For details on Wei’s life and activities leading up to the 1978–79 Democracy Wall movement, see the introduction to Text 39, above. As there noted, Wei was arrested in 1979. He spent fourteen years in jail and was paroled on September 14, 1993—a few days before the International Olympic Committee’s decision on whether to award the 2000 Summer Olympics to Beijing. If Wei’s release was an attempt to influence the IOC decision, it failed, with the games going to Sydney. Wei spent a brief time out of custody, endeavoring to write, publish, and meet with fellow countrymen and foreign journalists, before he was seized and held incommunicado for more than a year, the government denying knowledge of his whereabouts. After a show trial, Wei was ultimately sentenced to fourteen years in prison, plus three more years’ deprivation of political rights, in December of 1995. In November 1997, however, on the heels of a state visit by Jiang Zemin to the United States, Wei was released on medical parole and left China for the United States, where he now lives in exile. The letter that we reprint here is one of a large number that Wei wrote to high government officials while serving his first prison term. Wei is sharply critical of the Chinese government’s position on human rights—soon to be formalized, at the time Wei wrote this letter, in the first White Paper on Human Rights (see Text 52). He forcefully rebuts a number of arguments used by the government, including the views that human rights is an internal affair, that different cultures and societies have different human rights conceptions, and that economic rights supersede all other rights.
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