詹姆斯•塔格尔：“他们杀了他”——中国医疗的剥夺和文学良知
当你首次见到一位著名作家时，他们所说的话很容易在你的脑海里留下深刻的印象。不过, 当我首次遇到保罗•奥斯特的时候，我只记得他的一 句话：“他们杀了他。”
奥斯特当时盯着诺贝尔和平奖得主、中国作家刘晓波的海报。刘晓波那天早晨（译注:美国东部时间）因肝癌去世，离获保外就医出狱后仅 21 天，而奥斯特去参加守夜和诗朗诵，以纪念刘晓波的一生。 “他们杀了他。” 奥斯特对我重复。我确知他的意思。
就医学而言，当然是癌症夺走了刘晓波的生命。但他的死亡责任，必须由中国国家承担。刘晓波死于正因“颠覆”罪名服其十一年徒刑之时，而当局等到其病情到晚期时才将他放出监狱。他的最后几天成为一个微管理的闹剧，当局发布了一些粗劣的宣传视频，同时挑战外国医生说现去国外寻求治疗还不太晚的决定。
但是，当刘晓波最后几天遭到宣传性治疗的侮辱时，真正的问题是，为何中国当局只是在他病情变成晚期时才采取行动，以及他们是如何采取行动的。刘晓波患乙型肝炎，一种大大增加肝癌风险的病症。然而看起来,，他的监禁者们似乎只是在他去世前几周才受到困扰，要发觉他的健康状况。
在刘晓波去世数周后，我们在美国笔会获悉，另一位类似因其写作言行的异议活动被定罪的中国知名作家杨同彦（译注:笔名杨天水），被诊断患一种特别迅速恶化 的脑癌。杨同彦于 8 月 16 日获保外就医，并转往专科医院治疗，尽管家人希望他到国外治疗，却因其“罪犯”身份而被拒绝许可出国，于 11 月 7 日去世。
杨同彦正在服 12 年徒刑，他的家人曾两次为他申请保外就医, 但两次都遭拒绝。杨同彦曾患肺结核、糖尿病、高血压和肾炎，之前一直处于病危状态。2009 年，杨姐姐曾探访他，说他瘦到“无法辨认”。
刘晓波和杨同彦都是美国笔会自由写作奖得主，该奖每年颁发一次,以表彰那些为拒绝自审而付出高昂代价的作家。中国因为有最多自由写作奖得主（七位）而臭名昭著。维吾尔学者伊力哈木•土赫提是中国的第三位自由写作奖得主，目前正因“分裂国家”的罪名服无期徒刑。据认为，伊力哈木的身体很差：他在监狱中体重大减,部分是因监狱提供的清真食品不足量。
中国维权网 8 月份指出: “数十名政治拘留者和囚犯举报被剥夺了适当的医疗待遇。”他们的结论是：“有意剥夺政治犯的医疗保健……看来是在中国普遍使用于政治犯。”该组织研究员弗朗西斯 • 伊娃 （Frances Eve） 指出：“当局不怕让他们死于缺乏适当的医疗救助是良心犯和他们的家人一个切实担忧。” 国际特赦组织东亚主任尼古拉斯•贝克林（Nicholas Bequelin）也提出了类似的评估：“在许多案例中，身患重病的活动人士获得保外就医时都已经晚了，他们的家庭希望他们在监所外或国外就医的愿望被忽视。被当局贴上“国家敌人”标签的人在保外就医期间死亡已成一种模式，但似乎没人对此负责。”
杨同彦于 2005 年曾在《大纪元》发表的一篇文章中写道:“恐惧在中国到处漫 延……政府官员害怕丢权。”刘晓波和杨同彦死于癌症，但他们也死于政府对他们的恐惧：对他们的言论，他们的行动，以及他们作为自由和良心抗议象征的力量的恐惧。
医疗保健作为宣传。剥夺医疗保健作为一种武器。党的形象高于病患者个人的生命。
保罗，我同意你的看法。他们杀了他！他们杀了他！
詹姆斯•塔格尔（James Tager）——美国笔会言论自由项目资深经理。
原载：赫芬顿邮报（英文）
（张裕 译）
“They Killed Him”: Denial of Medical Care in China and the Literary Conscience
By James Tager
When you meet a famous writer for the first time, what they say has a tendency to stick in your head. But I only remember one phrase from when I first met Paul Auster: “They killed him.”
Auster was staring at a poster of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese writer. Liu had died that morning of liver cancer, only 21 days after being released from prison on medical parole, and Auster had come to a vigil and poetry reading to commemorate his life. “They killed him,” Auster repeated to me. I knew exactly what he meant.
As a matter of medicine, it was of course cancer that took Liu’s life. But the responsibility for his death must rest on the shoulders of the Chinese state. Liu Xiaobo was serving an 11-year sentence for “subversion” when he died, and authorities waited until he was terminally ill before they released him from prison. His last few days became a micromanaged farce, with authorities releasing crass promotional videos while challenging the decisions of foreign doctors who said it was not too late for him to seek treatment abroad.
But while his last days were subjected to the indignity of medicine-as-propaganda, the real question is how and why Chinese authorities took action only when Liu’s condition had become terminal. Liu suffered from hepatitis B, a condition which dramatically increases one’s risk of liver cancer. And yet it seems that his jailers only could be bothered to notice the state of his health mere weeks before his death.
Weeks after Liu Xiaobo’s death, we at PEN America learned that Yang Tongyan, another well-known Chinese writer who had similarly been convicted for dissident activities in connection to both his activism and his writing, had been diagnosed with a particularly fast-moving and malignant form of brain cancer. Yang was granted medical parole on August 16 and moved to a specialist hospital, but was denied permission to leave the country for medical treatment due to his status as a “criminal,” despite his family’s wishes to pursue treatment abroad. He died on November 7.
Yang Tongyan was serving a 12-year sentence: His family had previously sought medical parole for him twice and had been denied twice. Yang suffered from tuberculosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, and nephritis. He had previously been in critical condition—in 2009, Yang’s sister visited him and said he had become so thin as to be “unrecognizable.”
Both Yang and Liu were recipients of PEN America’s Freedom to Write Award, awarded yearly in recognition of writers who have paid a high price for their refusal to self-censor. China has the dubious distinction of having the most Freedom to Write Award winners: seven. A third Freedom to Write Award winner from China, the Uyghur academic Ilham Tohti, is currently serving a life sentence on charges of “separatism.” Tohti is also supposedly in ill-health: He has lost significant weight in prison, in part because the prison provides insufficient amounts of halal food.
The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders noted this August that “dozens of political detainees and prisoners have reported being deprived of adequate medical treatment.” They concluded that “Deliberately depriving political prisoners of medical care . . . appears to be commonly used against political prisoners on China.” Frances Eve, a researcher for the group, noted that there is “a real fear amongst prisoners of conscience and their families that authorities aren’t afraid to let them die from lack of adequate medical care.”
Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director of Amnesty International, has offered a similar assessment: “In many cases seriously ill imprisoned activists are being granted medical parole late, and their families’ wishes for treatment outside of detention or abroad are ignored. There seems to be no accountability for the pattern of death on medical parole for people labelled by the authorities as ‘enemies of state.’”
Whether through deliberation or through depraved indifference, Chinese authorities are wielding the denial of adequate medical care as a weapon against their dissidents, including writers and those who have been jailed simply for their peaceful exercise of free expression.
Yang Tongyan once wrote—in a 2005 jeremiad published in The Epoch Times—“fear flows everywhere in China . . . Government officials are afraid of losing their power.” Liu and Yang died of cancer. But they also died as a result of their government’s fear of them: their words, their activism, and their strength as symbols of freedom and conscientious protest.
Healthcare as propaganda. The denial of healthcare as a weapon. The image of the Party over the life of a sick individual.
I agree with you, Paul. They killed him. They killed him.
James Tager is the senior manager of Free Expression Programs at PEN America.
Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/they-killed-him-denial-of-medical-care-in-china_us_5a0c5804e4b060fb7e59d50c
