Chinese Human Rights Reader Entry Summary

During the autumn of 1978 a more relaxed and optimistic political atmosphere developed in China, culminating with the important Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee held in December that year. The new political leadership was determined to restore law and order and rebuild the legal system, and to this end a new constitution was adopted in 1978 and a criminal code, China’s first, promulgated the year after. Criticism of the excesses committed during the Cultural Revolution and in earlier political campaigns became accepted and widespread, and victims of these campaigns were now rehabilitated and restored to their positions. All these developments served to inspire and encourage Chinese citizens, who in November 1978 began to gather at a wall in Xidan in central Beijing, later to be known as the Democracy Wall, to put up big-character posters and debate the political issues of the day. The posters had a wide and varying content, ranging from accounts of personal grievances and persecutions, to more general demands for democracy, law and order, and respect for human rights. These writings were in many cases also gathered in more than one hundred different magazines that were put out around the country. During the democracy movement, human rights resurfaced as a powerful slogan and idea. The democracy activists were not an homogenous group of people, but took quite different views on a number of issues, including human rights, as we can see from the present text and the three following texts. Wei Jingsheng (b. 1950) was perhaps the most radical human rights advocate during this period. Apart from theoretical articles on the subject, Wei also published a critical article on the conditions in Qincheng Prison No. 1, which had housed many well-known political prisoners and where he himself would later be imprisoned. Wei’s magazine also reprinted excerpts from Amnesty International’s 1978 report, Political Imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China. In the spring of 1979, Wei was arrested and a crackdown on the democracy movement began. In November of the same year, Wei was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on charges of counterrevolutionary activities and leaking military secrets to foreigners; he was not released until 1993. What proved to be Wei’s undoing was not so much his conception and discussion of human rights, nor his demand for a fifth modernization, that is, democracy, as his critique of Deng Xiaoping as a new despot and his all-out criticism of socialism.

The Chinese Human Rights Reader:

39. Human Rights, Equality, and Democracy (1979)

Wei Jingsheng