Liu Qing (b. 1946) belongs to the 1978–79 generation of Chinese dissidents. He was one of the editors of the moderate magazine April Fifth Forum during the Democracy Wall Movement. When Wei Jingsheng was arrested in March 1979, many fellow dissidents who had earlier been quite critical of his views spoke out in his defense. Liu Qing managed to retrieve the transcript of Wei’s trial and published it in his magazine, and because of this Liu himself was arrested. While serving a three-year term of re-education through labor, Liu’s prison memoir was smuggled out and published in Hong Kong. This angered the authorities and Liu was put on trial and sentenced to a further eight years for counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement. Like Wei, Liu thus spent the fateful year 1989 in prison, only being released in December of that year. Since he did not have a valid residence permit for Beijing, he was then briefly detained in 1990. In 1992 Liu left China for New York, where he became engaged in the organization Human Rights in China, set up in 1989, and now serves as its chairman. Liu has since then continued to devote himself to the struggle for human rights and plays an active role in the dissident community in exile. Despite the many setbacks in human rights work over the years and the continuing repression in the PRC, Liu takes an optimistic outlook and remains convinced that the struggle for human rights and democracy will eventually bear fruit. In the text reprinted here, Liu describes and analyzes the Chinese citizens’ struggle for human rights since 1979.
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