China Dissident Kept in Solitary Since ‘81, Prison Warden Says

A prominent Chinese political prisoner has been kept in solitary confinement for seven years and refuses to confess in full his “counterrevolutionary crimes,” the prison’s warden said.

“Xu Wenli is here but you cannot see him,” Col. Xing Zhonghe said Friday in a rare interview after guards gave reporters a guided tour of Beijing’s No. 1 Prison.

The prison is home to 2,000 long-term criminals and more than 30 political prisoners.

“Xu committed counterrevolutionary crimes,” said Xing. “You understand it as ‘political crimes,’ but we call them counterrevolutionary.”

The warden confirmed for the first time that Xu, a 45-year-old railroad electrician who played a leading role in China’s short-lived “Democracy Movement,” had been kept in solitary confinement since he was jailed for 15 years in 1981.

“His crimes were very serious,” Xing said. “He’s in a cell for one to provide him with a quiet atmosphere to study.”

Xu edited an unofficial journal, the April Fifth Forum, after China’s Communist authorities relaxed their grip on free speech in November, 1978, encouraging China’s intellectuals to express their views on political reform.

Posters appeared on a wall in central Beijing--soon known as “Democracy Wall”--and lively debates attracted large crowds.

But late in 1979, the wall was “closed,” the posters were torn down, the unofficial newspapers banned. Arrests followed.

Xu was tolerated for a while as a moderate voice of dissent and became well known to foreign reporters in Beijing. Although he espoused democracy, he always called himself a socialist.

But the authorities’ patience finally ran out, and he was arrested in April, 1981.

In a long memoir smuggled out of prison in 1985, Xu wrote about waiting for trial in the Banbuqiao detention center:

“Although they would not use violence against me, within the prison buildings the sounds of beatings and cursings and electrical assaults being carried out were commonplace.”

Warden Xing said that good prisoners are rewarded with shorter sentences and said of Xu, “He did not confess well, but that is not to say he did not confess at all.”

The warden said Xu is getting fat and that his health is good.

But a former prisoner said he never saw Xu although they shared the same wing for years. “They were afraid of his influence on other prisoners,” he said.