Interviews with Wei Jingsheng

I think that Chinese people’s resistance to the Communist Party’s rule started at the very beginning when the communists took power. It started from the early 1950s. But this kind of resistance would be from the standpoint of maintaining the Communist Party, like it should be all right as long as some reforms are put in place.

Before the Democracy Wall in 1978, there were few people who proposed ending the Communist Party system. But only with a termination of the one-party regime of the Communist Party could China become good. The resistance had started shifting toward requesting a change from the Communist Party system, and this started from the Democracy Wall in 1978.

When we posted our opinions on the Democracy Wall, we were attacked by many people around the Democracy Wall. But the ordinary people enjoyed reading them. Many people were standing around and those posted opinions were widely spread.

So, at that time, most of the general public did not even think about overturning the Communist Party; however, a very few people thought about it and were frightened to speak out. But we spoke out at the Democracy Wall and made a public promotion and printed out some handouts and distributed them. This caused tremendous reactions in the mindset of the Chinese people.

So, after I was incarcerated and since the early 1980s, the opinions of demanding democracy in China, actually demanding a termination of the one-party rule of the Communist Party, spread rapidly. The whole 1980s became the biggest enemy of the Communist Party. Even people within the Communist Party stood up and said that China should take a democratic path and liberation, which were the main ideas that Deng Xiaoping hoped to suppress.

Soon the thoughts of democratization started brewing in Chinese society and getting more and more mature and growing broader. It was no longer limited to the legal system area. The entire society had started requesting democracy, in terms of freedom of speech and in terms of all aspects of the system. The people were demanding more openness, and also an open economy.

At this point, Deng Xiaoping on the one hand had to accept economic liberation in the society; however, in the political arena he thought he could maintain control. So he initiated some movements in an opposite direction, for example the Anti-bourgeois Liberalization Campaign, which was a very furious struggle during the entire 1980s.

On the one hand, the society was demanding liberation; on the other hand, Deng Xiaoping was continually launching this kind of campaign to oppose the liberation. The struggle was getting more and more intense, and it lasted until the end of the 1980s.

In fact, Deng Xiaoping’s approach of being open in the economy but definitely not open in the political area was formed gradually in the 1980s. At the beginning he did not understand, like many others, how China eventually was going to move. But soon he realized that without economic reform the Chinese economy would fall apart, and the Chinese people would no longer bear it and would force the communists to step down.

However, if he opened up politically and gave people freedom, the one-party rule of the Communist Party could no longer be sustained. He was very aware of this quandary in his mind. The growing conflict with the request for democracy from the society erupted in 1989. The conflict was also very intense within the Party; that’s why we saw the June Fourth Movement.

So he found in the economic area he could let things open up and develop, not only by allowing the Chinese people to develop the economy, but also attracting foreigners to come to China to help accelerate economic development. He thought as long as the economy’s developing well, and I let people get sufficient food, let people earn a sufficient amount of money, then the people wouldn’t rebel. This was his basic idea.

Deng Xiaoping thought – if the economy developed, then the Western people would believe there would also be democracy since their economy was developing. He developed this thought through the 1980s. But Deng Xiaoping also had thought about how to maintain a one-party dictatorship after economic development. The method was reflected in his famous statement, “Let some people get rich first,” or more specifically, let his kinsfolk get rich first.

If all the money is within the hands of their associates, then even with the development of a capitalist economy the Communist Party could still politically maintain a one-party dictatorship. He believed this so-called democracy was mastered in the hands of the capitalists; if the new capitalists were still part of our Communist Party members, then the power would still definitely remain in the hands of the Communist Party.

Wei Jingsheng was a prisoner of conscience in China for more than 18 years. Born in 1950 to parents who were Communist Party members, Wei served in the People’s Liberation Army and worked in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1978, he wrote an essay called “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy” and posted it in a place that had come to be called Democracy Wall. Unlike most pro-freedom authors in China during that time, Wei signed his name to “The Fifth Modernization,” which was a direct challenge to the Beijing government’s strategy of instituting economic reforms while continuing to suppress political dissent. Wei was soon arrested on the charge of being “counter-revolutionary” and served more than 18 years in prison, including several years in forced labor camps and eight years on death row.

By the mid-90s, Wei was China’s best-known political prisoner. There was strong international pressure for his release and, in 1997, he was allowed to go overseas for medical treatment. He now lives in the United States and heads the Overseas Chinese Democratic Coalition.

The People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, after a decades-long civil war between communist and nationalist forces. The communist victory drove the nationalist government to the island of Taiwan. While tensions have eased in recent years, both the nationalist and communist forces still claim to rule all of China. China ranks as the world’s third largest country by area, and the largest by population, with over 1.3 billion people.

Since 1949, China has been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong led the country until his death in 1976. Mao’s era was marked by dramatic swings in policy, massive crackdowns on perceived opponents of the regime, and harsh repression. Since 1976, the Chinese government has broken with Marxist economic orthodoxy by instituting limited market-based reforms, but the party has retained its monopoly on political power.

Freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and religion are severely restricted, and the people of China are denied the right to change their government. The courts are controlled by the Communist Party and do not provide due process of law. Government control extends into every aspect of people’s lives, most notably in the one-child policy in which unauthorized pregnancies often result in forced abortion and sterilization. While technology has spread quickly in recent years, Freedom House ranks China as one of the three most repressive governments in the world in terms of Internet freedom.

While the rapid expansion of the private sector has dramatically changed the Chinese economy, fundamental principles of free market systems are lacking, including property rights and independent labor unions. Official corruption remains a major obstacle to developing a fully free economy.

In 1989, 100,000 people gathered in a peaceful demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to protest human rights violations and demand democratic reforms. The protest lasted several weeks and inspired similar nonviolent demonstrations in other cities throughout China. On June 4, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army converged on the area with troops, tanks, and other advanced military weapons. Estimates of the death toll ranged from several hundred to several thousand. The army used similar tactics to suppress demonstrations in other cities and subsequently rounded up and imprisoned many thousands of protestors. The government vigorously defended these actions and instituted a campaign to purge those who had sympathized with protestors from the party and the government.

Although the Tiananmen Square massacre put an end to hopes for a speedy transition to democracy, courageous Chinese citizens have continued to risk imprisonment and worse to demand freedom. These human rights activists have included students, workers, lawyers, artists, and writers; Tibetan Buddhists and Uyghur Muslims who demand respect for their cultures, traditions, and religious practices; members of the spiritual discipline known as Falun Gong; Catholics who insist that their church is headed by the Pope rather than by government-appointed religious officials; and members of the “house church” movement, representing millions of Protestant Christians who are forced to worship in secret because their churches are not authorized by the government. China’s many prisoners of conscience include members of each of these groups.

In 2010, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to imprisoned Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo. His wife was arrested in order to prevent her from attending the award ceremony, and the government employed a range of coercive techniques to prevent other human rights activists from attending. China’s leading human rights lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, disappeared in early 2009 and is presumed to be in government custody.

The most recent Freedom in the World report from Freedom House gave China scores of 6 for civil liberties and 7 for political rights, where 1 is the highest and 7 the lowest possible score. Freedom House categorizes China as a “Not Free” country.