Panel: Literature and Human Rights in China I, 10/4/1989 by PEN America published on 2016-12-20T23:13:38Z Part one of three events on Chinese literature and human rights in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests. The focus of this first event is on literature: Jeffrey Kinkley gives some contextualizing remarks at the start, and then the panel of Chinese writers—many of them "Misty Poets"—discusses such topics as the role of poets in the protests leading up to Tiananmen, the underground press, the rise of reportage in China, and the perennial question of whether literature should have a political function or be "purely literary." Most of the panelists speak in Chinese and their remarks are translated.