ASIA : Allusions to Crackdown Keep 6 Young Poets in a Chinese Jail

Only a few people have ever seen the poetry-and-images videotape for which six young Sichuan province poets have already been imprisoned without trial for 19 months.

But lack of success in reaching an audience seems not to have lessened the severity of the alleged “counterrevolutionary” crime by the poets, who are being held in a detention center in the central China city of Chongqing while authorities ponder their fate.

A handful of the poets’ local defenders have tried to convince police that the videotape--made early last year with works from each of the writers--carried no direct message on the June 4, 1989, army massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing.

“It could have been describing Hitler, or South Africa,” these Sichuan intellectuals argued, according to a Beijing literary critic familiar with the case.

But authorities have not accepted that argument. Friends of the poets expect a formal trial soon.

One of the bitterest works in the confiscated videotape--the poem “Slaughter,” by Liao Yiwu--was started before the student-led Tian An Men Square protests were crushed, according to Michael Day, a Canadian scholar. Day, a specialist in contemporary Chinese poetry, was expelled from China on Thursday because of his closeness to Liao.

The first part of “Slaughter” is an exploration of what Liao views as spiritual and material destruction in China in the course of modernization. It seems clear, however, that the bloody suppression of the 1989 protests inspired the gory ending to the long poem, which speaks of a dog lapping up minced meat and laments that “the accursed epoch is all wrong!”

Liao, 31, and his five colleagues--Ba Tie, Wan Xia, Liu Taiheng, Li Yawei and Gou Mingjun--are among an unknown number of dissidents imprisoned in provincial jails and labor camps across China.

Estimates by international human rights organizations and Western governments place the number of political prisoners in the thousands, but no detailed figures are available. Most are either longtime prisoners or people arrested in direct connection with the 1989 protests. But there are others, such as the six poets, who moved deeper into dissident literature in response to the crackdown and are now paying the price.

This is not Liao’s first brush with cultural repression. He gained national notoriety when his poem “The City of Death” was printed in 1987 in the official journal People’s Literature, and later singled out for hard-line political criticism as too abstract and pessimistic.

Liao and many in his circle, Day said, have drawn inspiration from translated works of “beat” poets such as Allen Ginsberg and have read works ranging from Dante’s “Inferno” to works by modern American poets such as Sylvia Plath.

Liao and his five colleagues were arrested on or about March 25, 1990, most of them in the Yangtze River town of Fuling. Liao’s wife, Li Xia, was also detained but was released a month later, when authorities decided that her only involvement was copying Liao’s work in her clearer handwriting, the literary critic said.

A few months after her release, Li gave birth to a baby boy. Liao can receive letters from his family, but has been allowed neither a photograph of the baby nor visits from his wife and son, the critic said.

Nick Driver, researcher in The Times’ Beijing bureau, contributed to this article.

Verse from “Slaughter,” by Liao Yiwu:

In the name of the Fatherland,

slaughter the constitution.

In the name of the constitution, slaughter righteousness . . . .

In the name of urbanites,

destroy the city.

Open fire!