by Ian Buruma
That is why Wei was described in the pamphlet not only as a “bubble-star” with “poor vision” and “moderate IQ” but as “rootless in the entire Chinese dissident community in China.” Wei was not the “father of Chinese democracy,” as some foreigners said, but a “self-esteemed phony ‘leader,’ ” created by the Western media, which are obsessed with celebrity and ignorant of the real dissidents working inside China. Wei and his supporters were “acting like cancers in the exile dissident community. . . .” The conclusion: “To have bubble-stars monopoly all the creams while leaving nothing to those hard workers is just part of the soap opera culture.”
The meaning of “bubble-star” can be guessed. Wei is accused of being just another meretricious celebrity. But one wonders what was meant by “the creams.” Money from government agencies and private funds? Invitations to testify in Washington? Interviews in the mass media? Probably all of these things. Sadly, Wei was as wild in his denunciations as his critics. Not only did he see conspiracies behind Xu Wenli’s arrest, but he told me later that Wang Xizhe was also most probably a secret agent in the pay of the Chinese government. Where else did he get his money from? After all, he had no zige. His views were discredited. He was a failure in the West. Yet there he was, living in comfort, bad-mouthing Wei. There could surely be only one explanation.
When I asked Dr. Wang about this, still standing on the steps of the Rayburn Building, he repeated all the allegations against Wei, but then said something curious. He had urged Wei, as well as Wang Xizhe, to go to church, a Christian church, to have “a direct experience with God. Before our Lord, everyone must be humble.” After that he set off into the icy streets. His light-brown crocodile shoes had gone dark and soggy with slush.
It is sometimes tempting for the outside observer to wish a plague on all their houses. In periodic fits of disgust with the sheer bloody-mindedness of exile paranoia, I would recall one of Gong Xiaoxia’s remarks: “Look at the kind of people who join the democracy movement. They all had miserable childhoods. They join out of desperation. Because there is nothing else for them. They are all crazy.” I once asked her how much she thought life in prison had warped men such as Wang Xizhe and Wei Jingsheng. She replied that she was always surprised how little they had changed.
The other temptation for the outsider is to pick sides, to become an advocate for one figure or faction or another. The result is always deadly. You begin to see the world through paranoid eyes, and the person whose cause you seek to champion will inevitably resent you, too, for no apologetics can ever be wholehearted or effusive enough. It is amazing how many disillusioned foreign fans, experts, and groupies the overseas dissidents leave in their wake.
And yet it is wrong for an outsider to act as a moral judge. For however much they might set upon one another, men such as Wei Jingsheng and Wang Xizhe still deserve respect—not just because of their suffering, but because they chose to face the consequences of speaking out in circumstances that are hard for us even to imagine. They defied orthodoxy at the risk of their lives. To persist in doing so during long years of torture, buried alone in filthy, concrete vaults, where mind and body are systematically broken by brutal experts, takes extraordinary strength of character. Wei was locked up in stinking death cells, interrogated day and night for months, had his teeth smashed and his health wrecked, and when he staged a hunger strike in desperation, he was hung upside down, his mouth wrenched open with a steel clamp and hot gruel pumped into his stomach through a plastic hose. When Wang Xizhe went on his hunger strike, he was force-fed through a bamboo tube rammed down his throat.
Wei’s friend and supporter Liu Qing, who was jailed for having published the transcripts of Wei’s first trial in his samizdat magazine, was forced to spend four years sitting absolutely still on a tiny stool made of hard rope that cut through his buttocks. No books, no exercise, no conversation. Every day for four agonizing years. And while he sat, privileged criminals (“trusties”) were ordered to surround him in shifts, to beat him if he so much as moved. To come out of that without going mad, you have to be stubborn to the point of madness.
Liu Qing had also been present in the Rayburn Building when Wei was accosted. Indeed, it was Liu who was cursed by the agitated man in the gray sweater and told to go back to China and rot in jail. But this kind of madness, this embittered émigré frenzy, is not the kind of cussedness that kept Wei or Liu, or even Wang, from cracking in jail. Wei especially was driven by something else, more like an absolute conviction. After having been mentally swindled once into a blind belief in orthodoxy, Wei decided he would never again give up the freedom to think for himself. He changed his mind about communism, found another truth to replace it, and never wavered. The harder the authorities tried to break him and make him recant, the harder this conviction grew. The freedom to state the truth as he saw it became absolute in Wei’s mind. On this point he is utterly uncompromising, a quality so rare, and dangerous, that it could be easily mistaken for madness.
One way to get the measure of Wei Jingsheng’s character is to take a ride in his car. It is a disconcerting experience, not because he is ignorant of the traffic rules, but because he chooses to make up his own. Perhaps because of all those years of forced immobility, Wei is happiest when he is in motion and, above all, when he can control that motion himself. Impediments such as red lights are to be ignored. When Wei gets behind the steering wheel, he is a free man. Streets are taken in great bursts of speed. When the car must stop, to avoid instant death, he will slam on the brakes at the last possible moment. The point is to keep moving, moving, moving. A one-way street? Lesser men might be impeded. But not Wei. Impossible to turn left or right? Wei will decide about that. I never witnessed him being stopped by the police, but I can imagine his indignation.
There was some talk of my driving across America with Wei. He was keen. I was looking forward to it, with some trepidation. But the trip never came off. Wei was in Paris that week, or Bonn, or Taiwan, or Berkeley, or . . . Motion was perpetual, and stretched across continents. After eighteen years in a cell, the man with a mission could not bear to sit still.
It was never even clear where he lived. When he had a scholarship at Berkeley, he was hardly ever there. He kept an apartment near Columbia University in Manhattan, but his sister had moved into it with her daughter. Relations were not always good. There were times when Wei, rather than go home, would drive around New York for hours, aimlessly, just to keep moving.
One afternoon, in the living room of a mutual friend, Wei explained his attitude to rules. He said that societies where people stick to the rules are stable societies. When nobody obeys the rules, society breaks down. And yet, he said, to be creative, you have to break a few rules. A society in which everyone followed the rules would be boring and dead. So to liven things up, some people must ignore the rules, at least some of the time.
I first met Wei at a dinner in Washington. The other guests were a well-meaning but rather pompous State Department official and his somewhat formal wife, several academics in the China field, an expert on military affairs, and the odd journalist. It was, as Washington dinners go, not a stuffy occasion, but it was clear from the moment Wei appeared, wiping his eyes after a late afternoon nap, that he liked to present himself as a bit of a bad boy who had no time for petty conventions. For one thing, he refused to wear socks or shoes. For another, he not only smoked incessantly, which is perfectly normal in China, but insisted on blowing smoke into the eyes of the official’s wife. And the more the Americans lectured him about the perils of smoking, the greater the relish with which he lit up another cigarette and another, stating that, on the contrary, smoking was very good for him. His round baby face widened in a grin of deep satisfaction.
Wei delights in exaggerated displays of proletarian mannerisms, rolling his trousers up above his knees when he feels hot or letting out trumpeting farts in public. There is an element of playacting in this. The trickster’s chuckle is never far away. But I really under
stood the true nature of Wei’s manners only after reading his prison letters, which he had managed to keep, and later publish, by refusing to leave jail without them.
In 1982, in a letter to his brother and two sisters, Wei discusses a movie about an eccentric Song-dynasty poet named Lu You. The poet is conventionally described as a “mad genius” who flouted the Confucian conventions of his time by living with his lover without marrying her, and so on. The point, writes Wei27, is that he wasn’t really mad at all. Since feudal customs were intolerable, it was “more convenient to move about under the cloak of ‘madness’ in order to resist these customs or simply to numb oneself to them.” Wei continues: “The fact that traditional China could be so dictatorial and at the same time pass down so many anti-feudal elements in its literary classics has a lot to do with literati intellectuals feigning madness in order to resist social mores, as well as an increasing aspiration and admiration for the ‘famed mad genius’ style.”
In another letter, Wei reminds his brother, Taotao, of the time they were sent down to their ancestral village during the Cultural Revolution. Rural life was still in a state of shock. After Mao’s catastrophic economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, two thirds of the villagers had died of starvation. People had been forced to eat their neighbors’ children (even in desperation it was too painful to eat your own). But revolutionary extremism had not dented the stubborn rural conservatism of the survivors28. “Taotao,” writes Wei, with an air of big-city arrogance, “do you still remember how the two of us acted back when we were staying in our ancestral hometown? I had grown disgusted with the false niceties and affectations of southerners and began self-consciously modeling myself after the ‘famed mad geniuses’ of China and abroad.”
Wei continues to do so today—self-consciously, that is. For he is not an idiot savant or a simple worker whose thirst for freedom is instinctive and unschooled. Even though he was once an electrician, like Lech Wałesa, he is also the son of highly educated Communist cadres and went to the best school in Beijing. And like many former Red Guards, including his rival Wang Xizhe, he used his years of aborted education to read widely. Since he was born into the Party elite, he had the run of restricted libraries. So Wei not only worked his way through the Communist classics, but by the late 1970s he had become a self-educated expert on thinkers of the European Enlightenment as well.
In a sense, perhaps, Wei’s personality—like that of Mao Zedong, whom, in his total self-belief, he resembles—is artistic more than political. It does not take much prompting for his mad-genius side to come out. When I was in Washington, he would often drop in at my friend’s house, arriving from New York, Copenhagen, or wherever he happened to be that week, to cook steaming pork dumplings, roll up his trousers, take off his socks, hang them on the chair beside him, and hold forth in a bizarre, sometimes utterly wrongheaded, but often brilliant torrent of words.
He had thoughts about everything. “Western debate,” he opined, was all based on rhetorical “trickery.” Look at the O. J. Simpson trial; whoever has the better lawyers wins the argument. “Orientals,” he professed, are much more honest in debate: “We learn how to establish the truth through argument at a very early age.”
I expressed some skepticism, and said that I didn’t know about the Chinese, but the Japanese were hardly known for their debating skills.
Wei waved his hand as though my remark were a noisome fly. “The Orient,” he said, squinting through a curtain of cigarette smoke, “is China. Japan is just an appendage.”
Wild denunciations of fellow activists were made without any evidence. Western experts on China, who had sometimes dedicated themselves to helping Wei’s cause, were dismissed with “You foreigners can never understand China.” American policy was described as “pro-Communist.” And all this with unshakable conviction. But as with the cigarette smoke blown into the Washington lady’s face, you were never quite sure about the degree of deliberate provocation. He liked an argument for the sake of it, just to test your mettle. And he would always claim victory at the end.
If the world of intellectuals can be divided, as Isaiah Berlin once argued, between foxes, who know many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing, Wei is clearly a hedgehog. The one conviction he guards like a precious jewel, and about which he is lucid, always serious, and willing to stake his life, he had already expressed clearly in his 1978 manifesto on the Democracy Wall in Beijing. It goes to the heart of the Chinese problem. “History,” he wrote, “shows that there must be a limit to the amount of trust conferred upon any individual. Anyone seeking the unconditional trust of the people is a person of unbridled ambition. The important thing is to select the right sort of person to put one’s trust in, and even more important is how such a person is to be supervised in carrying out the will of the majority. We can trust only those representatives who are supervised by us and responsible to us. Such representatives should be chosen by us and not thrust upon us.”
Wei Jingsheng was twenty-nine when he wrote that. Memories of Mao worship and its millions upon millions of victims, humiliated, maimed, and tortured to death, were still raw. The statement is as simple as it is true. And Wei has stuck to it. He is often accused of being out of touch with developments in China, of not recognizing the changes that economic reforms, carried out while he was in prison, have brought. But if one believes, as Wei does, that only political change which guarantees the right to criticize and to vote will do, such reforms are beside the point, for they fail to address the main problem. He argues, simply, bluntly, doggedly, at times megalomaniacally, that without democracy—not “socialist” democracy or “people’s” democracy—the Chinese cycle of violence, followed by tyranny, will never be broken.
The way a former Maoist fanatic arrived at this conclusion has been described by Wei himself, as well as by his perhaps too admiring biographer, the German journalist Jürgen Kremb. That he was once a fanatic is clear from his own account: He had wrecked “bourgeois” homes, dragged out “rightists” for public interrogations, and spouted devotional Maoist maxims ever since he was a child, when his father made him learn a new page of Mao’s writings every day. Wei was among the first wave of middle school students to become a Red Guard but also, it seems, among the first to have doubts. Some of the stages of Wei’s intellectual journey from total belief in communism to total disbelief have taken on an almost mythical status. Most poignant, perhaps, is Wei’s glimpse of the naked girl.
To make it easier for the young to spread revolutionary terror all over China, Red Guards were allowed to travel by train free of charge. Wei hopped on a train sometime in 1966, bound for the northwest. When the train pulled into the city of Lanzhou, he was shocked to see children swarming outside the window begging for food. A middle-aged man, sharing his compartment, said they were probably children of landlords, “rightists,” and other “bad elements,” and deserved to starve.
The barren northwestern landscape became more desolate by the mile after the train left Lanzhou. It stopped at a windswept little station so insignificant that it did not even have a platform. Again, the crying and whimpering of beggars drew Wei’s attention. He leaned out of the window. One girl, of about seventeen, her face covered in soot and her long hair caked with dirt, raised her arms, begging for something to eat. She appeared to be dressed in a filthy rag. The middle-aged man sniggered and said girls like that would do anything you fancied for a few crumbs of food. Suddenly Wei pulled back from the window in shock. What looked like a rag was nothing of the kind. The girl was covered in nothing but her own matted hair. Wei was overcome by a wave of disgust—with the obscene, sniggering man, the starving, naked girl, the stench of urine and excrement, the simmering violence among the Red Guards, and the bony arms outside clawing the ground for scraps of food. And he asked himself: Was this the “fruit” of socialism?
There were more shocks to challenge the official version of reality in China. On a trip to the far west, he saw families
living in holes in the ground, sharing one warm garment against the freezing winds; he met “rightist” intellectuals there who had been banished in 1957 to do hard labor without a chance of ever going home. In the early 1970s, Wei met his first girlfriend, Ping Ni, the daughter of a high-ranking Tibetan Communist living in Beijing. Her family story was enough to drive away any illusions he might still have had.
Ping’s father was a staunch Maoist, even during the bloody suppression of the Tibetan revolt in 1959. But someone had to be blamed for the escape to India in that year of the Dalai Lama and a hundred thousand followers. So one night in the spring of 1960, when Ping Ni was six years old, there was a knock on the door. Her father was taken away to spend the next twenty years in prison. Six years later, the Red Guards came for her mother, who, in full sight of her daughter, slit her veins with a razor. With blood spurting from her wrists, she was dragged downstairs by the teenage revolutionaries and bundled into a truck. Ping Ni’s last sight of her mother was of her legs kicking before the door was slammed and the truck drove off into the dark.
Wei came to the dangerous, and for him almost fatal, conclusion29 that “a foremost characteristic of the Communist Party is lying, very effective lying, lying all the time and about everything. It is not easy for ordinary folks to see through this. As the youngest in the [Red Guard] leadership, I saw it clearly, all the cruelties, which totally destroyed my previously conceived impressions of the Communist Party.”
This in itself did not make him an original thinker. Many intelligent Chinese had reached similar conclusions. More unusual was his view that communism was absolutely incompatible with democracy, and there was nothing to gain from making concessions to the Party. This is what drove him to the Democracy Wall.