Communism Doesn’t Know It Has Won a Nobel Prize. China, Liu Xiaobo and Dante’s Inferno in a Soroptimist Club Educational Project
During the university seminar Conoscersi per Ritrovarsi. Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Tuscan Territory, organised in Italy at Carla Rossi Academy International Institute of Italian Studies thanks to the Soroptimist Club Montecatini Terme, Pistoia, a young professor, a participant from the Luxun Academy of Arts in Dalian, China, admitted not to know the famous Chinese 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. His testimony represents the extreme and unfair damnatio memoriae that in communist China involves every dissident, even if extremely important and prestigious as the essayist, sociologist and highly sensitive poet Liu Xiaobo. The first part of the class on Dante’s poem recently taken by the young Chinese professor in Italy and especially its analysis of the infernal City of Dis and the sin of heresy – that is to say ideological mystification – seems to dramatically reflect the mental jail in which even nowadays common people and intellectuals are obliged to live in China.