In 1966, the early days of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution, a teenage Wei Jingsheng took to the Chinese countryside with other idealistic Red Guards to “learn from the workers and peasants” and spread the revolution.
Well-versed in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin and devoted to the philosophy of Mao, Wei was a willing recruit in a campaign he believed fervently was bringing a better life to the world’s most populous nation.
One day, as Wei and his fellow rebels traversed China’s Northwest hinterland, a horde of beggars approached their train outside the city of Lanzhou. Wei’s attention was drawn by a young woman, her face smeared with soot and her filthy, matted hair covering her upper torso. As he reached down to hand her some cakes, Wei realized soot and mud were all that covered her body.
The horrendous deprivation, corruption and persecution he discovered in the workers’ paradise made the scales fall from young Wei’s eyes. Suddenly, he saw the naked beggars. He heard the stories of peasants too weak from hunger to harvest their own rice and of villagers who exchanged babies for food.
“Right up until my illusions were . . . shattered by the reality I witnessed, you could say I was a fanatic Maoist,” he would write later in an autobiographical essay. “I felt as if I had suddenly awakened from a long dream, but everyone around me was still plunged in darkness. . . . By now I could make out the face of the executioner quite clearly. . . . He was Mao Tse-tung.”
This anecdote may help to explain how the young man from a “good family” became China’s most famous political prisoner. It may be less helpful in trying to predict what will become of him now that he has been released and begun a new life in the U.S.
Wei, 47, spent 18 years in Chinese prisons and work camps for expressing his anti-establishment views too publicly. He was freed earlier this month on “medical parole” and, after being treated in a Detroit hospital, is in New York learning to live as an exile.
It remains to be seen whether the traits that propelled him to take on the Chinese government and helped him survive the brutality of his jailers–his courage, his bravado, his stubbornness, his sense of mission–will serve him as well in forced exile from his homeland.
“Wei may be facing his toughest challenge now,” said Ken Lieberthal, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan and an expert on China. “He has never been in a society that assumes people can disagree in public and that pays little attention to most advocacy. His advocacy won’t be given any extra attention because of the danger it puts him in.”
In an interview last week, Wei indicated his political views–and his tougher-than-nails personality–have not changed since his first essay was posted on Beijing’s “Democracy Wall” in 1978. He said the message he hopes to send to the Chinese people flows from his steadfast belief that the vast majority of his countrymen object to the “fascistic” rule of the Communist Party and hunger for a democratic alternative.
Some China experts and fellow exiles have expressed fear that a voice that while in jail could not be stilled will, once freed, be ignored. In fact, the Chinese government appears to be banking on that happening.
But Wei has other plans.
He said he will spend much of the next few months writing a book about his prison experiences. Columbia University announced last week that he would work there as a visiting scholar. He also is negotiating deals to ensure his voice gets heard inside China, through Radio Free Asia and other outlets.
Drinking warm brown tea and chain-smoking Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes in a Manhattan hotel room, Wei scoffed at the idea that he might have been more effective had he stayed in jail and remained a symbol of Chinese oppression.
“If I were to stay in jail, then truly not many people would be able to hear me,” he said. “But now there are so many diversified types of media, and they are so technologically advanced, that there is no way they can prevent my voice from being heard.”
Some clues as to what motivates the man known in the West as the father of the Chinese democracy movement may be gleaned from his childhood.
Wei Jingsheng (pronounced WAY jing-SHUNG) was born on May 20, 1950, a year after the heady Communist victory over the Chinese Nationalists, the No. 1 son of a couple of Communist Party bureaucrats. He grew up in a Beijing compound that housed families of the party elite and attended the country’s best schools until the Cultural Revolution disrupted the educational system.
His father, Wei Zilin, who had tutored Mao’s son in written Chinese, demanded that his own son memorize one page of Mao’s writings every day or go to bed without dinner. A dutiful son, Wei Jingsheng rarely missed a meal.
In the mid-1970s, after his service with the Red Guards and a stint in the army, Wei returned to Beijing and was assigned to work as an electrician at the city zoo. He also became engaged to a Tibetan woman, Ping Ni, whose father had been jailed and whose mother had slit her wrists after she, too, came under attack. Despite a 1949 agreement with the Dalai Lama that promised a degree of autonomy to Tibet, Beijing had begun a brutal campaign of repression in Tibet and official prejudice against its people.
Philip Cunningham, a Tokyo-based journalist who knows him well, believes Wei’s relationship with Ping Ni and her father, a man he respected and admired, may have been a critical factor in developing Wei’s views on human rights.
Wei’s mother had taught him socialist compassion for the poor and disenfranchised, and Wei was moved by Tibet’s plight. But his own family’s compassion did not extend that far; his parents threatened to cut him off if he married Ping Ni. She ultimately married someone else, but Wei Zilin cut himself off from his son anyway when Wei Jingsheng went on trial.
In the winter of 1978, China was enjoying a brief “Beijing Spring” following Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping assuming power. Some independent political activism was being tolerated, and worker-intellectuals like Wei began putting up “big-character” wall posters.
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In the predawn hours of Dec. 5, Wei’s career as a dissident writer was launched. Someone posted his essay titled “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy,” in which Wei argued that the regime’s “Four Modernizations”–agriculture, industry, defense and science–would be inadequate without democratic reforms.
“The people should have democracy,” he wrote. “When they call for democracy they are demanding nothing more than that which is inherently theirs. Whoever refuses to return democracy to them is a shameless thief more despicable than any capitalist who robs the workers of the wealth earned with their own sweat and blood.”
According to Andrew Nathan of the East Asia Institute at Columbia University, Wei took the government’s claims about human rights at face value and acted “as if he were a free man who is allowed to think and write.” He thus forced the authorities to employ ever more repressive measures to silence him–and prove the lie of their so-called rule of law.
“He reached a determination in his own mind that the only thing that would save China was democracy, and he devoted himself to that ideal–even though there’s little evidence he has any detailed grasp of democratic systems,” said Lieberthal. “But unlike most of the rest of the world, he was willing to spend much of his life behind bars to be true to that commitment.”
Cunningham, Wei’s journalist friend, says Wei is stubborn, as well as gutsy and committed. “Wei is pig-headed and extremely arrogant,” Cunningham said. “But if he didn’t have supreme faith in himself, how could he have survived what he’s been through?”
A prolific pamphleteer and underground journalist, Wei was bolder than other dissidents–or more naive. He took on Deng personally, which eventually got him jailed for subversive activity.
During his first long imprisonment, from 1979 to 1993, he wrote a series of critical and highly personal letters to Deng, many of which were published this year in a collection of Wei’s writings titled “The Courage to Stand Alone.”
On June 15, 1989, 11 days after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Wei wrote to Deng: “So, now that you’ve successfully carried out a military coup to deal with a group of unarmed and politically inexperienced students and citizens, how do you feel?”
His “imaginary correspondence” with Deng (the letters were all confiscated by the prison authorities) was one of the tricks Wei devised to keep himself sane, said Bob Bernstein, chairman of Human Rights Watch and Wei’s literary agent. Another was provoking arguments with his guards–“anything to keep busy.”
When the government released him in 1993, apparently as part of a bid by Beijing to serve as host for the 2000 Olympics, Wei refused to leave prison until his jailers handed over all the confiscated letters.
According to Cunningham, Wei may have seen his imprisonment as part of a potentially historic role, “and it’s worth any deprivation to stand out and be remembered in a country of 1 billion people.”
One question that remains puzzling to many China experts is why Wei agreed to go into exile now after rejecting previous offers and stubbornly insisting he would never leave his homeland.
His younger sister, Wei Shanshan, believes her brother may have feared he would not survive much longer in his prison cell, a transparent glass cage in which the lights were always on and which he shared with six other prisoners who reportedly beat him regularly.
“He had many problems in the last few months,” she told reporters in Detroit shortly after Wei’s release. “He was in a lot of pain, and the Chinese government made it clear he would not receive any treatment in prison.”
But Wei appears to be remarkably fit, which makes the “health crisis” explanation less plausible.
“Did he come near his breaking point?” Cunningham wondered aloud. “Was it pressure from his family? I don’t know.”
One intriguing theory, Cunningham said, is that an invisible underground network determined that Wei was no longer useful to the movement in jail. This theory, unsupported by objective evidence, would explain why a man whom friends feared would “die of stubbornness” suddenly changed his mind, Cunningham said.
Now Wei is out, contemplating his future. One potential pitfall facing China’s most famous political exile lies in the divisions within the exile community.
Many who fled China, especially the students who left after the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square, got caught up in the bickering among competing exile groups. Those who went to business school and established successful capitalist careers may not share the views of the staunch human rights campaigners. And some dissidents who remain in China are critical of those, like Wei, whom they see as claiming too much credit for themselves.
So far, Wei has not responded to the most recent attacks against him from fellow dissidents in China. “He is very strong. He can resist the temptation” to get involved in exile politics, said Betty Bao Lord, chair of Freedom House, which supports Radio Free Asia.
Perhaps. Now the closely linked but fractious world of China-watchers will be paying close attention to see whether Wei can rise above the fray and become a spokesman for the entire spectrum of pro-democracy activists.
“He may be able to mobilize the overseas democracy movement in ways the others can’t,” said Perry Link, a China scholar at Princeton. “He doesn’t have an alternative career the way many others have.”