Chinese author taken from plane, put under house arrest
Published: Mar 1, 2010 19:46 Updated: Mar 1, 2010 19:46
BEIJING: Banned writer and government critic Liao Yiwu said Chinese police removed him from a plane Monday and placed him under house arrest, preventing him from traveling to Germany for a literary festival.
As the plane was readying for takeoff in the southwestern city of Chengdu, a flight attendant told Liao to go to the entrance of the jet, where a police officer was waiting for him, the novelist and poet said in a telephone interview.
Liao said he was taken to a police station, held for three hours and questioned about Festival lit.Cologne, which he was to take part in on March 19.
"They also pointed out that they had called me a few days ago and asked me not to travel," said Liao, who had secured a German visa.
The writer was then allowed to go home, but he added that police said he could not leave his house without permission.
"I had been under stricter watch up until the festival in Cologne," said Liao, 50, who had also been barred from leaving China to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair this past autumn.
Liao's book The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up was published in the West last year after being banned in China. He wrote it from interviews with toilet cleaners, prostitutes, older monks, political prisoners and street artists.
The writer was imprisoned for four years beginning in 1990 after he published the poem Massacre in 1989 about the bloody crackdown that year on pro-democracy demonstrations, which were centered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
Since then, Liao has been on a black list and not allowed to publish in China.
