China’s Respect for Poets

China’s Respect for Poets

In a country that once, in a brief period of madness, smashed statues, burned books, and sent professors to pig farms, the crowds now come to stand quietly before the homes of poets and thinkers. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “A nation is not defeated while it still has poets to sing of its wounds and writers to remember its names.” China, for all its storms, has never stopped producing them, nor (when the storms pass) lining up to…