Volume 44, Number 12 · July 17, 1997
Living in Truth
By Liu Binyan
The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings
by Wei Jingsheng
Viking, 283 pp., $23.95
Here is a country where the skulls of the young come cheap: in 1979, an innocent twenty-nine-year-old named Wei Jingsheng, who did no more than advocate democracy, is shipped to prison for fifteen years, and nobody finds the event especially surprising. In 1995, after a short release followed by a year and a half of extra-legal detention, he gets another sentence, this one of fourteen years. But the total still comes to only about half of the sixty years he will have lived when he is released for the second time. Not bad, many Chinese will say. He is still alive, after all. This attitude among Chinese is not necessarily sarcastic or far-fetched. In May 1977, less than two years before Wei Jingsheng's first conviction, fifty-five equally innocent young people were secretly executed. Their 'crimes' were that they had once criticized Mao Zedong and his ideas. Never mind that Mao had already died and that his top lieutenants, now called the 'all evil' Gang of Four, had recently been arrested. The new 'wise leader' Hua Guofeng still judged that those fifty-five young freethinkers should each get his or her bullet in the head.
Review, 4943 words
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