by Francis Deron, Le Monde

Tuesday, April 9, 1996

At 46, the Chinese dissident has already spent 14 years in prison. Now, for 15 years more, his world will be narrowed by his cell's walls. His crime: denouncing the renewed despotism and human rights violations in his country.

Some considerations seem to be made on purpose to write them on a cell's wall: "The willingness to be cheated is the main pillar on which slavery stands", wrote Wei Jingsheng in 1979, a short time before becoming the most celebrated Chinese political prisoner. He was detained for a long period, fourteen years and half up to 1993, by Deng Xiaoping's will (who Wei described as a despot), and then imprisoned again in 1994 with a 15-year sentence until November 20, 2009, unless advanced release, by will of Deng's heirs on behalf of a power which still ascribes itself to communism. It is very harsh, at 46, to pay again for the refusal to be reduced to slavery. Isn't the price too dear?, Wei, like others formerly, might ask himself. In 1994, a short time before returning to prison, he assured it is not. But we don't know very well what Wei, shut in his cell, thinks today. Unlike other political prisoners, Wei doesn't communicate very much with the outer world. His prison is located 60 miles from Beijing, in the ne

ighbourhood of Tangshan, epicentre of a frightful earthquake in 1976, a short time before Mao Tsetung's death. Anyway, things changed a little in recent times. In fact, there was a period when his family received very scarce news about him and, anyway, frightened by the police didn't speak to foreign journalists, the prisoner's disgrace falling upon his family. A bitter life, especially for his father in dissention with him: a good communist of the hopes' era, during the struggle that led to the establishment of the regime, Wei's father broke off almost all relations with his restless son, one out of four.

Born in Beijing in 1950, Wei bears a name that his parents hoped to be of good wish: it means "Born in the capital". Their son embodied the pride of a country born again from its ashes, after a century and a half of wars, humiliations and oppression. Today, on the contrary, he is the symbol of any opposer's determination against the abuse of power of a regime that promised justice to its own people. It's 30 years by now that, with perseverance uninjured by the repression, Wei leads the opposition on all the issues: democracy, anti-militarism, the Tibetan question... He owes such a strength of character to the same regime that, with methods proper of the proletarian dictatorship, condemned him to reflect as a self-taught man.

Wei's political birth is due to Mao Tsetung. In December 1966, while China regales itself to the Red Guards' Cultural Revolution, Wei and other children of the regime cadres gather into a movement, the Committee of United Action of the Capital's Red Guards, determined to fight the extremist trends of the ruling staff closer to Mao's wife Jiang Qing, egeria of the wave that threatens to overthrow the system. Those teenagers (Wei was 16) allowed themselves to assault the political police headquarters and destroy part of the secret files about their relatives. That episode bears witness of the existence, among the fascinating Red Guards, of pro-democratic trends revolting the repressive system. After the Red Guards organizations were dismantled and the Army regained the power, Wei and millions other people were sent to the countryside, where he discovered the poverty and the waves of famine in the sixties, brought about by the regime's errors. He came to the conclusion that the merits of communism and the econo

mic miracle extoled by the propaganda were falsehoods. Back to the city, he found a job as electrician at the Beijing zoo. But Wei was not a Lech Walesa: he reflected, read a lot, but didn't think to an independent trade-union activity in the workers' circles. He prefer to be a polemic. He took part, aloof, to the first anti-government outburst in Tienanmen square on April 5, 1976, with Mao still alive. Two years later the Wall of Democracy, a corner where the democratic protest tazebaos were put up, appeared at one of the main crossroads of the Capital, briefly allowed by a Deng Xiaoping exploiting the movement in order to get rid of the maoist political enemies. On December 5, 1978, Wei put up the text that made him famous, the Fifth Modernization, in which he developed the idea that the country's economic progress must pass through the system's democratization, otherwise the people cannot benefit by the four modernizations extoled by the regime. Then Wei founded a magazine, Explorations, printed on a pape

r as much poor as expensive and distributed to the Wall's audience. He eloquently denounced the imprisonments for political reasons, the poverty of a large part of the population, the political origin of juvenile delinquency, the sale of children in the streets of Beijing. At the same time he discovered a question that he began to know thanks to his then girlfriend, a Tibetan woman: the repression in the roof of the world. The idea that a primary form of colonialism was taking place in Tibet was later resumed by a General Secretary of the Communist Party consequently discharged. Soon Wei found himself in clash with Deng Xiaoping who, firmly holding the regime's reins, was about to restore order. In 1979 Wei opposed the Chinese attack to the neighbouring Vietnamese provinces, and denounced the new despotism of the leader of the post-maoist era. He was arrested on March 29 and disappeared in a Chinese gulag after a farcical "public" trial in which the regime satisfied the dutiful publicity simply showing a pho

tograph of Wei, head shaven, while reading himself his defence. The Power didn't know that Wei's statements were recorded by a dissident penetrated into the guard and later made public outside, showing Wei calmly turning down the indictments against him as well as the counter-revolutionary nature of his writings (published in French with Wei's statements in "Un bol de nids d'hirondelles ne fait pas le printemps de Pekin" Biblotheque asiatique, Christian Bourgois editeur, 1980). Wei was also rebuked for transmitting military secrets to foreign journalists. As a matter of fact, they were wide-spread official information over military operations in Vietnam. Other dissidents lost their freedom for siding with Wei or helping for his statements to become public. Since then alarmist rumours, according to which he became insane, have gone around over his fate. He persisted in refusing to repent, while the prison system tried to annihilate him. During the first two years in detention, he was banished in a subterranea

n, lightless cell. Afterwards the situation got comparatively better. At the end, he will tell later, Wei enjoied some respect from the warders in the forced labour camps. The refusal to admit his error helped him with them: he was Deng's personal prisoner. He was pleased when he asked for some paper to write to the Patriarch, more to support his protesting political ideas than to bewail his condition. In the West, particularly in France, Wei became the Chinese symbol of the struggle for human rights, to such an extent that in September 1993 he was released at last, six months before the end of the expected punishment. That gesture, probably difficult to accept for Deng, was aimed to obtain the designation of Beijing as the host city for the year 2000 Olympic Games. But the memory of the bloody events in Tienanmen square in 1989 drove the International Olympic Games Committee to decide differently. Since the moment of his release, while theoretically deprived of political rights, Wei got his freedom of speec

h back. Less polemically than before, maybe with more reflection, Wei considered to direct his action closer to the reality, for instance taking interest in the workers' claims and the protest movements against the conditions of disadvantaged people, of those oppressed by the system, and began to speak of democracy starting from concrete experiences. For some months he seemed to enjoy the favour of the powerful. He trusted to be successful in wringing the promise to be allowed to freely speak to foreign journalists because he agreed with the regime for Beijing to be designated for the Olympics and because he asked the United States not to use the human rights question for striking Chinese export with higher duties. But Washington made a faux pas: the State Department official in charge for human rights, John Shattuck, met Wei in Beijing before meeting his official host, Foreign Ministry Qian Qichen. Furthermore, the International Olympics Committee prefered Sidney to Beijing for the games, and the relations

between China and the U.S. deteriorated. On April 1, 1994, Wei was arrested again, together with his girlfriend Tong Yi, a former student who took part to the Tienanmen movement in 1989. That time the regime put into practice a new strategy. Wei and Tong Yi simply disappeared. Even their families lost their track. The suspect is that the regime wants him exiled, an opportunity that he previously already refused. What is Wei going to do now? He will continue to question the regime. "I coudn't do anything else: they condemned me to dissidence and my place is here in China", he told us before his arrest. At last, on December 13, 1995, wei was taken before the court. The trial was brusque, the tribunal was deaf to the proofs developed by Wei and his attorney to deny the prosecutor's office thesis, according to which he was plotting to overthrow the government. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail. Such a simulacrum of justice, not only reveals the regime's willingness to obey to a judicial formalism, but also co

nfirms that some minority forces were pushing for a moderate liberalization of the system and, following a tested method, using one more time the emblematic symbol that Wei was and is. Otherwise his family wouldn't be allowed to enjoy neither the possibility to appeal (the first time in vain just after the conviction, the second time on february 1, 1996), nor that to contact human rights organizations in the U.S. (where for the first time, last year, Wei was proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize), nor to publicly worry for the state of his health after 16 years in conditions of detention harsh to an extreme: even an electric hot-plate essential to cook the food (Wei is completely toothless) was denied to him. His articulations are debilitated because of the wet cold in the cell he left in 1993, while a stifling heat is coming soon.

The very special guest of Tengshen number one prison now waits for some relief to appear again on the political prisoners' horizon in the last large country still looking to Lenin. He certainly ponders over the bitter irony of his situation, after the efforts to be moderate that he bore during the short period in partial freedom.