WRITER

Liao Yiwu

1958 - Today

Liao Yiwu

Liao Yiwu (Chinese: 廖亦武; pinyin: Liào Yìwǔ; also known as Lao Wei (Chinese: 老威); born 16 June 1958) is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is a critic of China's Communist Party, for which he was imprisoned in 1990. His books, several of which are collections of interviews with ordinary people from the lower rungs of Chinese society, were published in Taiwan and Hong Kong but are banned in mainland China; some have been translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Polish and Czech. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Liao Yiwu has received more than 97,688 page views. His biography is available in 17 different languages on Wikipedia. Liao Yiwu is the 5,991st most popular writer (down from 5,229th in 2019), the 994th most popular biography from China (down from 866th in 2019) and the 116th most popular Chinese Writer.

Memorability Metrics

98k
Page Views (PV)
44.00
Historical Popularity Index (HPI)
17
Languages Editions (L)
4.03
Effective Languages (L*)
2.05
Coefficient of Variation (CV)

Notable Works

Zheng ci

Prisoners, Biography

2004

Dios es Rojo

2016

Zhongguo di ceng fang tan lu

Social conditions, Poor, Interviews

2002

Die Kugel und das Opium

2012

Zhongguo yuan an lu

Biography, Corrections, Political prisoners

2005

The corpse walker

Current Events, Economic conditions, Nonfiction

The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the "new" China--the China of economic growth and globalization---is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives.Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others--people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity.Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful, and richly revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known.From the Hardcover edition.

2008

Page views of Liao Yiwus by language

Over the past year Liao Yiwu has had the most page views in the Chinese wikipedia edition with 18,395 views, followed by English (14,233), and German (5,648). In terms of yearly growth of page views the top 3 wikpedia editions are Egyptian Arabic (54.01%), English (28.62%), and Slovak (15.99%)