(HRW/IFEX) – Human Rights in China, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International will be sponsoring Wei Jingsheng’s first press conference in the United States of America at the New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum (entrance on 42nd Street) on 21 November 1997 at 10:30 am EST. The press conference will run no later than […]
(HRW/IFEX) – Human Rights in China, Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International will be sponsoring Wei Jingsheng’s first
press conference in the United States of America at the New York
Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum (entrance on 42nd Street)
on 21 November 1997 at 10:30 am EST. The press conference will
run no later than 12:00 pm.
**For background to case, see IFEX alerts dated 17 November, 28
and 21 October, 1 July 1997, and others**
Wei Jingsheng, China’s best known dissident, was released on 16
November and flown directly to Detroit where he has been
receiving medical treatment. At the time of his release, Wei
Jingsheng was in the second year of a fourteen-year sentence for
advocating democratic reform. It was the second lengthy sentence
for the former electrician for the Beijing Zoo. Now forty-eight,
he was first jailed in 1979 for his participation in the
Democracy Wall movement. His now-famous essay, entitled “The
Fifth Modernization,” argued that in addition to four kinds of
modernization advocated by Deng Xiaoping, China also needed
democracy. That essay was followed by another calling Deng an
autocrat. For these actions, Wei Jingsheng was sentenced on 16
October 1970 to fifteen years in jail, although he was formally
accused of leaking state secrets and “counterrevolutionary
propaganda.” As shown in the recently-published collection of his
prison letters, entitled “The Courage to Stand Alone”, his
treatment in prison was harsh. He spent long periods in solitary
confinement, and his health deteriorated sharply. In late 1993,
he was released in what was widely interpreted as an attempt by
China to deflect human rights criticism in pursuit of its
ultimately unsuccessful bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympic
Games. Wei immediately went back to advocating political reform,
meeting with activists, journalists, and others, and writing for
foreign and domestic publications. On 1 April, he was again taken
into custody and has been detained ever since. He was found
guilty in his December 1995 trial of “conspiring to subvert the
government.” In 1996, he won the European Parliament’s Sakharov
Award for Human Rights.
