(Internationally recognized as a major publishing event, T...)
Internationally recognized as a major publishing event, The Courage to Stand Alone is a collection of prison writings from the world's most famous political prisoner.
(Seeking to bridge that gap, a group of prominent scholars...)
Seeking to bridge that gap, a group of prominent scholars and activists challenge readers to move past the usual images of China presented by the media and to think about the common problems shared by China and the United States.
Wei Jingsheng is a Chinese human rights activist. He is known as the author of the essay "The Fifth Modernization".
Background
Wei Jingsheng was born on May 20, 1950, in Beijing, China. His parents were high-ranking officials in the regime established by Mao Zedong, who took power in 1949. The oldest of four, Wei grew up in Beijing. His father was an official in the Ministry of Construction, while his mother was a Communist Party leader in a textile factory.
Education
Wei grew up receiving a typical young Communist’s education. The Cultural Revolution cut his education short at the junior high school level. However, according to the Reader’s Digest article, he read Western philosophy on his own, and surprised his elders with his understanding of it.
Career
Wei joined the Red Guard, a mass of roving fanatics who, waving Mao Zedong’s “little red book,” traveled through China during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, denouncing “class enemies.” During his railroad travels as a Red Guard, Wei became disenchanted by the poverty and misery he saw among China’s people and by the evidence of famine caused by Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”. When his mother was imprisoned, beaten, and forced to write a confession of imaginary crimes, he was enraged; she died in 1976. In December, 1978, Wei, like other pro-democracy Chinese, took advantage of an apparent thaw following Mao’s death to place a poster on the “Democracy Wall” in Beijing. Wei’s poster, “The Fifth Modernization,” was a riposte to the new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s declaration of the “four modernizations” of agriculture, industry, science, and defense. Without the fifth modernization, democracy, the other four were meaningless, Wei’s poster asserted. Wei then sold his wristwatch to finance a self-printed periodical he called Exploration, and sold copies on the street.
His broadsheet’s revelations of party corruption were picked up by Western news media and relayed back to the Chinese people. Although warned about his safety, Wei persisted in his activism, and on March 29, 1979, he was arrested and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He was sent to Banbuqiao Detention Center in Beijing and was not allowed to see other prisoners. He developed heart and kidney problems and lost his teeth. Placed in solitary confinement for so long, allowed to see family members only every few years under close supervision, he nearly forgot how to speak. He told a French professor, “the loneliness, the impression that no one was concerned about me anymore, weighed on me terribly. In 1984, it was difficult for me to speak, since my vocal chords had lost the habit of functioning.” In 1984 he was sent to a forced-labor coal mine, Tanggemu Farm in the province of Qinghai, then in 1989, under the ostensible purpose to aid his health, to a forced-labor salt farm, Nanpu New Life Salt Works, in Hebei. He remained alive, in part, due to attention from the international human rights community. In response to the hope of being an Olympic host in the year 2000, the Chinese government released Wei in September, 1993. He was warned not to speak to journalists, but instead, according to Robert A. Senser in Commonweal, “he acted almost as though he lived in a free country,” giving numerous interviews to international visitors. In retaliation and shortly after meeting with a representative of a human rights organization from the United States, he was arrested again after six months. He was held in pretrial detention for twenty months, before being sentenced once again to a fourteen-year term. In 1995 Wei was back at the Nanpu New Life Salt Works prison.
A book of Wei’s writings, The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings, was released in 1997. It contained letters to Wei’s brother and sister, and to Deng Xiaoping, as well as articles, an autobiographical essay, and portions of Wei’s statement at trial. The majority of the letters were never sent, since Chinese prison officials held them in their offices; Wei refused to leave the grounds of the prison upon his release in 1993 until he received them. According to Mark Meng of Library Journal, the writings should give American readers insight not only into the situation of Chinese dissidents and political prisoners, but into the motives of a seemingly ordinary, intelligent young man for risking his life to fight an overwhelming force. Meng added that the translation “conveys the poignancy of the original”.
Wei was released from prison in November, 1997. According to Pamela Burdman, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, he was released after pressure from the United States government and on the condition that he must leave China. Some attribute his release to the death of Deng Xiaoping, the passing of governmental power to Jiang Zemin, and Wei’s ailing health. He arrived in Detroit, Michigan, on November 16, 1997, on a non-stop flight (his first trip on an airplane) from Beijing. He was then rushed to a hospital for medical treatment for his heart and overall poor health. Wei met with President Clinton as well as numerous television hosts, and gained a position as visiting professor at Columbia University.
(Internationally recognized as a major publishing event, T...)
1997
Politics
Wei authored the essay "The Fifth Modernization", which was posted on the Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1978. Due to the manifesto, Wei was arrested and convicted of "counterrevolutionary" activities, and was detained as a political prisoner from 1979 till 1993. Released briefly in 1993, Wei continued with his dissident activities by speaking to visiting journalists, and was imprisoned again from 1994 to 1997, spending a total of 18 years in different prisons. He was deported to the United States on 16 November 1997, on medical parole. Still a Chinese citizen, Wei established the Wei Jingsheng Foundation in New York City (now based in Washington) whose stated aim is to work to improve human rights and democratization in China.
Views
Quotations:
“It doesn’t affect my determination one iota. Generations of martyrs sacrificed themselves in order to obtain democracy in Europe, North America and many other places in the world, but people should not be satisfied with this. Those who already enjoy democracy, liberty and human rights ... should not allow their own personal happiness to lull them into forgetting the many others who are still struggling against tyranny.”