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Wei, Jingsheng

The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings, [42] 35

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Too Hot to Handle

Christian Tyler on Wei Jingsheng, The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings

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.

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