In the spectrum of opinions presented on Democracy Wall, Wei Jingsheng's was a distinctive voice. His writing in the original Chinese is pungent and direct, full of the irony and sharpness characteristic of the political humor in which people privately engage. Wei Jingsheng had had enough of prevarication, enough of falsehoods and muddy half-truths and he began voicing sentiments that most Chinese people had not yet allowed themselves consciously even to think. He rejected the mythology of the wise "great leader" and the "great, glorious and correct Communist Party" and instead sought to tell the truth about everything without flinching. As well as democracy and human rights, Wei wrote about political prisoners, juvenile delinquency and the roots of his own disillusionment in his Cultural Revolution experiences during this period. The statement of purpose of Exploration, the unofficial journal Wei founded in January 1979 with a group of like-minded activists who had contacted him through the telephone number he had appended to The Fifth Modernization, read, "Our explorations shall be based on realities in Chinese and world history. In other words, we do not recognize the absolute correctness of any theory from any person. All theories, including current theories and those which may soon emerge, shall be the themes of our discussions as well as tools for analysis." Written by Wei, this statement appeared on Democracy Wall on January 9, 1979.
Exploration's publication statement described the magazine's guiding principles as "freedom of speech, publication and association as provided by the Constitution." It stated that "only when the great majority of the powerless and suffering people speak out will it be possible to establish the reasons for [China's] backwardness, as well as the means to overcome it," The journal, Wei wrote, would discuss social problems "without any restrictions."
The establishment of formal protest groups and journals of political criticism became a trend in late December 1978 and early January 1979. Since it was too cold to stand for long at the Wall reading posters, more people could be reached through the printed word and visitors from outside Beijing could take copies home, while activists could venture outside the city to distribute their work, informal publications became the most popular mode of disseminating ideas. Wei went on one such trip to Tianjin to sell copies of Exploration. But, according to Marie Holzman, he was not so interested in developing an organization around his journal. Since his opinions were radical for the times, the combination of the risk involved in such organizing and the difficulty of finding people who shared his views made him disposed to keep the Exploration group small. Holzman said Wei also wanted to focus his attention on producing the journal, not on the intragroup discussions and arguments which increasingly absorbed much of the energy of other activists. Besides himself, the initial group was composed of Yang Guang, Lu Lin and Liu Jingsheng.
Producing Exploration took an enormous amount of work. A lot of the production was done at the home of Ping Ni. Quite apart from researching and writing the articles, finding, let alone buying, such things as paper, printing ink, or the wax sheets on which the characters were written and the mimeograph machines on which most Democracy Wall publications were produced was no easy task in the China of the late 1970s. Workers' salaries barely covered basic necessities of life, and articles like typewriters and mimeograph machines could only be purchased or used with permission. The 50 yuan Wei Jingsheng's girlfriend, Ping Ni, had saved up for a much-needed blanket was spent on materials for the journal, and Wei sold his bicycle and his watch, as well as other personal possessions, to cover the costs of Exploration. When Wei went to meet the foreign journalists Marie Holzman introduced him to, he asked them to buy Exploration at the relatively high price of 20 yuan, 200 times the price Chinese subscribers were asked to pay, but for them still only the price of a taxi ride in Beijing. The difference in price, he explained, was because he had no other sources of funds while the foreigners could afford to pay more. Holzman said the only person in the small Beijing press corps who objected to this was Ian Mackenzie, a Reuters correspondent who was eventually responsible for providing the authorities with substantiation for one of the principal charges finally leveled against Wei.
Like a number of the Democracy Wall activists, Wei soon developed many friendships among the foreign residents of Beijing, particularly in the overseas press corps. His willingness to associate with foreigners was, needless to say, regarded with deep suspicion by government authorities, who during the xenophobic Cultural Revolution viewed any friendship with a foreigner as grounds for a Chinese citizen to be pilloried as a spy. Wei eagerly inquired about the outside world and the tactics of Soviet dissidents. "He immediately saw the usefulness of getting to know foreigners, especially journalists," Holzman remembered. "Whatever you did on the Democracy Wall, it wouldn't go very far, people saw it and that was that, whereas if you got things printed in the foreign press, then it would go round the world and come back to China."
It is worth remembering that the official Chinese equivalent of Khrushchev's secret speech, the first official criticism of Mao Zedong, came only in 1981 with a Resolution on Party History. Even then, it still found Mao's policies 70 percent correct and only 30 percent erroneous. Despite the arrest of the Gang of Four and the repudiation of the brutality and extremism of the Cultural Revolution, moves towards greater openness were still hesitant and slow, and much criticism remained off-limits. At the time the first posters appeared on Democracy Wall, public criticism of Mao was still oblique, and none of the activities centering around Democracy Wall were reported in the domestic Chinese media. In April 1979, the ability of activists, like Wei, to meet with foreigners ended, when four foreign journalists who had reported extensively on the movement were labeled "international spies" by the Beijing Public Security Bureau.
As Wei's articles had argued, the authorities still would not accept the notion of a loyal opposition. Although Deng Xiaoping had used Democracy Wall for his own purposes in the power struggle with the "Whateverists", he had no intention of legalizing such uncontrolled expression. The first clear sign of this came with the arrest in Beijing of Fu Yuehua, 32, on January 18. Fu had helped organize the ragtag "petitioners" from all over the country who had descended on Beijing after hearing of a change in the political climate seeking resolution of wrongs they had suffered at the hands of local officials. Fu herself had suffered a nervous breakdown after her charge that she was raped by the Party Secretary at her work unit was ignored. On the anniversary of Zhou Enlai's death, January 8, 1979, she had ended up leading a remarkable march through Beijing mostly composed of thousands of "sent down youth" who were protesting the fact that they could not return to their homes in the cities after being sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. They carried banners saying, "We don't want hunger" and "We want human rights and democracy." Fu was taken from her home in Beijing on January 18, but her detention for "Shelter and Investigation" (a form of "administrative detention" not requiring any criminal charge that is frequently used to detain dissidents) was not officially confirmed until early February.
When her detention became known, Wei prepared a list of questions, and armed with a tape-recorder borrowed from Marie Holzman, went to various local police stations in the city to inquire about Fu's case. "He had the knack to know what had to be done at the time," said Holzman. But such an investigation by a private citizen was an unprecedented action in 1979. The transcript of the interviews, which was published in Exploration, shows Public Security Bureau officials so completely baffled by the audacity of their interrogator, that they did not even think to refuse to answer. Short excerpts from Wei's resulting article, "Is Fu's Detention Legal?" reveal the fearless persistence that characterized Wei's inquiry.
"The masses have been told: 'It is not necessary for you to understand the reasons for the detention...... The Xuanwu [District] Police Bureau has said that a so-called 'internal procedure' had been followed [in the Fu case]... Since this procedure is so internal that even a head of a police substation does not know anything about it, what then is the essential difference between applying this procedure to arrest people and wantonly arresting people? Does it mean that one may wantonly arrest people by following an 'internal procedure'? Is this a normal legal procedure? A responsible person by the name of Zhang of the Xuanwu police precinct office announced that Fu Yuehua had committed the crime of disrupting public order. He declined to give an explanation..."
Wei concluded: "Thus we believe the unreasonable arrest of Fu Yuehua carried out by the Xuanwu Police Bureau is a deliberate disruption of the legal system. Higher level judicial organs should attach importance to this serious disruption of the legal system....We demand that the Beijing Municipal Court and Procuratorate deal with this case, immediately release Fu Yuehua... and take action against those criminal elements in this incident."
From the very beginning, the police maintained close surveillance over the Democracy Wall activists, and Wei was aware that he could be jeopardizing his life by posting The Fifth Modernization. "It was the common practice," said Marie Holzman, "for posterwriters to stick their work on the Wall late at night, but the police were watching even then."
After his 1993 release, Wei told the Hong Kong paper, Ming Pao, that he had thought at the time of the great risks he was taking by participating in Democracy Wall. Both Wei's father and Ping Ni's had access to the high-level documents in which the movement was severely criticized. High-ranking officials sympathetic to the Democracy Wall activists had shared this information with them. As early as late November 1978, Deng Xiaoping had warned in a speech issued as an internal "Central Document" circulated only to high level officials that criticizing Mao or his successor Hua Guofeng by name was going too far. "The masses have their doubts on some questions - some utterances are not in the interests of stability and unity," he reportedly said.
Such reminders of the potential risks of involvement in the democracy movement continued throughout the months Wei participated, but did not deter him. In January, the Beijing Municipal Party Committee's negative assessment of the movement was conveyed to the people of the city. One of the principal criticisms was that activists had colluded with foreigners. "Some foreigners have used money to buy big-character posters," the Party Committee charged. "Some Chinese have asked foreigners for mimeographs, some Chinese have dined in restaurants at the invitation of foreigners, and all this has impaired the state system."
Wei Jingsheng impudently asked whether Deng Xiaoping's dining with the Japanese emperor hadn't also impaired the state system. The poster Exploration put up in response to the Beijing Party Committee said, "The foreign diplomats and journalists from democratic countries show by their concern and support for our democratic movement that they are not letting down their own people. They are promoting relations between countries.... Their inviting Chinese for conversation and meals shows they respect the Chinese people."
As barely veiled threats proliferated in the official press later that winter, Democracy Wall journals, including Exploration, argued that their activities represented legitimate exercise of free speech in accordance with Article 35 of China's Constitution. They would seek to advocate on behalf of those who were imprisoned for exercising their freedom of expression, the journals insisted in a January joint statement. A February 12, 1979, People's Daily commentary warned, "We should impose legal sanctions on some individuals who have ulterior motives in deliberately creating trouble." Exploration responded with an unsigned piece by Wei entitled "Responsibility for the Trouble," which countered that such "labeling" of people was reminiscent of the tactics of the Gang of Four. "If 'socialist order' is only intended to insure the power of a small number to suppress the People and ignore their demands rather than insure their democratic rights, then there is no point in the people upholding this kind of 'order,' because upholding it means upholding the people's enemy."
In one of the first human rights investigations ever conducted in the People's Republic of China, Wei Jingsheng explored how the regime had treated the "enemies" it had unearthed in its ranks in an exposé of China's principal prison for high-ranking political prisoners, Qincheng. As recently as 1993, Chinese officials have been heard to deny that this jail even existed. As mentioned above, much of the material for Wei's essay, "A Twentieth Century Bastille" (which was published in exploration) came from the father of Wei's girlfriend, Ping Ni, who had just been released from the maximum security facility. Holzman says Wei completed the research and writing of this path-breaking piece of investigative journalism in one week.
Wei describes the location of the prison, its physical appearance, as well as the sign some distance before the gate which read, "Foreigners Not Admitted." The prison did not appear on maps and even many local people had no idea what kind of place it was. Wei gives a detailed account of the daily regimen within, the poor food, various kinds of torture and the use of psychiatric drugs to control uncooperative prisoners. Stories of the incarceration there of various high-ranking CCP officials are also recounted, including Wang Guangmei, wife of former state Chairman Liu Shaoqi; Peng Zhen, the former Beijing Mayor; and Bo Yibo, one-time State Planning Committee Chairman. "It is quite natural for dictators to resort to barbaric measures to govern a country," Wei concluded. "Dictatorship cannot survive unless it has strong methods to suppress the people. Not only must the masses be repressed; the instruments of repression must also be aimed at any opposition in the inner circle. Even towards comrades who once fought at their side, dictators show not a bit of mercy." Such "dictators" clearly included Mao Zedong, but Wei Jingsheng did not exclude Deng Xiaoping from their ranks.
Returning from a triumphal trip to the United States where he had been embraced by human rights champion President Jimmy Carter, Deng was determined to suppress the Democracy Wall movement. On March 16, in a secret speech to senior government officials which quickly became known throughout Beijing, Deng reportedly endorsed a limited crackdown. Three days later, regulations to restrict the movement were issued in the city. "Slogans, posters, books, magazines, photographs, and other materials which oppose socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought are formally prohibited."
Wei Jingsheng argued with other activists, including Liu Qing, an editor of April Fifth Forum and the convener of the liaison group the various Democracy Wall publications had set up, over his analysis of the turn events were taldng. "At a March meeting of the Democracy Wall Liaison Conference," Liu Qing wrote, "Wei Jingsheng said that Deng Xiaoping had called for the suppression of us and our magazines, and he called on all of us to expose Deng's plot before he had the chance to carry it out. As I had no evidence that such a plan existed, I opposed his suggestion in the belief that the survival of the Democracy Wall should come above all else. But Wei Jingsheng insisted that the Exploration group should still act even on its own. Two days later Wei's article criticizing Deng by name - 'Do We Want Democracy or New Autocracy?'-was pasted on Democracy Wall."
Although Wei did not put his name to the piece, this article (reprinted in full below) is widely thought to have been the principal reason for Wei Jingsheng's arrest, which came on March 29, four days after the piece had appeared in a special edition of Exploration. "Is Deng Xiaoping worthy of the people's trust?" Wei asked. "We hold that the people should not give any political leader unconditional trust. If he implements policies that benefit the people and if he leads them to peace and prosperity, we will trust him.... if he implements policies that are detrimental to the people, and if he follows a dictatorial road and acts contrary to the interests of the people, the people should oppose him. " The people must be vigilant, Wei warned, lest Deng become a dictator like Mao before him. "Does Deng Xiaoping want democracy? No, he does not.... He says that the spontaneous struggle for democratic rights is just an excuse to make trouble, that it destroys the normal order and must be suppressed," Wei continued. "We believe that normal order does not mean everyone marching in lock-step. Especially in politics, only if different kinds of ideas exist can the situation be called normal."
In criticizing Deng Xiaoping by name, Wei crossed a crucial boundary. Besides committing the cardinal sin of Wei's criticism questioned the Party's fundamental commitment to true reform. As he clearly saw, the Party's new line of ending Mao's focus on ceaseless class struggle and of instituting more pragmatic economic policies did not necessarily mean real political change. Deng Xiaoping was attempting to save the CCP, not to transform it. It would take another ten years before a substantial group of top intellectuals, including most of the luminaries of the current Chinese democracy movement in exile, would come to this same conclusion. It is interesting to note that during this period, many foreign journalists continued to insist on painting Deng as a secret champion of liberalism, even many years after his suppression of the Democracy Wall movement and his arrest of Wei Jingsheng.
However, by 1989, Wei's words were echoing strongly in the consciousness of intellectuals, who had by then despaired of the Party's promises for meaningful political reform. Thus, when in January 1989, Fang Lizhi, then China's most outspoken advocate of democratization, wrote an open letter calling on Deng Xiaoping to mark the 40th anniversary of the PRC's founding by releasing Wei and other political prisoners (Wei was the only one mentioned by name), he set off a chain reaction of similar letters and petitions. More than 110 prominent intellectuals in China eventually lent their names, as did a much greater number of Chinese people living overseas. This set off a stream of denunciations of Wei in the official Party-controlled press. Wei had become, not only a new symbol of the Chinese democracy movement, but a living proof of the Party's broken promises.