Wei’s release is the biggest prize to date in the Clinton administration’s controversial approach to China. Nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the past four consecutive years, Wei is one of two dissidents the Americans most wanted to liberate from prison in the wake of Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s recent state visit to Washington. While Jiang used his eight-day U.S. tour to talk tough on human rights, once home he softened his stance. Democracy activists said Wei’s release was brought about by U.S. lobbying. ““It’s clear that Jiang’s visit to the United States has something to do with it,’’ says Merle Goldman, author of ““Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China.’’ ““We hope this is the beginning and helps those in prison.''
Chalk one up for ““constructive engagement.’’ Finally, Bill Clinton’s strategy for U.S.-China relations can claim real progress. Wei’s release not only gives the ailing pro-democracy activist access to medical care, it provides Clinton with a shield he can use to deflect charges of being ““too soft’’ on China. And Wei’s freedom may be just a beginning: administration officials expect another important release this year, of Tiananmen student activist Wang Dan. Human-rights proponents add that 2,000 other political prisoners could have their convictions reviewed and possibly reversed, a plan that was likely to come up for discussion when Chinese Justice Minister Xiao Yang met with his U.S. counterpart, Attorney General Janet Reno, in Washington on Monday.
Wei’s exile cuts short a prison term that would have kept him inside China’s gulag until 2009–a full three decades after he led China’s first modern democracy movement. In 1978 Wei, a former Red Guard, was an electrician at the Beijing Zoo. Reveling in the political-power vacuum created by Chairman Mao’s death two years earlier, Wei and other young intellectuals voiced support for reformist Deputy Prime Minister Deng Xiaoping in underground journals and essays pasted on Beijing’s ““Democracy Wall.’’ At first Deng sanctioned their movement–and used it to push aside Mao’s handpicked successor, Hua Guofeng. Later he clamped down, ordering arrests and prohibiting access to the wall. Wei’s response: a powerful essay, ““The Fifth Modernization,’’ denounced Deng’s reformers as ““political swindlers’’ and said that without democracy, ““all other modernizations are nothing but a new lie.''
On Deng’s order, Wei was arrested in 1979 and charged with ““counterrevolutionary crimes.’’ Courthouse defiance, including insisting on his innocence, earned him a harsh 15-year prison term. That didn’t blunt Wei’s assault on Deng. It continued in letters written in prisons and labor camps across China, published this year in ““The Courage to Stand Alone’’ (sidebar). Distributed around the world (though, obviously, not in China), the book is a hot property among the country’s young intellectuals. In it, a 1983 note asks President Li Xiannian to authorize improved prison treatment–but suggests not mentioning the request to Deng, because ““the person who is currently making the entire country read his selected writings won’t be too happy.’’ A 1987 letter to Deng himself blames his policies for ““an upsurge in popular dissatisfaction’’–then demands medical parole. Another letter to Deng, written days after the Tiananmen massacre, begins: ““So, now that you’ve successfully carried out a military coup to deal with a group of unarmed and inexperienced students and citizens, how do you feel?''
China freed Wei with great fanfare in 1993, six months before his term was due to expire and just nine days before the International Olympic Committee chose a host city for the 2000 Games. (Beijing leaders had hoped Wei’s release would swing the vote in China’s favor, but Sydney won the prize.) Once out of jail, Wei resumed writing about democracy and human rights. He published several essays abroad, angering Chinese leaders. Then, in early 1994, he met with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck in Beijing; on April 1 security agents detained Wei on a roadway outside Beijing. For almost 20 months thereafter, China’s judiciary denied he was in custody. The regime finally announced in November 1995 that Wei was to be tried for plotting to overthrow the government. He was convicted one month later.
Handed a 14-year sentence, Wei returned to his old cell at the Jidong Number One Prison, a labor camp in Tangshan. According to human-rights groups, inmates there routinely beat Wei at the urging of prison authorities. His family says he suffers from hypertension, heart trouble, gum disease and chronic insomnia–ailments made life-threatening by relentless prison abuse. Justice Minister Xiao hinted at medical parole in September, telling journalists Wei would be eligible for release if ““certified as seriously ill.’’ Wei himself removed an obstacle to his own freedom recently when he agreed to go abroad, an option he had formerly rejected. ““The family has always urged him to take exile and look after himself,’’ sister Wei Shanshan told NEWSWEEK by telephone from her home in Germany. ““Only very recently did he accept the idea.''
After the initial attention he garners, Wei may find it difficult to hold the world’s interest. In prison he ranked as one of the world’s most prominent dissidents. Free, he runs the risk of slipping into obscurity. He may at least have some company. John Kamm, a businessman and human-rights lobbyist in San Francisco, says Beijing is considering a policy change that could affect–and possibly set free–hundreds of convicted, jailed dissidents. China revised its lawbooks last year to eliminate all counterrevolutionary statutes, replacing them with a tough state-security law. That left about 2,000 convicts in jail for crimes that no longer exist. Kamm and others have suggested that the Ministry of Justice plans to review these cases and release prisoners whose prior activities broke no current laws. The idea is now under discussion ““at the most senior level’’ inside China, says Kamm, who met in September with Chinese officials in Beijing. ““That would pry loose hundreds of people, which is more important than trading one or two dissidents.''
But what would Beijing gain by making such a move? Michel Oksenberg of Stanford’s Asia Pacific Research Center thinks that Jiang talked tough while in the United States to show the folks back home that Clinton can’t bully him. With that message now sent, in Oksenberg’s view, Jiang is equipped to make concessions on human rights. Such a move would lessen criticism of abuses, elevating the country to the global-player status it desperately wants. Wei’s release still leaves China far short of that goal. But it’s a good place to start.
