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Too Hot to Handle

It wasn’t until the Beijing massacre in June 1989 that I really began to understand what democracy means.

At school we learned about the birth of democracy in ancient Athens; as a teenager I read about Stalin’s show trials; as an adult I saw repressive regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at first hand. Reporting on the political scene in Britain during the later stages of the Cold War, I heard the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ liberally bandied about; yet they remained for me essentially political slogans.

China was a different matter. I had got to know something of the country in the six years before the 1989 Tiananmen Square sit-in. So the leadership’s decision to call in the army, and the subsequent random shooting of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of civilians, I found particularly shocking.

What drove the lesson home for me, however, was the extraordinary testament of one political prisoner, Wei Jingsheng, a pioneer of China’s democracy movement. The letters and essays he wrote between 1981 and 1993 during his first, long spell in jail were published in 1997 as The Courage to Stand Alone. The book received rave reviews in the West, but Wei was not around to hear the plaudits. He was back in jail.

The letters do not merely prescribe what a democratic China should look like. They convey, in a way no political treatise ever could, what it feels like to live under a regime that has total and arbitrary power over its citizens. The reader shares the impotence of the prisoner silenced for thinking aloud, banished to the outer darkness for challenging the legitimacy of the rulers.

Like Primo Levi, the poet of Auschwitz, Wei reminds us that the human spirit can survive even the most degrading attempts to crush it. He shows, furthermore, that sometimes a single, determined spirit can defeat an entire state. As he writes in a preface: ‘Your having this book before you proves the weakness of any powerful dic

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It wasn’t until the Beijing massacre in June 1989 that I really began to understand what democracy means.

At school we learned about the birth of democracy in ancient Athens; as a teenager I read about Stalin’s show trials; as an adult I saw repressive regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union at first hand. Reporting on the political scene in Britain during the later stages of the Cold War, I heard the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ liberally bandied about; yet they remained for me essentially political slogans. China was a different matter. I had got to know something of the country in the six years before the 1989 Tiananmen Square sit-in. So the leadership’s decision to call in the army, and the subsequent random shooting of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of civilians, I found particularly shocking. What drove the lesson home for me, however, was the extraordinary testament of one political prisoner, Wei Jingsheng, a pioneer of China’s democracy movement. The letters and essays he wrote between 1981 and 1993 during his first, long spell in jail were published in 1997 as The Courage to Stand Alone. The book received rave reviews in the West, but Wei was not around to hear the plaudits. He was back in jail. The letters do not merely prescribe what a democratic China should look like. They convey, in a way no political treatise ever could, what it feels like to live under a regime that has total and arbitrary power over its citizens. The reader shares the impotence of the prisoner silenced for thinking aloud, banished to the outer darkness for challenging the legitimacy of the rulers. Like Primo Levi, the poet of Auschwitz, Wei reminds us that the human spirit can survive even the most degrading attempts to crush it. He shows, furthermore, that sometimes a single, determined spirit can defeat an entire state. As he writes in a preface: ‘Your having this book before you proves the weakness of any powerful dictatorship.’ I wouldn’t say that Wei’s letters are great literature. They are not graphic like Zhang Xianliang’s Grass Soup, a gripping account of life in a Chinese labour camp during the great famine of 1958–60. They are not, so far as one can tell from the English translation, particularly stylish. Wei doesn’t speak with the same sophistication as his fellow essayist, the academic Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate currently serving an 11-year jail sentence for ‘incitement to subvert state power’. The power of Wei’s writings lies in their genesis, in the dark and dreadful place from which they come. Their author was cut off from the world, like a frog in a well as Liu Xiaobo puts it, spending years on end in solitary confinement, denied newspapers, books, radio and TV, allowed family visits only infrequently, persecuted round the clock by ‘trusties’, enduring sleepless nights under glaring lights and insistent noise, suffering from cold, hunger and heart disease, dizzy and sick, while his gums rotted and his teeth fell out. Wei supposed the regime was hoping he would die a ‘natural’ death, so they couldn’t be accused of killing him. But by the time he had come close to death, the world was on his side, and the regime had no choice but to let him out. The letters, addressed to his family, the prison authorities and senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, were partly an antidote to suffering and despair. But Wei also wanted to work out for himself why the Utopian vision of a socialist China had gone so horribly awry and where the responsibility for that lay. He had little contact with Western ideas, and had to start from scratch. Raised on a strict diet of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thought, he was an ardent revolutionary, an active Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, and a soldier in the People’s Revolutionary Army. On his travels into the western hinterland of China during that chaotic time, he was shocked by the poverty of the people – the naked, mud-covered children begging by the railway track in Gansu province – by the cruel revenge exacted on so-called ‘rightists’ exiled to Xinjiang, and the rumours of cannibalism in Ningxia. The Cultural Revolution had one good thing in its favour. With all the schools shut, there was space and time for a new generation of intellectually curious young Chinese like Wei to rethink their world from the inside out. We would not have had these letters at all but for a courageous bluff by their author. Apart from those to his brother and sisters, few of them would have got past the censor. But Wei kept copies. He was nearing the end of his first, 15-year sentence in September 1993, when he was suddenly granted parole. It was nine days before the International Olympic Committee was due to vote on China’s first bid to host the Olympic Games (those of 2000). Realizing that he’d become a pawn in what he later called a ‘dirty and abnormal’ game, he played his own move and refused to leave the prison without his copies. They became, he says, the only written denunciation of the Communist leadership to have left a Chinese prison through the front gate. The bad smell left by the Beijing massacre was still wafting round the world, and China lost the IOC vote by a narrow margin. So, after six months of freedom during which he cheerfully ignored the conditions of his probation, giving interviews to foreign journalists and money to families of the massacre victims, Wei was rearrested, tried and sentenced to a further fourteen years. Now he was the most famous dissident in China. Three and a half years later, as the pressure of world opinion mounted, he was whisked to the airport and put on a plane to Chicago. Friends in the US had meanwhile organized publication of a book containing a selection of his letters and other writings. Wei’s first sight of it was when a passenger on the same flight to Chicago asked him to sign his copy. The published letters are an elaboration of ideas contained in the two documents which made Wei famous, and which led to his arrest. One was a poster calling on the supreme leader Deng Xiaoping to add to his ‘Four Modernizations’ – science, agriculture, industry and defence – a fifth, democracy. This was dashed off in one night and pasted on Democracy Wall on Beijing’s main boulevard in the early hours of 5 December 1978. The other, headed ‘Do we want democracy or a new autocracy?’ was a response to Deng’s crackdown in March the following year and criticized the supreme leader by name. Their 28-year-old author was working at the time as an electrician at the Beijing zoo, a job assigned to him, as most jobs were in those days. He knew his posters would get him into trouble, but instead of running for the hills he stayed to face arrest. Declaring himself to be no lawbreaker and opposed to violent revolution, he offered himself as a scapegoat – ‘the chicken killed as a warning to the monkeys’. A summary of Wei’s political message would look something like this: civil rights are human rights, and there can be no derogation from this universal principle. China’s constitution is not worth the paper it is written on because the rights it guarantees are not supported by the law. The law itself is not wielded as an instrument of justice, but as a ‘weapon’ in the hands of the leadership. The regime is illegitimate as well as inhumane. Everything in China has been reduced to the politics of power, stifling progress in the arts and science. Class struggle is an artificial device to deflect people’s anger from Party leaders, and set them at each other’s throats. As for China’s restless ethnic minorities, all they need is the vote. (Wei took a special interest in the problem of Tibet. His fiancée Ping Ni was Tibetan, the daughter of a former Party boss in the region. He had to give her – and his chances of a family – up when he was jailed.) In the letters, the leaders are addressed as equals, or even as inferiors. The tone is by turns serious, humorous, ironic and angry. The bosses are ‘old bumpkins who know nothing about economics’; ‘this incompetent generation of headstrong old men who think they are omnipotent’. Wei is mischievously familiar with Deng, whom he suspected of personally ordering his arrest and sentence, and whom he accuses of selfish inconsistency. ‘We know each other well,’ he writes. ‘You have great ambition but you’re untalented and small-minded.’ To others he is more lenient: he signs himself ‘Your devoted hostile element’ in a letter to the reformist general secretary Hu Yaobang, who was purged in 1987 and whose sudden death in 1989 was one of the causes of the student occupation of Tiananmen Square. He sympathizes with the impotence of Hu’s successor, Zhao Ziyang, who opposed sending in the tanks and was put under house arrest until his death in 2005. Wei reserves his deepest scorn for hardliners like premier Li Peng, president Li Xiannian and Party boss Jiang Zemin. What makes a man capable of sacrificing everything for a principle? Even as a child, Wei could never take no for an answer. ‘As a small boy I had always tried to do what others thought was impossible,’ he writes. ‘If I’m going to do something, I persist to the end. That’s the way I am.’ He has a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, yet no grand ambition, an almost limitless capacity for suffering and a will of iron which will not allow him to defer, concede or beg. Such was his obduracy, his jailers feared the consequences for themselves. ‘You can build walls to contain a man’s physical freedom,’ Wei writes in a prefatory note, ‘but you can never contain his freedom to think. You can never tear down the Democracy Wall in people’s hearts.’ One feels almost sorry for the authorities. Wei wouldn’t recant, he wouldn’t die and they did not dare to kill him. His fame spread, and he became too hot to handle. Like that other dissident Ai Weiwei, well known in the West, he made his resistance into a kind of performance art. And in the end it was the mighty Communist Party, not the prisoner, who proved impotent. I met Wei once, in 2008. He was 58 and showed no sign of his long ordeal. The ironic sense of humour was very much in evidence. He had come to London to meet politicians, civil servants and academics (none of whom would be photographed with him) because China was preparing to host its first Olympic Games. He told me he was convinced that the Chinese Communist Party was living on borrowed time, and could collapse at any minute. When I accused him of wishful thinking, he laughed. ‘It’s not just me who says it. The Party thinks the same.’ Wei may be obstinate, but he is not narrow-minded: he takes an interest in the arts and literature, philosophy and scientific invention. He told me that for recreation he goes shooting pheasants in Virginia. Yet dissidents are a special breed. They have a crazy kind of courage, a shocking disregard for their own safety (and, one could say, that of their families). In the Soviet Union they used to be treated as insane and locked up in lunatic asylums. In Mao’s China they were beaten and browbeaten until they ‘confessed’. These days, they are more likely to be charged with tax evasion. If dissidents are foolish, then they are holy fools, visionaries who change the course of history like the three with whom Wei has been compared: Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov. I don’t mind betting that when the history of post-Communist China comes to be written, the name of the electrician Wei Jingsheng will be up there in lights.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 42 © Christian Tyler 2014


About the contributor

Christian Tyler is a former Financial Times journalist and the author of Wild West China: The Taming of Xinjiang.

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