Liao Yiwu recorded and distributed a poem titled 'Massacre' responding to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, and was sentenced to four years in Chinese prisons for this act of expression. A single piece of writing, never widely published, was treated by the state as a crime grave enough to erase years of a life.
Inside the cells, power is organized through an elaborate internal caste system of 'cell bosses' and ranks, with torture and ritual humiliation administered by prisoners against each other rather than only by guards. The state delegates cruelty downward, so that the oppressed become the enforcers of the oppression.
Liao argues that the duty of one who endures atrocity is to record the concrete particulars, the names, the faces, the exact methods, precisely because the state's aim is to make these things forgotten. Memory itself becomes a form of resistance when forgetting is enforced policy.
Liao treats the prison and its population of petty criminals, drifters, and condemned men as the truest cross-section of a nation, learning more about China from its outcasts than from its official life. Looking at a system through those it throws away reveals what its official self-presentation conceals.