November 18, 1997
The Release of Wei Jingsheng
After spending all but six months of the last 18
years in prison, Wei Jingsheng, the father of China's
democracy movement, has been released to get the
medical attention he has long required. The world
has reason to rejoice that the cruel imprisonment of
Mr. Wei is over and that he is resting in a hospital in
Detroit. But his release is not necessarily an indication that the Chinese Government is changing its
repressive policies on human rights.
According to his family, Mr. Wei, who is 47, had
repeatedly said he did not want to accept an offer of
freedom that did not allow him to remain in China.
They said he had done so only because his health
has deteriorated badly -- he suffers from heart
problems, high blood pressure, arthritis and other
illnesses -- and because the Government made his
confinement intolerable. Prison officials incarcerated Mr. Wei with thugs who were rewarded for
beating him, and after that put him for months in a
cell with no heat and constant light. He was denied
medical care and forbidden to write or read anything except the Communist Party newspaper.
Nevertheless, by releasing Mr. Wei Beijing has
satisfied an important demand of the Clinton Administration and human rights groups. That it did so
just days after President Jiang Zemin visited
America may be a signal that China's leaders are
prepared to address international concerns about
their human rights record. Mr. Wei should never
have been in prison to begin with, and neither should
anyone else in China whose only crime is peaceful
dissent. Over the weekend China detained Lin Xinshu, a dissident who wrote two open letters demanding Mr. Wei's release. At a minimum, China should
release all its critics.
Real progress on human rights, however, must
involve an end to the Communist Party's control
over China's legal system. Laws prohibiting political expression and assembly should be abolished.
China has had anything like a real legal system only
since 1979, when Deng Xiaoping wrote new legal
codes and reopened law schools that had been
closed for 30 years. Lately, China has made small
improvements to bring those laws closer to international standards. But laws still do not protect the
rights of China's people, or assure equal justice.
Once Mr. Wei recovers his health, his challenge
will be to avoid the slide into irrelevance that has
stricken many of his exiled dissident colleagues.
Outside China their voices have faded, which is one
reason Beijing is willing to let others go. Judging
from his conduct in prison, Mr. Wei is a resourceful
and persistent man who will continue to annoy the
Chinese leadership with his arguments for democracy.
But he will not be truly free until he can speak
out inside China itself.