News at Eleven: Liao Yiwu, the writer, has left China,

his homeland. He arrived this morning in Berlin, via Warsaw and Hanoi. This is good news and bad news at once. It is good, because Liao is now safe and feels liberated: "My goal was personal freedom and freedom to write," he told me over the phone from Berlin, with his German translator, Yeemei Guo, as our interpreter. And it is bad news that he felt pushed by the constant threat of prison at home to choose between silence and exile.

from The New Yorker: Liao Yiwu Unbound

~~~~~~~~~~~