Chinese Dissidents List

Gao Zhisheng, via the Guardian

Around Christmas last year Liu Xiaobo made headlines when he was given a heavy prison sentence; essentially his only crime was to help write and distribute the "Charter '08." I remember at the time that Wei Jingsheng, the famous Democracy wall activist now exiled in the USA, spoke on Liu's behalf before news media, showing inter-dissident solidarity.

Now another human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, is making some waves for a strange story of disappearance -- or perhaps he was in custody the whole time? The British press in particular seems to enjoy the opportunity to make Chinese security bureaucrats look evil:

China says missing lawyer is 'where he should be'

Foreign ministry official hints leading human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng is in custody after he disappeared nearly a year ago.

I'll be honest, the debate over human rights in China has never been my favorite subject. But that's because I was not looking at it from a literary perspective. Portraits of dissidents have a long tradition in all cultures, and particularly get a lot of attention in English-language coverage of China.

So here I'll leave a list of dissidents and interesting texts about dissidents -- I'm not sure what if anything I'll do with that yet. My larger goal is to create knowledge banks sort of like old-school note cards to come back to. I notice that so far in this blog I have not come back to things very often, but I want that to change.