2018年12月被捕的秋雨圣约教会创办人王怡牧师，被控“颠覆国家政权罪”。他只要求全面宗教自由。他的证词是「一场反对洗脑的战争」, 是为了从唯物主义的平庸中夺取中国文化和人民: 一场「灵魂」之战。

在公布这篇呼吁之前，汉学家佩里·林克（Perry Link）、迈克尔·马丁·戴（Michael Martin Day）、玛丽·霍尔兹曼（Marie Holzman），诺贝尔奖得主作家赫尔塔·穆勒(Herta Müller)、作家马丁·肖尔（Martin.Schult），导演斯蒂芬·克尼斯(Stephan Knies)，及柏林文学节主席乌尔里希·施雷贝尔(Ulrich Schreiber）已表示倾力支持。

2018年12月9日，世界人权日前夜，在我的家乡四川成都，当今中国最有影响力的家庭教会，秋雨之福圣约教会，被警方夜袭并取缔，一百多名信徒被抓走，由大伙儿集资购买的礼拜堂、神学院等教产被查封，旋即被非法强占，变成双眼井社区政府办公大厅。而这个教会的创办人王怡、蒋蓉夫妇被双双指控，犯“煽动颠覆国家政权罪”，被捕并失踪至今，抛下他们十来岁的儿子王书亚，由王怡父母代为照看。几天前，王怡爸爸心急如焚，替儿子委托了律师。不料双方约见刚刚结束，跟踪监视的警察们一拥而上，把律师抓进派出所，羁押审讯达6个小时，没收了所有法律文书，并宣布剥夺其辩护权。

王怡与我相识快20年，我们都是异议诗人和作家，都做过独立中文笔会理事，也曾一块出版过四本被查禁的地下黑皮书。由于我十六次申请出国被拒，他还做过我的维权律师。2005年，蒋蓉和王怡先后受洗归主，大半年后，王怡、余杰、李柏光等基督徒在白宫受到美国总统布什的接见。2008年四川大地震余波未了，王怡夫妇在家中创立秋雨之福教会，自此屡屡被警方骚扰，20多次被传讯。再后来，王怡做了秋雨圣约教会主任牧师，也是信众达一千多万的中国地下教会中最具争议的“政治牧师”。每年6月4日，他都为天安门大屠杀的死难者举办祷告会，因此受到许多责难，他回应道：“不少人问我们凭什么为六四祷告，那是政治。我说我没看到政治，我看到的是杀人，是不公义，是人民被压迫，在受苦。在一个政治化的社会里，仅仅持守良心的自由，就已经被认为在搞政治了。”

最近的2018年10月28日，他布道：“这个国家正在发起一场对灵魂的战争，虽然这场战争的排名并不是最靠前，但这是最重要的一场战争。因为在新疆，在西藏，在上海，在北京，在成都，这个国家的统治者都在发起这场战争，但他们却为自己树立了一个永远不可能被关押，永远不可能被毁灭，永远不可能被降服、被征服的敌人，这就是人的灵魂......所以他们注定要失去这场战争，注定要失败.....。”

但“录音机”也有泪流满面的时候，就像现在我阅读他的诗，咀嚼着“去监狱如同去非洲”——如此的遥远！如此的遥远！！他回得来吗？今生今世，我还能见到他吗？共产党的牢房是越来越暗无天日，刘晓波和杨天水都死在里面，他们才六十多岁，都是主张非暴力的异议作家，眼看刑期快满了，却突然被检查出绝症——而王怡有痛风顽疾，发作起来，脚尖沾地就疼得钻心。带他“去非洲”的警察们会让他随身携带止痛药吗？接下来的突击审讯，痛风突发在意料中，他们会送倒地挣扎的他上医院吗——我们这一行的老师傅索尔仁尼琴，把徧布苏联的劳改营比作“古拉格群岛”。他描述道，当一个人没进去时，群岛如高空的群星，那样遥远，深不可测，谁也不知如何抵达。直到某一天大祸临头，才明白去那儿的唯一路径是通过正式逮捕。什么时候回来，或者永远不回来，谁也说不清——是的，当我离开噩梦的故乡，痛风患者王怡却继续朝前，拼死抵抗了七年，终于正式逮捕，而不是“被喝茶”“被传讯”“被软禁”“被遣送”“被旅游”“被失踪”“被黑头套”。我预感他回不来了！大伙儿知道，那个国家，那个叫成都、拉萨、乌鲁木齐或北京的城市，暗地里塞满了服刑的政治犯，对于暂时没进去的人们，却如群岛或非洲那样遥不可及。

附录：王怡的三首诗

在这个时代，你必须写一首涉嫌犯罪的诗

在这个时代，你必须写一首涉嫌犯罪的诗。

一排汉语，可以颠覆一个政权。

十四行诗，可以颠覆十四个政权。

在秘密的化装舞会上，让认出你的人

认出你来。认不出你的，更加认不出你。

在这个时代，你必须让领袖害怕一首诗。

一个比喻，是一枚核弹。

商女不知，满纸荒唐言，一把亡国泪。

在最糟糕的日子，也有巨大的涌浪袭来。

死亡，成了囚犯，被水羁押着。

谁不是政治犯家属呢？谁不是鬼魂的未亡人？

在这个时代，你朗诵一首诗，涉嫌三、五个罪名。

你不朗诵，你就被他们朗诵。

在这个时代，瞎子呐呐自语。

神圣，神圣，神圣。瞎子问聋子，你看见了吗？

在这个时代，你必须写一首涉嫌犯罪的诗。

向那些涉嫌犯罪的人致敬。

A Brain-washing War — an Appeal for the poet-preacher Wang Yi

[Prior to the official publication of this appeal, it has received the strong support of the sinologists Perry Link、Michael Martin Day and Marie Holzman, the German writer and Nobel laureate Herta Müller and writer Martin Shult, director Stephan Knies and of the Berlin Literature Festival, Ulrich Schreiber. Thanks a lot.]

On December 9th, 2018, on the eve of international Human Rights Day, in my hometown of Chengdu, Sichuan, the most influential house church in China today, the Early Rain Covenant Church, was raided by the police and banned, and more than 100 believers were taken away. The chapel, seminary, and other church property funded by the congregants were seized and the property was immediately illegally occupied, becoming the government office hall of the Double Eyes Well Community. The founders of the church, the husband-and-wife pair of Wang Yi and Jiang Rong, were both accused of “inciting subversion of state power”, arrested and have gone missing until this day, leaving their ten-year-old son, Wang Shuya, to be looked after by Wang Yi’s parents. A few days ago, burning with worry, Wang Yi’s father sought out a lawyer for his son. Unexpectedly, just after the two parties had finished their interview, police officers who had been surveilling them rushed up and arrested the lawyer, interrogated him in the police station for six hours, confiscated all related legal documents, and announced he had been stripped of his right to provide counsel.

Wang Yi and I have known each other for 20 years. We are both dissident poets and writers and have both been directors of the Independent Chinese Pen Association. Together, we also published four underground books that have been banned. As I had visa applications to leave the country rejected 16 times, Wang also acted as my human rights lawyer. In 2005, Jiang Rong and Wang Yi were baptized and returned to the Lord. A half year later, Wang Yi, Yu Jie, Li Boguang and other Chinese Christians were received by President Bush in the White House. In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, Wang Yi and his wife founded the Early Rain Covenant Church in their home. Since then, they have been repeatedly harassed by the police and have been interrogated over 20 times. Later, Wang Yi became the chief pastor of the Early Rain Covenant Church and the most controversial “political pastor” among the more than 10 million congregants of China’s underground churches.

Every year on the anniversary of June 4th Massacre, he has held a prayer meeting for the victims of the Tiananmen Massacre, for which he has been repeatedly censured. He has responded: “Many people ask us why we pray for June 4th as it is politics. I say I didn’t see politics, I saw people being killed, an injustice, people being oppressed and suffering. In a politicized society, just maintaining freedom of conscience is already considered political.”

On October 28, 2018, he preached: “This country is launching a war against the soul, although the ranking of this war is not the most advanced, it is the most important war. In Xinjiang, in Tibet, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Chengdu, the rulers of this country are launching this war, but they have established for themselves an enemy that can never be detained, can never be destroyed, will never capitulate nor be conquered: the soul of man…so they are destined to lose this war and are doomed to fail…”

He went on to mention the spiritual life, stating that life without spirituality is consequently undignified. He stressed: “Just as the spiritual life is the essence of human life, just as Christian faith is so precious, the one thing we cannot bear to lose, and is even the one treasure we sinners possess ; just so, when this country comes to take this sole treasure away, we beseech the Lord to fill us with the Holy Spirit, Amen. We beseech the Lord to let us not only do this, but to also let us use our persecution to convey a gospel of persecution to the society of China. Let them torture themselves in questioning the value their own souls, interrogating their own pitiable, despicable lives; where is dignity, honor and freedom under such a dictatorship of money and absolute power? It is either in Jesus Christ, or there is no dignity at all…..”

And, so, Wang Yi was accused of “inciting subversion of state power”, and the sentence awaiting him will be no less than that of Liu Xiaobo, who was convicted of the same crime. And as he follows in the glorious path of a martyr, I predict that it can be no less than the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

In this “brainwashing war”, or call it a “war of souls,” like those of authoritarian tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, etc., God’s servants Wang Yi and Jiang Rong have become captives of “this country”, just as a decade ago, Liu Xiaobo became a prisoner of “this country” for drafting Charter 08. Wang Yi has stated: “If you tame the rulers in heaven, you cannot tame the dictators on the ground.” This young “egg”, who is 18 years younger than Liu Xiaobo, is at the turning point of this darkest chapter of Chinese history, similar to the martyred saint Dietrich Bonhoeffer during the Nazi period in Germany, when he openly confronted the “boulder” coming to crush him. At an evangelistic meeting on September 11, 2018, Wang shouted: “We have a duty to tell Xi Jinping that he is a sinner. The government he leads has greatly offended God because it has persecuted the church of our Lord Jesus Christ; if it does not repent, it must perish. We must proclaim that an evil person like him still has a way out. And the only way out is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ… we say this as it is of true benefit to him and China’s rulers: we don’t want to see them sinking into hell, being cursed by God…”

In a sermon on the evening of September 21, 2018, he told the more than 500 Christians present: “In the persecution of the Henan House Church, not only was the cross dismantled, but the church was looted, and even the bibles and psalm books were burned. In the China’s history of the twentieth century to the present, this is the fourth burning of the Bible. In 1900, the Boxers burned the Bible and killed Western missionaries, but the Lord at that time prepared a group of local evangelists for the future revival of his church. The second time was the heathen movement of 1922-1927, when the government burned bibles in large numbers; but it was followed by a ten-year renaissance of the Church from 1927 to 1937. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 was the third time China’s rulers burned the Bible and demolished churches; but since the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Church of our Lord has had a revival of forty years in length. So, a few days ago someone asked: ‘Pastor Wang, don’t you worry that you will go to jail?’ I replied, I don’t worry, I just want to know one thing: Is the Lord using this burning and persecution in 2018 to somehow raise up a group of preachers for the church in China? And are some of them congregants of the Early Rain Covenant Church …… “

In the early spring of 2011, on the eve of my escape across the Sino-Vietnamese border, Wang Yi sent an e-mail to his friends that accurately predicted his own, later calamity. “Going to prison is like going to Africa,” he wrote, “God has given me three brocade purses: the ability to move house at any time, to go to jail at any time, and to return to my heavenly home at any time.”

Seven years later, he finds himself in a cage. A common friend of ours, from our hometown thousands of miles away, mailed me Wang’s four underground poetry collections. Once, I deliberately did not read his writings. I am not a Christian, although I wrote God is Red, a book pirated and praised by Wang Yi as “exalting the Lord”. However, I never subconsciously felt any form of mission or desire to offer praise. Although I will diligently write everything down [that I am told], I am but a tape recorder of an era.

But the “recorder” also bursts into tears, just as I do now as I read Wang’s poems, mulling over “going to prison is like going to Africa” ​​- so far away! So far away!! Can he return? Can I still see him in this life? in this world?

The prison cells of the Communist Party are getting darker and darker. Both Liu Xiaobo and Yang Tianshui have died within them. They were only in their 60s. They were both non-violent dissident writers. As soon as their sentences were almost served, they were suddenly diagnosed to have terminal illnesses… and Wang Yi has chronic gout that is extremely painful whenever it strikes. Will the police who took him “to Africa” ​​let him carry painkillers with him? The next surprise interrogation he is subjected to, an attack of gout can be expected, and as he writhes in pain on the floor, will they send him to the hospital….

Our teacher in this profession, Solzhenitsyn, compared the labor camps all over the Soviet Union to a “gulag archipelago.” He described how when a person had not yet entered, the archipelago is like a constellation in the sky, so far away, unfathomable, no one knows how to reach it. Until one day the catastrophe befalls them, and they then realize the only way to get there is through formal arrest. Coming back, or never coming back, no one can tell….

Yes, when I left the birthplace of my nightmares, the gout patient Wang Yi continued to move onward and desperately resisted for seven more years before finally being formally arrested instead of being “asked to tea”, “subpoenaed”, “placed under house arrest”, “repatriated”, “sent on vacation”, “gone missing” or “black-hooded”. I have a foreboding feeling he will not return! Everyone knows that country and its cities known as Chengdu, Lhasa, Urumqi or Beijing, are secretly filled with political prisoners serving their time. For those who for the time being have yet to enter, they are as remote as the archipelago or Africa.

I am here with an appeal for the poet, writer and pastor Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong. I hope that all Western politicians and poets, writers, scholars, human rights activists and ordinary citizens will pay attention to this confrontation with brainwashing, this resistance in the war of hijacking the souls of China’s people; I hope that German Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Maas will make use of their influence on China to prompt the Xi Jinping regime to release the Wang Yi and Jiang Rong; I also hope President Trump and the US government will link their unprecedented trade wars with human rights and rescue Wang Yi and his wife. I say this because the President put his hand on the Bible when he was sworn in, and Wang Yi was arrested and imprisoned in protest against the burning of the same Bible.

Of course, I also hope that the Pope and the Vatican, who signed a shameful agreement with the Chinese government not long ago, will repent and publicly propose the release of God’s children, Wang Yi and Jiang Rong.

Dear friends, whether we know each other or not, thank you for reading and passing this on. I also hope that you will express what you feel and your conscience in any way you find appropriate, and support this appeal.

Liao Yiwu, exiled writer

On Chinese New Year’s Eve, 2019, Berlin

[Trans. by Michael Martin Day, National University, CA]

Three Poems by Wang Yi

Rise Up, Go Call On the Dear Departed

Rise up, go call on the dear departed

The rain’s stopped, the rice’s already above your knees

Do you believe the instant a broken bone heals

It’s sturdier than when intact?

Death is the antonym of creation

In great volumes, books on death

Are awarded Nobel prizes

Breathing still calmly carries on

Explaining invisible things by way of tangible objects

Or going about it the other way round?

Rise up, return to a homeland that’s already gone

Do you believe the swaying of trees whips up the wind

And it’s not the wind blowing the trees?

Is the start buried in the end, or is a

Blurry-faced person incessantly making

Idols after his own image?

Rise up, go ask forgiveness of a dead man

Winter has passed and this is my purpose on earth

He has died and cannot die again

I have lived and cannot live again

January 11, 2016, Chengdu

God of the Moment

God of the moment. Not a part

Of any time. The god here

The god there. The same god

At weddings, at funerals

In dialogue, and on the road being travelled

God of the moment. Bearing wounds and worry

Carrying all the perfections of the imperfect

Carrying the scars of history, the odor of dust

The same god. Dropping disasters and

Bestowing blessings. Judging people and pitying people

God of the moment. Freeing the heart

Also bending the body. Magnificent

Insignificant, a god of

Christmas and of Good Friday

A god of white people, a god of black people

Hey, god of the moment. God of

The Party and the people

God of dogs, pigs, and breeders

The god of judges and convicts,

Nuclear bombs and stem cells

God of the moment. Of Bethlehem

Guiyang and Chengdu

God of heavenly stems and earthly branches, of Yin and Yang

God of parties of the right and left, of the long-lived and prematurely dead

Of all that breathe, offer praise or rejection

December 20, 2012, A prayer while waiting for the holiday

In this Age, You Must Write a Poem that Borders on Criminal

In this age, you must write a poem that borders on criminal.

A line of Chinese characters may overthrow a state.

A sonnet may overthrow fourteen states.

At a secret masquerade, let those who recognize you

Identify you. Those who don’t recognize you do so even less.

In this age, you must make leaders fear a poem.

A metaphor is a nuclear bomb.

The singer doesn’t know a page of absurd words are tears of a subjugated nation.

On the worst days, a massive sea swell strikes.

Death becomes a prisoner, detained by water.

Who is not related to a political prisoner? Who is not the widow of a ghost?

In this age, when you recite a poem, you become suspect of crime.

If you don’t recite, they’ll recite you.

In this age, the blind stammer to themselves.

Holy, holy, holy. The blind ask the deaf, have you seen?

In this age, you must write a poem that borders on criminal.

Pay respect to those suspected of this crime.

June 5, 2015, at night