Spectator's Journal: Wei Jingsheng: Here to Stay
Aikman, David
SPECTATOR'S JOUR NAL by David Airman Here to Stay w hen China's Communist rulers released Wei Jingsheng from prison last November for a direct flight to the U.S. on "medical parole," they no...
...As several hundred guests applauded thunderously, members of Congress seemed to sense they were in the presence of a great man...
...I think my personal role is an important one," he says, "in the sense that there are times when people have a very strong desire, strong aspirations, but they need a voice that can really symbolize how they feel...
...as being on the side of democracy or on the side of Communism...
...Definitely yes...
...The words were indeed harsh, but Wei speaks with the bitter authority of a man who has survived everything that a totalitarian system can throw at a political dissident...
...As for Nixon's trip to Peking in 1972, Wei said, it took place because Americans had been "duped by the lies of a dishonest politician" (presumably Henry Kissinger...
...When he began his democratic odyssey in 1978, he was a municipal electrician in his late twenties...
...opening to China, Wei said, saved a tyranny that was "facing imminent breakdown and total demoralization...
...That's why I don't think you can say that the world has done a good job on human rights when you have one-fourth of the world's population in China that does not enjoy them at all...
...I think that democracy, freedom, and human rights have never been the issue of just one country...
...My friends,44 imagine for a moment that you are a Chinese who has had no contact with Western democracy...
...The American Spectator • April 1998 57 cases were actually punished...
...It took China's Communist Party until 1981 to acknowledge publicly, five years after his death, that Mao Tse-tung's lunatic Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution had indeed made "mistakes...
...Along with Wang Dan, a still-imprisoned 1989 Chinese democracy activist, he was awarded the 1998 Democracy Award by the National Endowment for Democracy...
...Anyone refusing to give it to them is a shameless bandit no better than a capitalist who robs workers of their money earned with their sweat and blood...
...He does not oppose them...
...Wei certainly knows that it will be more difficult to persuade Western governments that nudging the Chinese government toward democracy is more in their interest than increasing commercial links...
...Their main concern, he said, was the powerful economic interest groups, carefully built up by the Communist Party, that would fight tooth and nail to maintain the political system that allowed them to feather their nests...
...Wei skewered this specious reasoning with a pugnacious rejection of everything Mao Tse-tung stood for...
...But after a year holed up as a not-so-welcome refugee in the U.S...
...The guard assigned to me by the mayor of New York, who went to the movie with me, couldn't believe what he was seeing...
...It is not just myself holding this view of China...
...Wei still has a lot of catching up to do...
...He now realizes this was "absolute nonsense, it just wasn't true...
...Martin Lee, the Hong Kong democrat whom Wei describes as "an old friend," says it's remarkable that the self-taught Wei thought through the concept of democratic rights almost entirely by him-44 The Chinese people did not need a poetry-writing tyrant, a 'self-exalting autocrat,' he insisted...
...What he must now do is convince Americans that, if they were in the same position as he was, at least some of them would have paid the same price too...
...Testifying in early February before the House Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, for example, he blamed the U.S...
...During his years of imprisonment, he barely had access to Communist Party newspapers, much less the works of Burke, Sakharov, or Solzhenitsyn...
...Even when I was in prison," he says, "I heard several cases where prisoners were beaten to death, and very few g police people 152 involved in these A profile of Chinese hero Wei Jingsheng...
...The second source was Wei's stubborn refusal to be cowed by seventeen years of cruel imprisonment (he was freed in September 1993 only to be reincarcerated in April 1994...
...He's rather dismissive about the recent Richard Gere movie Red Corner and its depiction of courts and detention in today's China...
...In early February there was the first of what could turn into a series of AmeriDAVID AIICVIAN is the author most recently of Six Souls: Six Who Changed a Century (Word Publishing...
...But in public he can come across as dogmatic 58 April 1998 • The American Spectator and even shrill, a combination that could cause him to be "discounted" in the China debate much as Solzhenitsyn was "discounted" in his criticisms of America's Soviet policy in the late 1970's...
...Even House Majority Leader Dick Armey waxed lyrical...
...But how to do that...
...A lot of prisoners lost their sanity because of this torture...
...they are a universal issue...
...It is not for me to say," he added, "if the acts of that politician or his president should be considered patriotic or treasonous...
...It's like the more ordinary they are, the man on the street, the more they are concerned with this issue and the more 'naïve' they are about it...
...Unless China exerts quite extraordinary pressure on the Nobel Committee, Wei may later this year join the pantheon of Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Gorbachev, and fellow former electrician Lech Walesa...
...embassy in Peking, Fang held the limelight only briefly after his departure for the West in 1991...
...It is the great gift of our creator...
...Nixon's U.S...
...As other speakers noted, several members of Congress have annually proposed Wei's name for the annual Nobel Peace Prize...
...If Americans didn't wake up, Wei warned, the U.S...
...These words may be a little harsh, but they are all facts...
...His nomination last year was short-circuited by the surge of publicity for the global campaign against land mines...
...Now, rather than in the future, he says, is the time to push China on human rights...
...The British foreign secretary agreed to a private meeting with him...
...I said it was very true, but not true enough...
...The first was the breathtaking originality of his call for political change in 1979, when Deng Xiaoping was commonly assumed in the West to be the man of the hour for China...
...In late February he embarked on an ambitious European trip that within weeks would take him to Britain, France, Germany, and five other European nations, including the Czech Republic...
...The Chinese people did not need a poetry-writing tyrant, a "self-exalting autocrat," Wei insisted, demolishing a favorite line of Western apologists...
...People should have democracy," Wei insisted in his essay...
...on "medical parole," they no doubt hoped he'd quickly fade away...
...That's mild," he says...
...would "not be able to maintain its power and prosperity for long, and quickly go into decline...
...Do they want to be masters of their own destiny...
...Nancy Pelosi...
...I actually started doing that back in the Democracy Wall days [1978-1979] and I always want to do that regardless of the risks...
...In prison he was denied medical or dental treatment, deliberately sent to a high-altitude labor camp near Tibet in the hope that he would die of heart failure, and regularly beaten by common criminal inmates whose rewards included conjugal visits...
...Freedom is of us, freedom is in us, freedom is what sets us apart from dumb animals...
...Not bad for a former Red Guard who didn't make it to college...
...As he notes, "It is very hard for people like [Gere] to truly experience the kind of suffocation and cruelty inside Chinese prisons...
...As important to the development of democracy in China as anything else, Wei says, will be the buildup of independent small and medium-size businesses and the break-up of state-controlled regional and national mercantilism, much as was necessary for the full development of democracy in the West...
...In 1989 this famed astrophysicist publicly demanded the release of Wei Jingsheng in order to bring China into line with the political processes of advanced and civilized nations...
...There's little chance Wei Jingsheng will follow this path...
...China's regime, he says, is internally far more fragile than most Western governments appear to think...
...W here Wei will have some learning to do is in how he expresses his ideas to Western audiences...
...Many of those who traded with the Chinese government, he insisted, had actually helped China's Communist "oppressors...
...I was surprised, I was amazed at the extent of Americans' concern with human rights in China and freedom and democracy in China," he said during a recent conversation in an office in Columbia University...
...The entire Chinese nation, said Wei, had been "deceived" by "political swindlers" who had created a system that was nothing less than "fascist autocracy under feudal socialism...
...In one-on-one conversation, he is both patient and persuasive...
...government...
...I'm afraid that if the governments in the West do not seize this moment and exert pressure on the Chinese government, and instead lets it benefit economically, ten years from now, even if they re-double their efforts [on human rights], these efforts may be to no avail...
...To Deng Xiaoping and his supporters, this was as brutal a bucket-full of cold water as it was to Mao and the henchmen they had replaced...
...It is something I will certainly tell my grandchildren about for many, many years to come," said Rep...
...But even then it insisted that Mao overall had been "70% correct...
...can public honors for Wei...
...Though he may no longer be in the headlines, Wei is in the struggle for China's future for the long haul...
...Previous recipients include Elena Bonner, Violeta Chamorro, and Vaclav Havel...
...Wei, of course, has already paid a 17-year price for saying this sort of thing...
...That is why I don't think it is very likely in China for someone like Gorbachev to do what Gorbachev in Russia did on his own...
...What drove him toward this crusade...
...77 self from a grab-bag of books, articles, and discussions...
...and in the West," he complained, "there have indeed been some who have been helping the Chinese oppressors to spread rumors and to spread a defeatist and pessimistic attitude, particularly the belief the Chinese people are different from the Westerners and therefore different human rights standards should be applied to them...
...Perhaps they had Fang Lizhi in mind...
...W ei's prominence has two sources...
...Wei does not favor canceling China's Most Favored Nation status, because "it will be the Chinese people who will pay a price for this," and he understands that trade will always be a huge component of U.S.-Chinese relations...
...Since arriving in the U.S., Wei has barely had time to find his way around Columbia University, where, like other distinguished exiles before him, he functions as "a visiting scholar...
...I live with an abiding belief that freedom is not something that people can grant to people," he said...
...In the U.S...
...The astonishing thing about Wei is that, from the age of 28, he locked in his anti-tyranny invective not on the "errors" of the Cultural Revolution or the "excesses" of the 1958 Anti-Rightist campaign, but on the corruption and brutality of the Communist system itself...
...In prison, he recalls, he once accepted the Communist argument that American activists for Chinese democracy were "trying to take advantage of China...
...he just wants to avoid the often vicious internecine fights that tend to plague freedom fighters in exile...
...There are a lot of people just living off corruption in China, maybe numbering in the tens of millions," he notes...
...Deng wanted an end to Maoism —not a bad objective—but Wei in his ringing Democracy Wall poster, "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy," declared the Chinese wanted something much more basic than that: political freedom...
...Do the people have democracy now...
...there are a lot of people who believe in this and are ready to pay a price for it...
...As evidence, Wei says that during his few brief months in freedom during 1993-1994, several senior Communist Party officials privately approached him to discuss how China could embark on democracy...
...Wei envisages his new role in two ways: as a voice for the Chinese in China who want an end to Communism, and as a voice to government and business in the West...
...He does not plan to join any of the existing Chinese exile dissident groups orpolitical parties...
...Such "Nazi-type themes," Wei said, had even managed to influence many in the U.S...
...for inadvertently helping the Chinese Communists take power in 1949 by believing the "lies spoken by friends of the Communists wearing the cloak of so-called China experts," lies that suggested the Chinese Communists were more democratic than other Communists...
...Fang still loves democracy, but he no longer is a factor in China's political evolution...
...In the course of history over the generations, from time to time, God sends us a leader to match the greatness of the ideas that have gone before...
...What does he want us to do...
...His most important current task, he says, is "to find a way to let the Chinese people know that Americans and Westerners in general are really concerned, so that they will be more confident in fighting for their own rights...
...In recent years "in the U.S...
...his awareness of the American grassroots has developed fast...
...I guess the most important thing for me to do now," he added, "is to really help the Americans and people in the West generally to see for themselves, and to convince them that the Chinese are really the same as the Americans and the Europeans when it comes to the issue of human rights, democracy, and the pursuit of happiness...
...asked an exasperated State Department official who has worked hard on Chinese human rights issues, "declare war on China...
...When they ask for democracy, they are only demanding what is rightfully theirs...
...And it does seem terribly fashionable now," he added, "to aid the henchmen who are engaged in butchering their own people...
...Wei saved some tough words for the National Endowment for Democracy event the next night...
...Wei makes an interesting case...
...Judging from the above-mentioned situation, would you consider the U.S...
...Eventually he took a teaching position in physics at the University of Arizona and removed himself from the activist fray...
Vol. 31 • April 1998 • No. 4
