Who is Wei Jingsheng?

The prison system of the People's Republic of China has achieved such "remarkable results in reforming criminals," the government claims, that very few people have to be jailed a second time. By that measure, Wei Jingsheng, a former electrician, is one of the system's most dismal failures. From a boy forced to memorize a page of Mao Zedong's thought each day, he grew up to become China's most renowned voice for human rights and democracy. Even fourteen-and-a-half years in gulag-like prisons failed to reeducate him, and so now he is back a second time.

Wei's first prison term started in 1979 when he was twenty-nine. His crimes then, as the leading activist in the short-lived Democracy Wall movement in Beijing, included editing a mimeographed bulletin and writing wall posters that attacked the icons of Chinese communism, including one-party rule. After Deng Xiaoping publicly warned the activists to toe the line of "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought," Wei wrote an editorial daring to suggest that Deng was becoming a "new dictator." Arrested a few days later, Wei was quickly convicted for violating Mao's 1952 Regulations on the Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries.

Wei emerged from prison in September 1993, having lost his teeth but not his determination. For six months, despite constant surveillance, despite repeated warnings from police, he acted almost as though he lived in a free country. In interviews and in his own articles published abroad, he advocated policies deviating from the Communist party line, for example, by calling for the release of thousands of political prisoners and even supporting the independence of Tibet. He helped poverty-stricken dissidents with money awarded from his international prizes. He talked with representatives of the U.S. government and international human rights groups. Such activities, none violent and none advocating violence, became the basis for arresting him, holding him incommunicado for twenty months, and then in December sentencing him to fourteen years in prison for "slandering the socialist system" and "plotting to overthrow the people's democratic dictatorship."

Beijing could live with the strong international criticism that followed, even while complaining against it, because the massive infusion of trade, and, loans, investment, and technology into the People's Republic was continuing unabated. Bonn, concluding a package of business deals with Beijing, suggested that Wei be released for exile in Germany. Wei, however, has made it clear that he does not want to leave China. The Chinese government might nevertheless force him into exile in return for some international concession, such as favorable terms for China's entry into the World Trade Organization. But it would be an outrage for Germany, or any other country, to collaborate in a deal that reduces Wei Jingsheng to a bargaining chip.

The glaring spotlight on Wei leaves in the shadows many others in China who share his fate because they share the same commitment to freedom. Among them are countless worker activists condemned to two-to-twenty years in prison for trying to organize independent groups (such as one called the League for the Protection of the Rights of Working People) or for sending prodemocracy petitions to the government or for publishing bulletins informing workers of their rights under China's own constitution. The current issue of China Rights Forum, published in New York, lists twenty-three such activists, who the magazine says represent only "a small fraction" of those languishing unjustly in prison. It is routine for their relatives and associates also to be punished through loss of jobs, confiscation of bank accounts, harassment by neighborhood committees of the Communist party, dismissal from school, surveillance by security police, and other reprisals. Wei's own secretary and interpreter, Tong Yi, twenty-seven, was condemned to two-and-a-half years in a labor camp known for exporting products abroad. According to a letter smuggled out to Human Rights/Asia, she has been severely beaten for objecting to being forced to work twelve-hours-a-day making textile products.

Hence, far more is at stake than Wei's fate alone. The citizens of Hong Kong understand that well. The banners of demonstrators in a pre-New Year march through Hong Kong streets had it right: "Today Wei Jingsheng, tomorrow you and me!" and "Fighting for democracy is no crime." The 6 million Chinese in Hong Kong include many--journalists, lawyers, union leaders, doctors, teachers, workers, business people, and other--who have already put their necks on the line in legislative council elections and other public activities seeking the survival of freedom after Beijing absorbs the colony in July 1997.

What ought democratic governments do? Anxious to show that Wei, locked up in solitary confinement, has not been forgotten, the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament have nominated him for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize Pressure is also building on the upcoming session of the UN Human Rights Commission to pass a strong resolution criticizing China. Such actions, however, do not fulfill the urgent need for a concerted China policy not inspired by commerce alone. But the U.S. government, which ought to take the lead, as it did over Bosnia, is encumbered by the extensive American entanglement with the Beijing regime.

Harry Wu, during his sixty-six days of incarceration in China last year, saw first-hand how far that involvement reaches, specifically in equipping China's party-state apparatus, the largest bureaucracy in the history of the world, and still expanding. "All the plainclothes security people [who seized and guarded him] carried Motorola cellular phones," Wu told a congressional hearing in September. "That American products are helping make China's repressive machine more efficient should be a moral concern to every thinking American." Should be, but is not.

Some members of Congress this year will probably again try to deny China what it never should have been granted, the status of a "Most Favored Nation," from which the regime gains so many benefits. But, barring some major blunder by Beijing such as a military attack on Taiwan, continued renewal of MFN for China seems assured, because U.S. business interests share richly in those benefits. The energy wasted on another losing anti-MFN campaign should be devoted to devising and implementing a strategy with a greater chance of winning bipartisan and business support.

Consider, for example: the People's Republic ranks third from the top among nations in the volume of UN-sponsored development aid it receives, and its $23 billion in low-interest loan commitments from the World Bank make China the Bank's heaviest borrower. As the Wall Street Journal has correctly pointed out, "these [international] resources are funneled through China's central government, strengthening its purse and its power over Chinese citizens' lives." Not only that. China is so flush with foreign funds that it can now divert some to shore up the power of kindred governments. In December, Beijing's newly established Export-Import Bank, as its first project, granted $12 million in preferential loans to Sudan's military government. As its second project, it ceremoniously signed a $520 million contract to overhaul Nigeria's railway system and provide it with new locomotives. On the day when the People's Court sentenced Wei, Lagos thanked China for helping Nigeria reach "the threshold of an economic revolution," presumably to parallel the bloody political revolution by a military dictatorship that in November hanged nine human-rights activists.

Policy debates about China usually revolve around the wisdom of applying punitive sanctions. But the key issue is not whether China should be punished, but whether it merits being so munificently rewarded.