WEI JINGSHENG: THE FORGOTTEN MAN
Dorfman, Ron
Wei Jingsheng, the Forgotten Man The wall in Peking that used to be called Democracy Wall is now covered with commercial advertising instead of the "big-character posters" on which people debated...
...The masses realize now that freedom of speech can only be secured through the abolition of political imprisonment and oppression...
...And in the West, shamefully, the young democrats who created the Peking Spring of 1979 have been all but forgotten...
...Or it may be that we simply do not know the Chinese Sak-harovs...
...The toothpaste ads seem to have obliterated consciousness of the brutal duplicity with which Chinese strongman Deng Xiaoping first encouraged, then smashed, the democracy movement...
...We might ask the former officials emerging from Qincheng," Wei wrote: "When you used to suppress the rights of others, what did that do to help secure your own rights...
...Wei was the first person to dare to describe publicly the Qincheng Number One prison, where important political offenders were held and tortured and where, presumably, Wei himself is now incarcerated...
...After the Cultural Revolution, some prisoners were released but sent into internal exile...
...People's rights cannot be protected by a dictatorship which strips people of their rights...
...Wei Jingsheng, the Forgotten Man The wall in Peking that used to be called Democracy Wall is now covered with commercial advertising instead of the "big-character posters" on which people debated China's past and future after the fall of the Gang of Four...
...The best and brightest of them, Wei Jingsheng, has been in prison since October of that year, when he was sentenced to serve fifteen years...
...The title of that book was taken from one of Wei's essays, in which he argued that without the "fifth modernization"—democracy and intellectual freedom—Deng Xiaoping's campaign to modernize Chinese industry, agriculture, defense, and science and technology is doomed to failure...
...A computer search of 135 publications and news-agency files turns up exactly five mentions of him in the past year and a half-two in The Washington Post, two in The New York Times, and one in the Taiwan wire service Central News Agency...
...None devotes more than a sentence or two to Wei...
...Although he sometimes romanticized conditions in the West, Wei was sharply realistic about the incompetence, corruption, and mendacity of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, pointing out that despite such self-evident failures as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the Party remained ossified in power because it was accountable to no one...
...That may be because of our tendency to romanticize China...
...Wei's summation in his own defense is a classic of the genre...
...he speaks truth to power, opposes the power of reason to reasons of state...
...Americans pay less attention to human-rights questions in China than in the Soviet Union," Anthony Lewis of The Times wrote last September...
...Ron Dorfman Ron Dorfman is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...He was convicted on charges of publishing counterrevolutionary propaganda and revealing a "state secret"—the name of the Chinese commander in the border war with Vietnam—to a foreign journalist...
...If we don't, it is not because their work is inaccessible or because they have no advocates...
...Americans ought at least to know his name...
...Under Mao Zedong, Wei reported, few of those who entered Qincheng Number One survived the experience...
...Wei has been designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, which has published the unofficial transcript of his trial...
...Here is no Solzhenitsyn mystically longing for the Czarist trinity of autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality, but a young Chinese man magically but somehow firmly rooted in the Western liberal democratic tradition...
...They can only be secured by the mutual protection of everyone's rights...
...When you engaged in political persecution yourselves, did you foresee yourselves being subjected to the same kind of persecution...
...And it wouldn't hurt for tourists in China to ask their hosts what's become of him...
...His most important writings—essays on liberty and commentaries on contemporary Chinese politics and society-are collected along with others of the period in The Fifth Modernization: China's Human Rights Movement 19781979...
Vol. 50 • October 1986 • No. 10
