Chinese poet Liu Shahe dies from throat cancer aged 88
- Online fans of writer, who spent two decades in a hard labour camp, pay their respects by quoting a speech about his love for Americans
- Liu was also an outspoken critic of simplified Chinese characters, blaming them for the loss of culture and tradition
Internet users across China have been expressing their grief at the loss of Yu Xuntan – the famed writer and poet best known by his pen name Liu Shahe – who died from throat cancer on Saturday at the age of 88.
And at a time of intense rivalry between China and the United States, it was perhaps fitting that many of his millions of online followers chose to quote from a speech published on the People’s Daily website in 2007, in which he referred to Americans as “the best friend of the Chinese people”.
In the piece, Liu recounted his experience as a teenager in the 1940s helping to build an airport in Guanghan, a small city in southwest China’s Sichuan province, where he was born and died.
The airport provided a base for American planes to launch attacks against the Japanese during World War II.
“When I was young, I only thought of these pilots as brave. I didn’t know how many of them died in the Pacific Ocean,” Liu wrote.
“They are our friends. They died here. I will never feel relieved at their death.”
He described the airmen as “pure and naive”, and remembered how they would look the other way when the local poor people helped themselves to supplies from the American airbase.
And even when China and the US fought on opposite sides during the Korean war, Liu said he never lost his faith in the Americans.
