THE AMERICAN WEI

But the similarities with the Cold War dissidents end there. Solzhenitsyn was trying to warn America about a country which, most acknowledged, ranked as our chief political and military adversary. Wei Jingsheng, by contrast, is trying to convince the West to press for democratic reforms in China — a country few regard as a threat to peace and freedom, and many see as a splendid business opportunity. Celebrated Soviet dissidents were greeted as heroes and martyrs — or met with hostility at the hands of detentists who found their descriptions of a repressive and expansionist Soviet Union inconvenient. Wei, for his part, must contend not just with hostility, but also with apathy and indifference.

In the five months since his arrival in America, Wei has found that while Americans are generous in their tributes to his courage and moral integrity, they are skeptical of his hard-edged message about the Chinese political leadership. And that’s putting it mildly. “There’s not one thing I’ve said about China since I’ve been in the West that did not meet with some objection, ” Wei told me during a recent interview. “Inevitably, someone says: ‘No, that can’t be; you’re wrong.'”

Wei arrived in the United States in the midst of an intense debate over America’s policy towards China, over the extent to which human-rights and national-security concerns should drive that policy. The upshot of that debate has been made abundantly clear in the last week. Despite near- unanimous resolutions from both the House and Senate, the Clinton administration, for the first time since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, will drop U.S. criticisms of China at the U.N. human-rights meeting in Geneva. And President Clinton’s state visit to China — also the first such since Tiananmen — has now been moved up to June.

It is not, in short, a propitious atmosphere in which to be the leading critic of the Beijing regime. But true to his combative nature, Wei has not hesitated to join in the controversy. To what degree he can influence that debate is unclear, however. To be sure, he is under no illusions about the prospects for a dramatic change in America’s China policy. Yet unlike Solzhenitsyn, who railed at the Free World for its cultural decadence and lack of political will, Wei declines to make sweeping criticisms of the American people or government. “I wouldn’t call the American attitude towards China abnormal. Once a country achieves democracy and material wealth, it often finds it difficult to understand the problems of other societies. That is why we in China relied on ourselves to build democracy, rather than calling on the West for support.”

Wei was the son of devoted Maoists. His father was in the Communist underground during the 1930s and later served in the Red Army; his mother joined the party as a student in the 1940s. By the time of Wei’s birth in 1950, communism had triumphed, and both parents soon found jobs in the state bureaucracy. They lived in a special compound for the families of party members, and Wei and his siblings went to schools reserved for the children of party cadres.

At 16, Wei was caught up in the Cultural Revolution, the last of Mao Zedong’s insane experiments in social revolution. Ironically, the Cultural Revolution would turn Wei and many members of his generation against communism in any form. He was among the roving army of teenagers — the so- called Red Guards — who, for a brief time, had the power to purge officials, humiliate elders, and terrorize the cadres. As was the case with many senior cadres, Wei’s father was targeted for persecution and was sent to do hard labor in the countryside to “reform his thinking.” Wei’s mother was assigned to a lower-level job, where she was treated as a pariah and forced to write and rewrite self-criticisms.

For Wei, the Cultural Revolution was a time of political revelation of a very different kind than anticipated by Mao. He spent much of his time touring the provinces, where he encountered the shocking depths of Chinese rural poverty and witnessed conditions that contradicted everything he had been taught about the achievements of Communist revolution. His most disturbing experience occurred in the course of a visit to the ancestral home of his father. It was there that he began to hear stories of the Great Leap Forward, the most deadly of Mao’s projects, whose human toll in the years from 1958-61 has been estimated at 20-30 million. The peasants described years of mass starvation not from natural disaster, as the regime claimed, but engineered by party officials in the name of political ideology. Wei visited one ghost village in which, he was told, the entire population had starved to death. But it was after he was told stories of cannibalism that Wei came to believe Mao was one of the great monsters of history. As he wrote in an autobiographical essay he prepared in 1979:

Wei secured a position in the military after the Cultural Revolution simmered down, a fortunate development since former Red Guards were hated and considered unemployable. During his army stint, Wei had another jolting experience. Assigned to duty in the northwest provinces, he was among the troops who forcibly defended granaries against peasants who were rioting for food.

The thoroughness of Mao’s idiosyncratic form of totalitarianism is reflected by the fact that so little of what Wei witnessed was known in China’s cities, much less the outside world. China’s isolation also had its effect on the country’s democracy movement, which emerged in the late 1970s after Mao’s death. Wei and his friends knew very little of Western-style democracy aside from what they gleaned from the broadcasts of the Voice of America and the BBC World Service. Since their education was limited to Marxian interpretations of history, they returned to the classics of Communist literature, especially those works which probed the nature of the ideal socialist society. They discovered, of course, a yawning gap between the kind of society envisioned by Marx and the corrupt and privilege-ridden society that had emerged after a quarter century of Maoism.

By the time of the Democracy Wall movement in 1979 that would make him a renowned figure, Wei had moved beyond a Marxian mindset and vocabulary. His famous essay that year, “The Fifth Modernization,” argues in clear, direct language that the Four Modernizations urged by Deng Xiaoping — in industry, agriculture, defense, and science — were insufficient. If China was to join the modern world, it would require a fifth modernization, political democracy.

Like dissidents in other Communist countries, Wei was charged with espousing counterrevolutionary propaganda and reactionary ideas and threatening the stability of the Communist system. The authorities also managed to find a national-security rationale for his arrest. In conversations with foreign journalists, Wei had mentioned the names of the generals who were leading China’s forces during its brief war with Vietnam; for this, he was accused of betraying state secrets and handed a 15-year sentence.

In a sense, Wei was the victim of high-level Communist party politics. Deng initially encouraged the democracy movement in order to discredit his principal rival, Hua Guofeng, in their struggle for party control. But once his power was consolidated, Deng turned on the democracy activists. A series of arrests and secret trials were ordered, with Wei’s being the centerpiece case. Deng is reported to have personally ordered Wei’s arrest, determined the charges to be brought against him, and decided the length and conditions of his imprisonment.

As an instrument of psychological cruelty, Chinese prisons have few rivals in the annals of the modern totalitarian state. Although Wei served his term during a period in which China was undergoing a process of liberalization, he was subjected to the kind of severe prison regimen usually associated with the early, Stalinist phase of Communist control. During the first several years he was placed in solitary confinement, with a bright light shining in his eyes day and night. So limited was the opportunity for simple human contact that he developed a soreness in his larynx from lack of use.

Wei fended off despair by pondering the question of China’s political future and by dreaming up scientific inventions. In a major concession toward the end of his first prison term, he was allowed to raise rabbits. And, of course, he wrote frequently — letters to his siblings, complaints to prison officials, assessments of China’s political condition to the country’s highest leaders, including Deng Xiaoping himself. The letters were often provocative — Wei called Deng “small-minded and lacking in vision.” By treating them as equals, Wei was telling Deng and other leaders that their attempts to subdue him were doomed to failure; he would not, under any circumstance, follow the traditional Chinese pattern of kow-towing by adopting a tone of elaborate politeness when addressing the leader. “In China, ” he explained, “people believe that if you don’t ask politely, you won’t be taken seriously. I decided to make my observations as forcefully as possible because I wanted to make clear that I was not asking for some personal favor. Furthermore, I believed that you had to show the leaders that you were not afraid to die if you wanted them to take you seriously.”

Although Wei’s case was taken up by human-rights organizations, Western governments did not exert the kind of political and moral pressure on Beijing that they brought to bear on the Soviets for their persecution of Andrei Sakharov, Anatoly Scharansky, and other dissidents. The Chinese regime, furthermore, expressed no regrets over the growing number of political prisoners in its jails. In late December 1986, Deng boasted: “We put Wei Jingsheng behind bars, didn’t we? Did that damage China’s reputation? We haven’t released him, but China’s reputation hasn’t been tarnished; in fact, our reputation improved day-by-day.” Nevertheless, Beijing thought it prudent to release Wei six months early, in September 1993, after he had served a total of 14 and a half years. This, in order to bolster its (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to host the Olympics.

Upon release, Wei took up where he had left off. He attacked the government in interviews with foreign journalists and in essays written for the foreign press. He organized a fund for the families of those killed in the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. He was then “disappeared” by the government for some months, given a secret trial, and handed another 15-year term, which he served until the authorities forced him into exile in the United States last fall. Wei had resisted exile in the past; his mission, he believed, was to participate in the struggle for democracy at home. But with mounting health problems — he suffers from a weak heart, hypertension, arthritis, and a disease of the gums that cost him most of his teeth — and with the regime apparently prepared to keep him in jail indefinitely, he agreed, under duress, to accept America’s offer of asylum.

Despite his ordeal, Wei appears surprisingly fit; his most obvious physical malady is the dissident’s traditional smoker’s cough. He remains unembittered at the Chinese leadership for taking away the prime years of his life, and undaunted by the resistance to his criticism of the Chinese system that he has encountered in the West.

He has, in fact, delivered some exceptionally tough, even strident, speeches during his few months in the United States. He has also given evidence of a weak grasp of postwar history. He told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that the United States bore responsibility for communism’s triumph in China and asserted that America had “casually turned its back on a most important long-term ally.” He also denounced the opening to China engineered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger as having rescued the Communist regime from near-certain collapse. He contends that American- Chinese ties have been a one-sided affair, in which the United States has made all the concessions and the Chinese have reaped all the benefits.

These judgments may be questioned, even by those who condemn the abuses of China’s dictators. But on one issue Wei is almost certainly right, and that is the failure of the West to come to grips with the evil of Chinese communism. He believes that while American scholars, journalists, and government officials were reasonably well informed about the workings of the Soviet system, the West remained fundamentally ignorant of the Chinese version of communism. As a result, he and other Chinese dissidents are looked on in Washington as nuisances and obstacles to improved relations. A further problem, Wei believes, stems from an organized whispering campaign to discredit him and other dissidents mounted by what he calls the “friends of Beijing” among America’s business and political elites.

But if Americans have historically been ill-informed or naive about Chinese political realities, Wei himself gives contradictory assessments of China’s present condition. He acknowledges that the Chinese people are much freer today than during Maoist times, but insists that the country’s leaders, including Deng, had nothing to do with liberalizing change, a statement which few China experts would accept.

In Wei’s interpretation, China’s leaders have jettisoned Communist policies except for those that help control the population and ensure their continued political rule. The leaders have devoted much study to the unraveling of communism in the Soviet bloc and are determined not to repeat the mistakes that led to the collapse of that system.

While Wei believes that the party ranks include genuine reformers, their efforts inevitably meet resistance from those who see democratic change as a threat to their exalted positions. Wei is opposed to an American policy that bestows economic benefits on China, like most-favored-nation trade status, unless there is clear evidence of a movement toward political liberalization.

On the other hand, Wei favors policies that acquaint the Chinese people with Western ideas about democracy and freedom, such as cultural exchanges and, especially, Western broadcasts, which he sees as more cost effective in undermining the system in China than additional armaments. Wei himself is given extensive coverage by Radio Free Asia and the Voice of America, whose commentaries on China, he says, have improved since a number of broadcasters from the mainland were hired.

Wei is especially dismayed by the West’s complacent response to China’s coercive population-control measures. He allows that the one-child policy, though still China’s official policy, is less rigorously enforced than in the past. But it still results in forced abortions and sterilizations and has contributed to the murder of female infants by parents who want sons. Many Chinese, Wei says, interpret the tepid response from Western governments, not to mention the open praise which China receives for its population measures from elite circles in the West, as a reflection of anti-Chinese bias. ” Chinese believe that the West fears China because of its large population. Even the best-intentioned Western supporter of population control can never convince the Chinese that their motives have nothing to do with this fear.” Wei himself is certain that many Westerners simply believe “China has too many people, and something has to be done about it.” He sees this as “just another version of the notion that Asians are different from everyone else, and don’t require the same level of human rights.”

The historic mission of the exile from totalitarianism is to remind the free world that a political elite which persecutes its own people is not a suitable partner for a cooperative relationship with a democracy. We do not look to men who have spent their lives under conditions of intellectual isolation or imprisonment for advice on the intricacies of geopolitics, but rather to inform us about the fundamental character of a political system that treats advocates of freedom as enemies of the state.

A Chinese elite that fears Wei Jingsheng can scarcely be described as confident and stable, despite the arrogance of the top leaders. A leadership that tries to regulate family size and goes to elaborate lengths to keep its people ignorant of the outside world should be treated with wariness, if not outright suspicion, by those who value freedom. This is Wei’s basic message, and it is one he offers with a rare moral authority and personal courage.

Arch Puddington is vice president for research at Freedom House. He is completing a history of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty.