No Enemies, No Hatred by Liu Xiaobo is a collection of powerful essays and poems by one of China's most important democracy advocates today. In this collection he castigates the Chinese political system for failing to abide by its own constitutional guarantees of human rights and in Charter 08, calls for a democratisation of China with free elections, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and all the human rights we take for granted in the West.

Further essays expose the cultural and national bankruptcy of modern Chinese society as built by the Communist Party: the aggressive, thuggish nationalism in Chinese society today, the over-sexualisation and banality of modern Chinese consumer culture, the inept officials who allow child slavery to go unchecked in the kilns of Henan, and the betrayal by the modern May Fourth writers (Cao Yu, Ba Jin, Guo Moruo etc.) who exchanged free thought and critical writings for political favour.

This collection is extremely powerful and hopeful; Liu's desire for a new China is infectious. With the copy of Charter 08 and the essay titled, "To Change a Regime by Changing Society" demonstrate that Liu is one of the most important political thinkers in China and his continued work for freedom and democracy in China makes him worthy of a Nobel Prize. ( )

Liu Xiaobo is someone I admire inordinately, just as I do Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela, for his bravery and for his optimism that China can change in the face of its leaders and elites' corruption (power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely) and materialistic greed. His analysis of human rights--to own property one has worked, to have some control over one's life, to have a say in the kind of government one has, to have laws that are enforced no matter what station of life one belongs to, etc.--is excellent and sad because it is given much lip service but little substance in the China of today. Liu Xiaobo has been imprisoned for speaking out four times, the most recent, for promoting Charter 08, a human rights document signed by many. His prison term will end in 2020. His wife lives under house arrest so that she would not be able to tell the world that her husband wished to dedicate his Nobel Peace Prize to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre (this fact is not in the book). He is enormously honest and self-critical; he feels guilt that although he came back to China for the Tiananmen Square protests, others sacrificed far more than he did. His writing is direct and engaging. One of his most out of the box ideas is to make the Dalai Lama President of China--how healing that would be!!! The fourteen poems in the book are mostly to his wife and also to the victims and mothers of victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre but the poem that wrenched my heart the most was the one about his puppy that he loved: his father who never showed him affection gave him movie tickets that made him so happy until he returned home to find that his father had killed his puppy and nailed his pelt to the door, all because the Communist Party demanded that dogs be killed. The hurt, the devastation, Liu Xiaobo expresses, is restrained and for that reason even more powerful. I recommend these essays without reservation. ( )