Wei Jingsheng, ``stubborn idiot'' who defied Beijing
10:25 p.m. Nov 15, 1997 Eastern
By Andrew Browne
BEIJING, Nov 16 (Reuters) - Wei Jingsheng, China's most eloquent advocate
of Western-style democracy now released after long years in communist jails,
sealed his fate by pasting up ``Big Character Posters'' on Beijing's Democracy
Wall in the 1970s.
Stubborn -- some would say recklessly heroic -- he never buckled during his
years of solitary confinement in some of the bleakest camps of China's gulag, into
which he disappeared for the first time in 1979.
By his own account, prison guards tried to break his spirit through torture:
techniques included shining arc lights into his cell to keep him awake at night.
His health deteriorated, and when he emerged after serving all but six months of a
15-year jail term he was a frail shadow of the hale 29-year-old who had
challenged China's Communist rulers with a plea for human rights.
His parole in September 1993 was timed by the Chinese government to burnish
its image in its drive to win the right to host the 2000 Summer Olympics.
The Olympics bid failed, and Wei's freedom was short-lived.
In April 1994, Wei was taken from his home after meeting a top U.S. human
rights official and vanished back into the penal colonies.
China did not formally charge Wei until November 1995. He was handed another
long sentence, this time for 14 years, after a trial from which even his family was
barred.
Wei and fellow dissident Wang Dan, a student leader of the Tiananmen Square
pro-democracy demonstrations crushed in 1989, were both nominated for the
1997 Nobel Peace Prize.
During Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to the United States in October
1997, an exiled former aide to Wei, Tong Yi, told U.S. lawmakers that Wei was
being held in a glass cage.
An electrician by trade, Wei was the product of a generation robbed of education
by the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. For a time he was one
of Mao Zedong's marauding Red Guard zealots.
Manuscripts he brought out of prison in 1993 were published in the book, ``The
Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and other Writings.''
While his musings on democracy rarely rise to the philosophical levels of the likes
of Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, they are blunt and earthy
-- and calculated to raise the ire of Beijing leaders.
``I've long known you are precisely the kind of idiot to do something like this,'' he
wrote to the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping from his jail cell after the 1989
crackdown.
``Just as you've long known that I am precisely the kind of idiot who will remain
stubborn to the end, and take blows with his head up.''
During his six months of freedom, Wei frequently and openly attacked the
government and said he had no regrets about taking a public stand.
He had emerged, like a Rip Van Winkle, into the strange new world of Beijing.
Red Guards had given way to fashion-conscious teenagers, revolutionary music to
rock-and-roll, and noodle stands to Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises.
Ironically, although Wei's name has resonance abroad, it is hardly known in his
own country. He is never mentioned on radio or television in China.
His long years in jail took him to labour camps in western Qinghai province and a
salt farm not far from Beijing. He lost most of his teeth due to poor food and lack
of exercise.
Born in Beijing in 1950, the year after the Chinese Communists took power, Wei
graduated from middle school and answered Mao's call to attack ``bourgeois
bureaucrats'' as a Red Guard.
In 1968, he joined throngs of radical youths who trekked into the countryside to
hone their revolutionary credentials among the peasants, and in 1969 he enrolled
in the People's Liberation Army.
Demobilised in 1973, he worked as an electrician in Beijing's parks, including a
stint at the Beijing Zoo.
A magazine, Explorations, that he helped publish first appeared in late 1978 and
advocated what Wei called the ``fifth modernisation'' -- democracy -- a wry twist
on the Four Modernisations espoused by Deng.
Deng at first supported the 1978-79 ``Democracy Wall,'' harnessing the
messages of dissent pasted on its brick face to defeat Maoists blocking his rise to
power. Once Deng was victorious, the wall -- and Wei -- were doomed.
In December 1978, Wei's article the ``Fifth Modernisation'' had been pasted in
its entirety on the wall.
The following March, he and other Democracy Wall writers were denounced by
Deng, architect of China's economic reforms.
Wei responded by writing and circulating an article, ``Democracy or New
Autocracy?,'' in which he charged Deng was becoming a dictator like Mao. The
article is said to have incurred Deng's personal anger and contributed to the
severity of his sentence.
He was quickly arrested and sentenced in October 1979 for
``counter-revolution,'' or sedition, and leaking secrets about the Sino-Vietnam
war to a foreign reporter.
``The people must have the power to replace their representatives at any time so
that these representatives cannot go on deceiving others in the name of the
people,'' he wrote in another article.