Wei, Jingsheng (1950– )

Chinese pro-democracy activist and essayist, imprisoned 1979–97 for attacking the Chinese communist system. He authored the document, ‘Fifth Modernization – Democracy’ on Beijing's ‘Democracy Wall’ in 1978. He is regarded as one of China's most important political dissidents. In 1996 he was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

In 1978 he joined the ‘Democracy Salon’ movement of reformist dissidents in Beijing and published essays critical of the government in the journal Explorations, which he cofounded. Most courageously, he called for ‘the Fifth Modernization – Democracy’. In 1979, he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment ‘for handing military secrets to foreigners’. He was released in September 1993, but within six months he was re-arrested twice and placed under interrogation by the Chinese authorities. He was re-arrested again in November 1995 on the capital charge of trying to overthrow the government and was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment. He was released in November 1997, on medical parole, in a move designed to improve Chinese relations with the USA. During a stay in the USA for health reasons, he met President Clinton in 1997, and in 1998 he was in exile in the UK.

The son of a Communist Party official in Anhui province, Wei joined the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and later became an electrician at Beijing Zoo.

Following his arrest in 1979 he was sent to a labour camp in the remote Qinghai province, where his health deteriorated. This prompted the dissident scientist Fang Lizhi to write an ‘open letter’ in January 1989 to Deng Xiaoping pleading for Wei's release.