988 and reaffirmed in 2006.
But interestingly enough, it wasn’t these ideas that Liu Xiaobo was charged for in court. As president emeritus and now honorary president of German PEN, Josef Haslinger, has pointed out, the Court did not even mention the demands for private property or the privatization of farmland in their verdict. What really struck a nerve, was Liu Xiaobo’s idea of a Federal Republic of China. The intent of such a concept could easily be understood as an attempt to protect Hongkong, or Macao, from Communist access. Now those were demands they did not want to see discussed in public.
In his renowned speech of defense in 2008, Liu Xiaobo stated that he had acted in accordance with the Chinese Constitution which since 2004 guaranteed Human Rights including Freedom of Speech (in Article 35). It is a tragedy not only for Liu Xiaobo, but for Chinese society as a whole that the ideas of Charter 08 had no chance to be widely discussed, and maybe amended, modified, and developed further in the years to come. He would have been the first one, I think, to embrace a better argument in an open discussion, had there ever been one.
“How can we measure the distance from Liu Xiaobo’s ‘China Needs 300 Years of Colonialism’ to ‘I Have No Enemies?’, asks Su Xiaokang in an article entitled, “Liu Xiaobo Turned Radical Suffering into Calm”. The explanation follows: “It’s the distance between culture and politics, between Nietzsche and Gandhi, and between a rebelliousness and arrogance against everything, and self-examination, humility, and a willingness to descend into hell.”
Remorse and repentance, resistance and rebellion, and ensuing responsibility, Xiaobo’s strengths of character deeply resonate with me, having grown up as a Protestant in a Catholic environment in West Germany. The two of us share the same year of birth, 1955, but how different the circumstances of our lives have been. In my youth, some people my generation loved to quote from a little red book known as the “Mao Bible”, officially the ‘Words of Chairman Mao Zedong’. They got on my nerves, and in return, they may have despised me for being a ‘liberal bourgeois’ in their eyes, but this did not affect my life. In November 1988, I traveled to China with a group of journalists, focusing on the situation of women. We went to Beijing, Xian, Harbin and Shanghai, visiting nurseries and schools, a computer company run by women, a factory producing awesome Christmas decoration, the maternity ward in a hospital, a women’s prison. We were fifteen journalists and writers, and none of us had any premonition of what was to happen only six months later on Tiananmen Square. How naïve we were. I met Chinese writer Wang Anyi for an interview and wrote a portrait about her for a weekly German magazine which in the end was never to be published.
When you died, Liu Xiaobo,
You were only 61.
I am now ten years older than that, still here and unharmed, more or less.
Facing your departed soul,
Living may not be a crime,
But writing a poem to you, according to your standards might be a disgrace.
Yes, you were right, the living must shut up
And listen to the grave.
【欧洲之声】2026.07.17
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