by Ian Buruma
Beijing in 1978, when it all began, was a city in chaos. The winter was unusually cold, with winds from the Gobi Desert howling through the broad, empty avenues around the Forbidden City. Thousands of jobless former Red Guards were returning every day from the countryside. Many of them hung around the streets with nowhere to go. Thousands more victims of recent upheavals, ex-prisoners, desperate people labeled as “rightists,” orphans of murdered parents, all the human ruins of Maoist lunacy, arrived by bus or train or even on foot. They came to petition the government to get their innocent relatives out of jail, or to find jobs, food, or indeed any means of survival.
There was also a sense of political and cultural excitement in the air, as though a thick layer of ice that had muffled free human expression were gradually melting. Independent journals were founded. Artists experimented with new forms. And apart from the many pathetic petitions plastered on the Democracy Wall, in Xidan, a busy junction not far from Tiananmen Square, there were poems and political tracts. A young poet named Huang Xiang wrote about Chairman Mao’s war on the Chinese people, a war that was not yet over, despite the Great Helmsman’s death:
The war goes on in everyone’s facial expression.
The war is waged by numerous high-pitched loudspeakers
The war is waged in every pair of fearful, shifting eyes.
But most of the political writing on the wall was supportive of Deng Xiaoping, and couched in careful, reformist, Marxist language. The term “human rights” was not yet used. Dissidents talked about “citizens’ rights” instead. All except for Wei. That is why the appearance on the dawn of December 5 of the Fifth Modernization caused such a commotion. Crowds gathered around Wei’s wall poster, shoving one another to get a better view. Volunteers read the words out loud so others could hear. Word got around, and crowds kept coming and coming. The message, expressed in simple, lucid prose, that Chinese should be masters of their own destiny, that they had no more need of gods and emperors, and that the only form of modernization worth having should bring democracy and freedom, was so unusual, so fresh, and so extraordinarily bold after thirty years of leaden propaganda that it packed the emotional force of great poetry or beautiful music. People burst into tears.
Not only had Wei said in public what he thought; he had signed his name to it, too. His own recollection of this act of almost suicidal courage is already encrusted in legend, but it is a legend wrapped around a psychological truth. In 1999, Wei explained to some Chinese journalists why he had done it. He said it had been a matter of pride. He recalled that in November 1978, Deng Xiaoping had issued an order to stop the protests on the Democracy Wall. A notice duly appeared on the wall saying that Comrade Xiaoping’s words should be heeded.
The popular reaction, according to Wei, was one of disgust: “As soon as this notice was posted,” he remembered, “citizens all over Beijing were critical: ‘The Chinese are simply inept, and spineless. Just imagine, after having been free for only a couple of days, and able to speak out, they now want to retreat because of a little directive from someone. What a bunch of spineless weaklings. There is no hope for China.’ ”
Wei goes on: “After I heard such commentaries, I was particularly saddened. I felt that not all Chinese were spineless. Certainly my thoughts, and my ideas, with years of deliberation, had long been stored in my mind. I decided to utter them, to do something. The primary motivation was to prove to everyone that not all Chinese were spineless. So I posted the Fifth Modernization.”
It is a neat little story, with a fine mythical resonance. In fact, Deng had not forbidden postings on the wall in November 1978. On the contrary, he told a Canadian journalist that the Democracy Wall was “good.” The Fifth Modernization manifesto was posted in that short period of calculated tolerance. The trouble actually began early in the following year, when Deng had defeated the hard-line Maoists and was embroiled in a messy war with Vietnam—described in the official press, rather quaintly, as “the self-defensive counterattack.” It was only then, in March 1979, that Deng decided to crack down on liberals, reformers, and dissidents. And Wei responded, in a typical act of political bravado, by attacking Deng for being just another Chinese despot. That manifesto was called “Democracy or a New Dictatorship?”
But the historical sequence is less important than the underlying sentiment. Wei was touched, as were so many modern Chinese rebels, including Mao himself some fifty years before, by the pain of Chinese humiliation, by the abject feeling of impotence and submission to bullies and tyrants, foreign or homegrown. It is the sentiment that sparked almost every revolt in China in the twentieth century, from Sun Yat-sen’s anti-Manchu revolution in 1911 to the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the Communist revolution of 1949 to Tiananmen in 1989. When they took part in the Tiananmen demonstrations, Li Lu, Chai Ling, Wu’er Kaixi, and their fellow students knew virtually nothing about Wei Jingsheng or the Democracy Wall. And yet Li Lu used almost the same words as Wei to describe the actions of his generation. He said: “In 1989, the people discovered that they had lived like slaves. And they risked everything to rebel. I believe that the sense of humanity that emerged in 1989 had been buried. But once it came alive, that feeling of human dignity, you were no longer a slave.”
The deep sadness of modern China is that every generation has had to learn the same lesson, over and over again, a lesson written in great lakes of blood.
One of the most indelible images of human dignity is that of Wei Jingsheng reading his defense statement during his first trial, in October 1979. I am moved every time I see it. The photograph is simple, with no great dramatic action. Wei stands in the foreground, looking young and thin, fragile almost, in his shabby convict’s clothes, one buttonless sleeve hanging loosely around a slender wrist. His shaven convict’s head and calm, studious expression make him resemble an earnest monk. Behind him is a blur of faces. Two people appear to be picking their noses, several blink up in a bored, distracted manner, and a few look at Wei with curiously froglike expressions, caused by the harsh television lights bouncing off their glasses. They are all identically dressed in Mao uniforms, these provincial policemen and prosecutors summoned to Beijing to learn how a show trial should be staged.
Yet this was no ordinary show trial. For Wei’s speech was every bit as devastating as his Democracy Wall manifestos. He made a simple, beautifully argued case for the right to criticize. The logic was so impeccable that it embarrassed the judges, who shuffled their papers, cursed the defendant’s impertinence, and called for an early lunch. One of the things Wei said was30: “The Constitution grants citizens the right to criticize their leaders, because these leaders are human beings and not gods. It is only through the people’s criticism and supervision that those leaders will make fewer mistakes, and only in this way that the people will avoid the misfortune of having their lords and masters ride roughshod over them. Then, and only then, will the people be able to breathe freely.”
Wei was sentenced to fifteen years for “betraying the motherland,” because he had mentioned the name of a Chinese general fighting in Vietnam to a Western journalist, and for writing “reactionary articles,” as well as propagating “counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation,” all of which constituted “a serious counterrevolutionary crime of the most heinous nature.”
In fact he was lucky to have gotten away with his life. Deng Xiaoping is said to have wanted him shot. The fact that we know what happened during the trial is one of the reasons he was spared. Wei’s defense was published all over the world, and the trial, held less than a year after Deng won American hearts by wearing a cowboy hat in Texas, had become an international cause célèbre. The man who smuggled Wei’s words out of the courtroom and thus helped to save his life is an artist now living quietly in a terraced house in a southern suburb of London. His name is Qu Leilei.
Qu, a neat man with small laughing eyes and a craggy face, is the same age as Wei. They first met in 1966, at the house of a distinguished older writer, who pa
tted the top of Wei’s head and pronounced that this young man would one day be a great theorist. After that they lost touch. Qu was sent to the countryside and, like Wei, served some years in the army. He became serious about art sometime in the 1970s, when he saw for the first time a book of French Impressionist painting. After years of nothing but Soviet socialist realism and Maoist propaganda, this first, unforgettable glimpse of European art was a revelation that paralleled the discovery of Yeats and T. S. Eliot by young Chinese poets, or Wei’s reading of Locke and Montesquieu.
Qu was working as a lighting technician for China Central Television when Wei was arrested. And by sheer chance he was ordered to attend Wei’s trial as a member of the television crew. When the leading dissidents Liu Qing and Xu Wenli heard that a sympathizer was going to be in the courtroom, they called on Qu the night before to ask whether he would be willing to make a secret tape recording. Qu agreed, and the next morning he smuggled a small cassette recorder into the courtroom in his bag and placed it as close to Wei as he dared. During the lunch break, he met Liu and Xu in a secret place to quickly exchange the recorded tapes for fresh ones. The tapes were transcribed that same night, and the next day Wei’s defense was posted all over the Democracy Wall.
But nobody dared to publish it—nobody, that is, except Liu Qing. Liu told me in New York, where he works in the Human Rights in China office, that other editors would not touch the speech, because Wei was considered “too radical” and “too dangerous.” In fact, Liu himself did not share Wei’s radical views, either, but knew that his friend had not had a fair trial. And he realized that if the government got away with this, it would be “Wei today and me tomorrow.” So, well aware of the risk he was taking, he printed fifteen hundred copies of the trial transcripts, which were quickly picked up not just by Chinese readers but by the international press. Liu would pay a terrible price, but his action saved Wei’s life. And if the truth had not been told, thanks to Liu, Qu, Xu, and others, Deng Xiaoping’s cynical prediction that no matter what happened to Wei, no one would remember him in ten years’ time would almost certainly have come true.
Liu does not look like a tough guy. Unlike Wei, who has the stocky frame and expansive manners of a street fighter, Liu looks like an intellectual: slim, a little owlish behind his spectacles, hair plastered across a high, pale forehead. His strength seems to be entirely mental. When he was made to sit on the punishment chair for four years, he developed a regimen of imperceptible muscle movements: pressing the floor with the balls of his feet, flexing his arms ever so slightly, muscle by muscle, as though physical exercise were almost entirely in the mind. He would try to think through scientific problems, such as the nature of black holes. Or he would build houses and construct bridges. Liu was an architectural engineer by training.
But these methods, extraordinary though they are, do not reveal the source of the man’s inner strength. Like most people of my generation, born just after the war in a country that had been under Nazi occupation, I have always been haunted by the moral dilemmas we never had to face. How would we have behaved? Would I have risked everything? Would I have broken under torture? There is no answer to these questions, but still I looked for hints in men such as Liu and Wei, not so much to understand my own morbid preoccupations as to gain some larger insight into human nature.
Liu said he had been able to stand his torments because he believed that what he did was right. That was of course precisely the spirit his jailers meant to crush. The Chinese penal system is designed to break the prisoner’s will, to force confessions of ideological “crimes.” “Re-education though labor” may be a Communist innovation, but public confession always was of prime importance in Chinese justice. The object of punishment is the mind. Humiliation is the key. Liu’s interrogators had wanted him to tell lies. Yet he resisted. “They can control your body,” he said, “but they can’t control your thinking.” Even, he might have added, if they drive you insane. For insanity is the final refuge, where a person is beyond the reach of even the most skilled and brutal interrogator.
Liu, and Wei too, reminded me of stories I had read about religious martyrs, men and women who would rather burn than stamp on an image of Christ. During the Nazi occupation, the Resistance had a strong religious component, which often seems the source of greater resilience than more secular convictions, patriotism, say, or human rights or scientific truth or democracy, though the line between secular and religious is not always easily drawn.
Wei denied that religious faith had ever played any part in his life. He understood its power and conceded that it might help other people to survive in prison. But in fact he had never seen any evidence of it. Chinese, he said, had other ways of standing the pressure. One day, after a lunch of dumpling soup, which he had cooked in haste before rushing off to Paris via New York, Wei mentioned a short story by Lu Xun that every literate Chinese knows. It is called “The True Story of Ah Q.”
Ah Q is a village vagabond, uneducated, unscrupulous, and sly, a kind of rural Chinese Everyman, who grovels to his social betters the more they abuse him. But Ah Q has one line of psychological defense. In his tortured mind, he manages to turn every misfortune into an imaginary blessing. After being robbed by village ruffians31, he walks away, slaps his own face, pretends it was meant for one of the ruffians, and soon believes it was so: “. . . it was just as if he had beaten someone else—in spite of the fact that his face was still tingling.”
Lu Xun’s point was to criticize the abject passivity of Chinese people, their unwillingness to fight back or do anything to improve their fate. He wrote the story in the early 1920s, when China was at the mercy of predatory warlords and foreign imperial powers. Ah Q was, in fact, a study of Chinese humiliation.
Wei understood the story very well but gave it a peculiar twist of his own. He said Chinese had been like Ah Q for centuries. But the same psychological mechanism that turned Ah Q into a slave could also be turned to a more positive end. Wei’s prison guards used every means to break him down, not just by brute force. They were especially good at demoralizing a political prisoner by pointing out kindly that all resistance was futile, nobody outside cared, people were getting richer all the time, and they no longer even knew his name. “They use your own regrets and human weakness to torture you.” Wei coped with this in a way that he claims is traditionally Chinese. It is not through controlling desire, as in Buddhism, but by shifting its focus. Wei kept on telling himself that he was freer than his jailers, for unlike them, he could say what he really thought. “Because I could speak the truth, I had more integrity than they did. Their official position may have made them better-off, but I was happier, for I could live life as it is, not life as we are told to think it is.”
Wei, in other words, had used Ah Q’s method to overcome humiliation, or, better still, to humiliate his torturers. That is why they were unable to break him. He could not afford to let them do it. For it was a game of all or nothing. The smallest concession, the tiniest dishonest “self-criticism,” would have turned the prisoner into a slave.
As Wei spoke, I studied his face, the sharp stubborn chin, the spiky hair and tobacco-stained teeth, and the dark eyes that were always watchful even when dancing with laughter. And I think I could see why this enormously attractive man had so many enemies. Resistance heroes rarely make good diplomats or politicians. Having defied for eighteen years the attempts of prison interrogators to make him budge, Wei is not about to fudge or compromise now that he is free. This makes it difficult for him to work with others; he would have to concede too much. Wei is an admirable dissident, a moral symbol of defiance whose vision remains unsullied, but these qualities are not necessarily suited to the give-and-take of democratic politics. Deals and messy compromises are more in the line of smooth operators like Dr. Wang Bingzhang.
This is not to condemn Wei, or indeed Dr. Wang. A democracy movement needs dissidents as well as operators. Without the purity of vision of the former, the latter would soon degener
ate into mere contenders for petty power, with zige as the only political currency. And as long as there are no democratic institutions in China, the scope for democratic politics is limited anyway, since it is impossible to organize political parties at home and they have little meaning abroad.
So to say that Wei should be more compromising is to miss the point of him. The importance of Wei Jingsheng is the clarity of his principles. As long as he is there, no one can say that Chinese don’t care about freedom or that it is an alien concept which has no place in an ancient, non-Western civilization. For here is a man who was prepared to die for it. Whenever operators and politicians, in Washington, Beijing, or anywhere else, claim that authoritarian rule is best suited to China, Wei is there to offer an alternative view. I know from conversations with people in China that this view, though only heard by few, still offers some comfort to those who cannot yet freely express it.
The last time I saw Wei, as I write, was in London, on the television news. The sky was a pale wintry blue. Flags of Britain and the People’s Republic of China were snapping in the blustering wind. And there, clattering along the Mall, in the direction of Buckingham Palace, was the queen of England in a gold coach, accompanied by President Jiang Zemin, smiling vacuously, his mouth half open, at the sparse crowds waving paper flags handed out by Chinese embassy staff. President Jiang had come to London for a state visit. Economic deals were promised. And the British were aware that protesters irritated the Chinese president. When some Tibetans had been able to get into his line of vision during a recent visit to Switzerland, Jiang told his hosts that they had just lost themselves a good friend. The British were determined to stop a similar mishap from upsetting their distinguished visitor.
On that sunny, windy day in London, then, the television cameras were focused on the royal coach, the queen waving and her guest smiling, when suddenly there was a commotion. The camera turned to a scuffle in the crowd. A middle-aged Chinese man in an anorak was being wrestled to the ground by British policemen, who then dragged him off with his arms pinned behind his back, almost as though they were forcing him to adopt the “airplane” position. It was Wei Jingsheng. He had tried to draw Jiang’s presidential eye to a large white sheet of paper held in his hand that read RELEASE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS.
