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About Wei
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In the course of the last 16 years, Wei Jingsheng has won a place at the head of dissident movement, even though he has been able to speak his mind publicly for less than a year during this period. The rest of the time he has been in prison or in detention, most of it in solitary confinement. Yet in the brief months of his freedom, in 1978-79 and 1993-94, the strength of his conviction that all Chinese citizens have the right and even the duty to express their political opinions, even when this involves criticizing government policies and high leaders, has been an inspiration to several generations of Chinese democrats and human rights activists.
Wei's best-known articles were written at the beginning of the reform period initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and were posted on Beijing's Democracy Wall, which, for a few months in the winter of 1978-9, became the first truly spontaneous forum for extended public discussion of politics in the history of the People's Republic. The first Piece Wei posted on Democracy Wall argued that Deng's economic reform program, known as "The Four Modernizations," would not result in a real transformation of society without a fifth modernization, namely democracy. This piece, entitled "The Fifth Modernization - Democracy," rejected the idea that the Chinese people could entrust change to enlightened leaders, asserting that only with real participation in the political process could the people come to enjoy the rights and freedoms to which they were entitled.
What made Wei's poster such a clarion call was that hardly any other activists had dared challenge so directly the Chinese Communist Party's notion of "democracy," in which it claimed to represent the people's interests for them. Even many of Wei's fellow activists thought he had gone too far by asserting his right to oppose the Party so unrepentantly. What they feared was that such outspoken views would bring the wrath of the Party down on the movement as a whole. Many wanted to believe the promises of political and economic reform the CCP was then offering. Wei, however, argued that without democratization, human rights could never be truly protected and reforms would remain incomplete. His own fate would soon prove his point.
By the time Wei's last piece appeared almost five months after the Democracy Wall movement had begun, he was convinced that the authorities intended to suppress the dissident voices to which it had given rise. Entitled, "Do We Want Democracy or New Autocracy?" the broadside daringly criticized Deng Xiaoping by name. "Does Deng Xiaoping want democracy?" he asked, then answering "No he does not." Wei warned that without democratic supervision Deng, too, could become a dictator: "History tells us that there must be a limit to the trust placed in any one person. "
On March 29, 1979, a week after his piece appeared, Wei was arrested for this. In October of that year he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Despite being kept in complete isolation, he remained defiant at his trial, saying, "Criticism may not be beautiful or pleasant to hear, nor can it always be completely accurate. If one insists on criticism being pleasant to hear and demands its absolute accuracy on pain of punishment, this is as good as forbidding criticism and banning reforms."
Throughout the following 14 1/2 years of his incarceration, despite abysmal prison conditions that damaged to his health (he lost about 12 teeth and developed a heart condition), Wei refused to recant. Instead, he defiantly continued to appeal for a review of his case and to protest maltreatment with repeated hunger strikes.
Although frequently dismissed as being too radical in 1979, by 1989, with the CCP's promises of political reform still undelivered, Wei Jingsheng's ideas had gained a new ring of truth and a number of Chinese began to take up his cause. Calls for his release started in January 1989 with an open letter to Deng Xiaoping from astrophysicist and democracy advocate Fang Lizhi, and became a significant factor precipitating the protest movement of that spring. "The repression of the 1989 movement," Wei later said, "taught the Chinese people a very bitter lesson: ... that relying on the dictators to gradually move towards democracy was a vain hope."
Early in 1993, Wei's jailers insisted that he would not be considered for early release because of his unrepentant attitude. Nonetheless, at the beginning of September that year, just 6 1/2 months before he was to complete his 15-year term, Wei Jingsheng suddenly found himself a free man. The Chinese authorities, who were pushing to win the 2000 Olympic Games for Beijing, found it expedient to make such a release. Ignoring warnings prior to his release that he should not meet with foreign journalists or speak of his prison life, Wei immediately threw himself back into his old work. He not only accepted interviews from foreign journalists, but also wrote articles for publication outside China. One of his first visits was to Ding Zilin, a People's University professor who had lost her 17-year-old son in the 1989 military assault on Tiananmen Square and was working both to collect the names of the dead and wounded and to help them and their families.
His courage did much to revitalize the struggling dissident movement, and in the months following his release, a spate of unprecedented actions took place, including the launching of the "Peace Charter," a human rights signature campaign modeled on Czechoslovakia's Charter 77. Despite a heart condition which made it difficult for him to walk for any distance, repeated threats from the police and obtrusive surveillance, Wei continued to meet friends, journalists and fellow dissidents, as well as to write. At the end of February 1994, he became the first Chinese dissident to meet with a high-ranking foreign diplomat when he had dinner with John Shattuck, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. A few days after, Wei was detained and taken on an enforced "vacation. "As of this writing, he has not yet regained his freedom. Officials claim that he is under investigation for having committed "new crimes."
Before his latest detention, Wei insisted that he was not afraid of being sent to prison again. "Most people wait until others are standing to make their move, very few people are willing to stand up first or stand alone," he told an interviewer just days before he disappeared again. "That's why my friends call me a fool!" Did he have regrets about the official reactions to his outspokenness? "I think what I did was worthwhile," he said.