Profile in Courage

Ancient Chinese metaphysics holds that things give rise to their opposites; when a trend approaches an extreme, it undermines itself and feeds a reversal.

Thirty years ago, the flamboyant sights and sounds of Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution certainly did not seem to contain seeds of anti-Maoism. But in fact, it was just then that young Red Guards, their heads filled with the Great Leader’s utopian visions, were leaving school and plunging into “the life of the masses,” where they found that communism in action was utterly different from the communism of their dreams. In many cases, the shock of disillusion did not kill their idealism but only redirected it from support of Mao to opposition.

This generation, now in its 40s, differs clearly from both an older one that was educated in Soviet-style socialism and a younger one, whose thinking has been dominated by the moneymaking of the Deng Xiaoping years. Each generation continues to carry its distinctive values in China today.

Wei Jingsheng, 47 and now serving his 18th year in prison, is a vivid example of his rebellious generation. As a prisoner of conscience, he ranks with Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel and Nelson Mandela but so far is not as well known as they. “The Courage to Stand Alone,” which contains three of his best essays and a selection of his letters from prison, should help the world to understand him better. Most of the letters, which are addressed to government officials or to Wei’s family, were confiscated in prison and stored in a file. We have them now only because in 1993, when Beijing released Wei briefly in support of its bid to host the Summer Olympic Games in 2000, Wei refused to leave prison unless he could take his letters with him.

The best way to read this book is to begin with Appendix III, an “autobiographical essay” that Wei wrote in 1979. Here Wei explains how, as an ardent Maoist in 1966, he led a group of his high school friends on a “field investigation” to China’s northwest. At train stops west of Xi’an, “a horde of beggars swarmed around nearly every car.” Wei was shocked to see a young woman who smeared herself with mud and soot because she had no clothes to wear.

Farmers told him stories of the great famine of 1959-’61 caused by Mao’s absurd agricultural policies. At a desolate village, Wei observed “no roofs on these houses” and was told that “the entire village starved to death during the Communist Wind.” Then he heard and was most profoundly shaken by “stories of how villagers had exchanged babies as food. I felt like I could practically see . . . the pained expressions of parents chewing the flesh of children they had exchanged for their own babies. . . . Who made them do this?” After some difficult rethinking, Wei concluded that he “could make out the face of the executioner quite clearly. . . . he was Mao Zedong.”

The problem, as Wei saw it, was not just Mao but the whole layer of Communist officials who touted fine slogans like “serve the people” and “classless society” while bullying the people, caring only for their bureaucratic superiors and jealously guarding their personal interests. At 16, Wei decided that “unless there was solid evidence to convince me otherwise, [he would] regard all power holders as ruthless people lacking in conscience who had built their success on others’ misfortunes.”

In April 1976, Wei and many in his generation joined a protest of Maoism at Tiananmen Square, the very place they had cheered Mao wildly 10 years earlier. In 1978, Mao was dead, and Deng Xiaoping, in engineering his climb to power, announced his support for posters on Beijing’s “Democracy Wall.” Deng’s aim was to elicit “mass opinion” that he could use to his advantage in battles with the Maoist holdovers, who were his principal rivals.

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Wei, however, posted an eloquent essay called “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy,” in which he argued that Deng’s own program of the “Four Modernizations” was incomplete because it omitted democracy. Wei held that dictators (including Deng), who grab for themselves power that rightfully rests with the people, are “more despicable than any capitalist who robs the workers of the wealth earned with their own sweat and blood.”

Nine months after publishing his essay, Wei was arrested, tried and sentenced to 15 years in prison for “the crime of counterrevolution.” He was released on parole 14 1/2 years later at the time of the Olympic bid but, still refusing to keep quiet about democracy and human rights, he was rearrested after six months, detained extra-legally for a year and a half and then brought to a second trial.

The government called both trials “open,” but attendance was by permission only. Even Wei’s family was barred. Wei was sentenced in 1995 to 14 years, in part for pursuing “illegal activities under the cloak of legality,” which was a reference to the publication of some of the prison letters that appear in the present collection. It seems likely that Wei has continued to write letters during his second confinement, but none has yet passed beyond prison walls.

We can also only guess at the extent of the physical abuse Wei has endured. His letters between 1981 and 1993 document steadily worsening health--high blood pressure, heart disorders, severe headaches, nausea and loss of all but 12 teeth to periodontal disease. He describes some noxious living conditions: a bright light is shined in his cell around the clock, preventing sleep; he is confined to his cell for days in a row, preventing exercise; in winter, his cell is so cold that frost rises on the inner walls. In a practice borrowed from Stalin’s prisons, common criminals are assigned to harass the political prisoners, and one of the favorite techniques is to create constant noise so loud that even thought becomes difficult. Wei records his suspicion that the leaders’ plan for him is that he “die of natural causes.”

Yet Wei doesn’t refer to this treatment as “torture,” because prison regulations forbid the mention of torture in correspondence, and Wei hopes that his letters can be mailed out.

What he omits can be estimated, however, from the known experience of Liu Qing, Wei’s colleague at the Democracy Wall, who served a prison sentence simultaneously with Wei’s first and who now lives in New York and has contributed a preface to the present volume. Liu writes about being forced to sit upright on a small stool all his waking hours. When he tried a hunger strike, prison guards used a metal brace to force his mouth open so violently that the corners ripped open. (Wei’s letters mention his own hunger strikes but omit detail.)

Yet Wei does monitor the workings of his own mind and honestly concedes his moments of weakness. In a letter to his family, he writes: “ . . . Right now my mind feels a bit rusty and my reactions to things are slow. I am completely cut off in here and feel so out of touch that I have a hard time assessing things people tell me. . . . I am unsure and hesitant and have trouble understanding things.” After his first two years in prison, he apparently contemplated suicide, wondering whether “a quick death is better than hanging around like this, half dead, half alive.”

Although he often writes about defying his captors, he at times takes a humbler stance by referring to their “kind permission” and his “thanks for their consideration.” It is not always easy to distinguish genuine compromise from irony, however. In one letter, Wei goes on at length, tongue in cheek, about the “rather difficult question” of how to arrange for a prisoner to listen to a radio. In this case, Wei seems to expect that his guards will miss his irony or, at least, not be able to prove that he intended it. Elsewhere his sarcasm is less subtle, as when he signs a letter as “your most devoted hostile element.”

Wei tries to bolster his morale, as his letters show, by trying somehow to remain helpful to China. For example, in April 1984 he wrote to Chinese state leaders about the problem of desertification in China’s northwest and presented his own “wind-powered alkalinity control plan.” Pointing out that living conditions in the salt flat are as bad as in many prisons, he suggested that he be transferred there to implement his plan. A few months later, he was indeed sent to a prison camp in the general area but was still kept in a cell. There he tried to raise rabbits, but, poorly fed himself, found little to feed them.

He reads the People’s Daily, the only newspaper that he is allowed, and offers his advice on world issues to China’s rulers. Tibet should stay part of China but enjoy complete internal autonomy. Taiwan should be allowed a speaking seat at the United Nations and be given a charge d’affaires office in every Chinese embassy. The 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong is good but “no more than the critical first step.” Everything will depend on whether the agreement can in 1997 “be followed to the letter and be coupled with the advancement of reform and democracy inside China.”

On all topics, Wei’s letters show that the worldview he and his Red Guard friends formed in their teens has stayed with him. He expresses explosive indignation at the misbehavior of officials; Deng is an “idiot” for ordering the 1989 Beijing massacre. Less obtrusively, but more often, he reveals an abiding sympathy for the poor. When his access to showers is cut off, he reflects, “I can’t complain that this is inhumane because . . . peoples of some regions in the northwest either never bathe or take only dry baths.”

Again, typical of the idealism of his generation, he cherishes his independence of thought and especially enjoys puncturing the hypocrisy of official doublespeak. Charged at his first trial with “flaunting the banner of so-called free speech for democracy and human rights,” he answers: “First of all, allow me to point out that there is nothing whatsoever ‘so-called’ about free speech. On the contrary, it is stipulated by the Constitution as a right to be enjoyed by all citizens. The public prosecutor’s choice of such a term . . . illustrates that he has forgotten his responsibility to protect the democratic rights of his fellow citizens.”

Elsewhere he points out that the Communist Party claims to have “fed 1 billion people,” but actually, he writes, it is the people who feed the party and the party that created the world’s largest famine; also that “the rule of law” in China is not something that “protects the freedom of citizens” but only a “legal weapon” that power holders use at will.

If Wei’s general outlook is common to his generation, what makes him so unusual? He has rare candor, but there is more to it than that. He “stands alone” because he was the first and the boldest to cross publicly into an area where he knew he would be labeled a “dissident.” As in the former Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe, people in China in the immediate post-Mao years tended to admire the dissident only from a distance, regarding him or her as sort of high-minded simpleton whom the society very much needs, so long as someone else is willing to pay the price. In 1978, Wei Jingsheng’s sister Shanshan was ecstatic after reading his essay “The Fifth Modernization” but was intensely dismayed to learn that her brother was the author. “You absolutely must not write that sort of thing!” she told him.

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Wei’s insistence to stand behind his essay--before not only his family but the entire Chinese state--was a conscious decision to accept a role on the stage of Chinese politics. It turned him into a conspicuous symbol that could be put to use by supporters and opponents alike. Deng Xiaoping could not easily order that he be executed in secret (as he did other, less famous political offenders both before and after Wei), but Deng could, and did, use Wei’s symbolic weight to draw a line for the whole country: You may have more money and more flexibility in daily life, but no democracy.

Deng also used Wei to make a point about China in the world: Wei had to be silenced because China was under assault from hostile foreign forces. In fact, though, there has been no military threat to China, and, except for a few years when the United States debated higher tariffs for China, there has been no economic pressure, either. The war has been entirely of words and has focused mainly on the Chinese government’s violations of human rights. Hence the necessity to silence people like Wei amounts, as Oxford philosopher Ronald Dworkin has written, to “the bizarre argument that constraints on free speech are necessary in order to prevent external criticism of China for not respecting free speech.”

Wei’s own letters explicitly reject the notion that human rights are an “internal affair.” To Wei, such rights are as “natural” as food and sex and “independent of the will of the government.” The Deng regime’s argument that “China is different” is, for Wei, as absurd as arguing that “people can do without food because there are some people who have nothing to eat.”

On Dec. 28, 1995, Wei was returned to the prison he had left in 1993, an “advanced” institution whose ungainly name, the Nanpu New Life Salt Works, oddly captures the blend of cruelty and hypocrisy that defines its mission. His contact with the outside world is even more limited this time than last. From visitors, he had heard, at least, that his book is being published. But he cannot watch as it is translated into other languages (four, so far) and as the international campaign to recommend him for the Nobel Peace Prize grows stronger. These facts make him not quite the most “alone” person in China. Those most profoundly alone are the thousands like him whose names we do not know.

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A special evening honoring the life and letters of WEI JINGSHENG will take place Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Mark Taper Forum at the Los Angeles Music Center. The event, a presentation of the Taper’s Asian Theatre Workshop with assistance from the Gleitsman Foundation, will include readings from “The Courage To Stand Alone.” A $20 donation is suggested; proceeds benefit Human Rights in China. For more information, call (213) 972-7389.