The author Liao Yiwu has left China. Repeatedly denied the right to travel abroad, Liao recently slipped out of China to Vietnam, and arrived last week in Germany.

It is impossible not to be relieved on his behalf.  He told Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker he had been warned that the forthcoming publication of two books, one about Christians in China and the other a memoir of his experience during the Tiananmen democracy protests, would land him in jail.