Interviews with Wei Jingsheng

I know in prison, for example, there were many people who were incarcerated in isolation. After a long period of time you would be driven crazy. Then under such circumstances many people might have surrendered. Another thing was to impose lots of — oh, to make you feel very distressful. Of course it was not like whipping you with a lash, but, for example, if you went on a hunger strike, they would say they were humanitarian and then they tortured you, using various methods to torture you. There were many people who surrendered under this kind of circumstance.

Of course there were people who surrendered because of missing family members, et cetera. In various circumstances, while in prison many people succumbed. But in each case, they made it unendurable, beyond what a human being could possibly bear. These were the techniques that were widely used in the prisons of the Communist Party.

We political prisoners all had a big problem, even those arrested political prisoners who had previously been members of the Communist Party. They put you in a very small environment, absolutely quiet, nobody was allowed to talk to you, nobody was allowed to contact you either. You could not hear a single voice from the outside world. In this kind of circumstances, after a period of half a year to two years time, people’s brains would start having problems; they’d become insane.

We found many political prisoners who were incarcerated, including non-Communist Party people and previous Communist Party members, had problems after they were released from the prison. Sometimes because of this the other people would think they are insane and condemn them. But I feel, I know that was because of the torture of the long lasting isolation in prison, which caused these people to develop problems in their minds.

Wei Jingsheng was a prisoner of conscience in China for more than 18 years. Born in 1950 to parents who were Communist Party members, Wei served in the People’s Liberation Army and worked in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1978, he wrote an essay called “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy” and posted it in a place that had come to be called Democracy Wall. Unlike most pro-freedom authors in China during that time, Wei signed his name to “The Fifth Modernization,” which was a direct challenge to the Beijing government’s strategy of instituting economic reforms while continuing to suppress political dissent. Wei was soon arrested on the charge of being “counter-revolutionary” and served more than 18 years in prison, including several years in forced labor camps and eight years on death row.

By the mid-90s, Wei was China’s best-known political prisoner. There was strong international pressure for his release and, in 1997, he was allowed to go overseas for medical treatment. He now lives in the United States and heads the Overseas Chinese Democratic Coalition.