For most businessmen and governments around the world the problem of China is a severely practical one: how do you, while trying to break into that vast market, keep from suffocating in the stench of its human rights violations? Most solve the problem by fixing a clothes-peg to their noses, and spraying themselves and-too often, alas-China itself with deodorant.
Indeed, a good deal of China's deodorising work is done for it by the rest of the world. Using bribes and threats, China persuades enough third world governments to protect it against annual censure votes at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. I witness this process first hand at the UN in Geneva every April. This year France joined the bribed, to help Airbus sales to Beijing.
But not only governments are complicit; private organisations and individuals are too. Take just two examples. The VSO's recruiting advertisements for teachers of English in China specify that graduates in politics and theology need not apply. When we censor ourselves, tyrants have nothing to do. And in a recent number of the journal you hold in your hand (July 1997), Owen Harries reported, as if it were fact, the Chinese government's propaganda on political repression; he quoted their claim that there are "only" 3,000 political prisoners in China. (Would not one be too many?) This is the Chinese government's own figure for 1993 of imprisonments under the counter-revolutionary crime statute. It is merely the tip of the iceberg: there are other categories of political crime covered by other statutes, and there is the provision most widely used for crushing dissent, "administrative detention," which saves the bother of a trial. This label "counter-revolutionary crime" has been abolished-all political prisoners are now disguised as other sorts of "criminals" and "anti-social elements."
China has two prison systems: an "ordinary" one and a gulag of forced-labour camps. On conservative estimates the latter's population at any one time is 4m, a significant proportion of whom are political detainees. One of the writers on my PEN list, the rebarbative and blunt-speaking Liu Xiaobo, is currently in a labour camp. But the best known detainee is in an "ordinary" prison: Wei Jingsheng languishes in solitary confinement, with the electric light on 24 hours a day, in Jidong Number One Gaol.
While western apologists for China sit in warm rooms on well upholstered sofas, and write essays comforting to the Chinese leaders in their elegant Zhongnanhai pavilions in the Forbidden City, Wei Jingsheng sits in a small cold cell writing letters of protest which his guards never post.
But those letters have at last been posted: smuggled out, translated and published in book form as The Courage to Stand Alone (Viking 1997). The book is a testament to the amazing fortitude, integrity and strength of mind that human beings can display. Remember the Tian-anmen Square image of a white-shirted man with his shopping bags, defiantly halting a line of tanks? Wei is that figure in the moral sense, confronting the vast bullying machine of the Chinese dictatorship with his peaceable and steadfast insistence that China must become democratic and respect human rights.
For this Wei has been in prison since 1979, apart from a short period when Beijing was bidding for the 2000 Olympics and he was released as a bribe. The bid failed, and Wei, who had been giving interviews and writing articles as if 14 years of solitary had been a mere evening gone, was clapped back into prison-the same prison, the same cell.
In Wei's book one can read the record of his crimes, because there he persists in committing them. He calls for democracy, a free press and an end to the political and economic corruption now devastating China. He exposes the Chinese leaders' addiction to raw power, and the way in which they use their mantra of "stability and unity"-with which they justified sending tanks into Tiananmen Square-as a cover for dictatorship. His letters to Deng Xiaoping, to Jiang Zemin, Li Peng and other present leaders of China are by turns magisterial, scathing, statesmanlike and mercilessly mocking. They would make the cheeks of a tyrant burn with shame, if only tyranny knew how to blush.
Where Wei's letters to China's leaders are damning and barbed, those to his friends and family are touching and wise. Although written under conditions of terrible hardship, illness and isolation, they are rarely bitter. At his trial in 1979 he made a statement that constitutes one of the clearest and most cogent defences of the democratic ideal in any language. In these letters, especially those written at the time of the Tiananmen massacre, he eloquently reasserts his faith in that ideal, and in its eventual realisation in China.
Wei Jingsheng is dying in prison. On 29th October, President Jiang Zemin of China arrives in Washington for the first China-US summit since the Tiananmen Square massacre. Let President Clinton be judged by what he does to help Wei Jingsheng and the cause of Chinese democracy.
