NEWS ANALYSIS : Wei’s Harsh Sentence Reflects Hard Line

The conviction and sentencing of prominent dissident Wei Jingsheng on sedition charges Wednesday reflect the Communist government’s hard line against dissent during the political transition from ailing 91-year-old leader Deng Xiaoping to a new generation of leaders.

Since the June 1989 army crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, during which hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians were killed, the government has effectively silenced open dissent through arrest, forced exile and imprisonment on charges often unrelated to political acts.

The consensus in the leadership ranks has been that senior officials at the time precipitated the Tiananmen demonstrations by being overly permissive and not stepping in earlier to halt the snowballing democracy movement.

“No one can afford to look soft on dissent in this period of political succession,” said John Kamm, a California-based businessman who has often served as an intermediary in human rights cases involving China.

More than any other dissident, Wei, 45, has symbolized the Deng era.

“Of all the various dissidents,” Kamm said, “Wei Jingsheng is the one guy who’s gotten up Deng Xiaoping’s nose in a big way.”

Wei was well-known across China at the time of the short-lived 1978-79 Democracy Wall movement. But his first long stint in prison removed him from the public eye.

During his incarceration, steady and impressive economic growth improved the lives of most Chinese, providing many citizens with new outlets for expression and enterprise that did not exist when Wei first went to prison in 1979. At that time, China was still recovering from the ideological turmoil of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

When Wei was released in the fall of 1993, toothless from poor dental care and suffering from a weakened heart after living in harsh prison conditions, he was a political Rip Van Winkle suddenly awakened to a greatly changed world.

One of his preferred venues for meeting foreign journalists was the two-story McDonald’s that had been built during his imprisonment on the outskirts of Tiananmen Square. Unable to eat meat because of his false teeth, Wei would chew on soft hamburger buns and marvel at the changes that had taken place in his country.

During his imprisonment, he had survived by believing that the democratic debate he helped launch was still in full swing. He would address personal letters to Deng and, later, to Chinese President Jiang Zemin--the current favorite to replace Deng at the helm of Chinese power--written in a leader-to-leader style.

Discovering on his release that few people remembered him and his famous essays urging Western-style democracy, Wei used money donated by foreign human rights supporters to hire a secretary and crank up his personal campaign for reform.

In interviews, he made little attempt to soften his criticism. He wrote provocative articles for overseas newspapers. He predicted that Hong Kong would cease to be an international trading center after the British turn it over to Chinese control in 1997. He wrote of Chinese persecution of ethnic Tibetans.

For most Chinese, however, he had become an obscure figure. Traveling across China, a reporter made a habit of asking people if they had heard of Wei Jingsheng. Preoccupied with a new passion for making money and cutting deals, many had not.

Ironically, by conducting a high-profile trial and condemning Wei to prison, the government may have revived his fallen stature.

“Why are they doing this to him?” asked one low-level government worker Wednesday. “When he was first around in 1979, people were open to criticism of the government. But now, people are living better. They have money, and they have hope. He is just one man. Why are they [government officials] afraid of him?”

By featuring the Wei trial on Wednesday’s evening television newscast--which reaches about 800 million of China’s 1.2 billion people--the government did more than any foreign newspaper or human rights organization could do to identify Wei as China’s most prominent living dissident.

“It’s a very historic day,” said Kamm. “They have finally come to this--a clash between one man and the state.”

Some of the most revealing evidence of the hard-line attitude that led to such a clash came during an overseas book tour in February by Deng Xiaoping’s youngest daughter, Deng Rong. In interviews with French journalists in Paris, the daughter described her father’s displeasure at the way the Tiananmen episode had been handled.

“If at the beginning the party leaders had been more firm,” she said, “the problems would not have been as serious. Zhao Ziyang has an irrefutable responsibility.”

After the army swept into the capital on June 4, 1989, using tanks and automatic weapons to crush people in its path, Zhao--the Communist Party general secretary who was once considered Deng’s chosen heir in the Chinese leadership--was stripped of all his party titles. The former senior man in the party hierarchy now lives under virtual house arrest in Beijing.

Since then, party leaders have snuffed out any hint of organized dissent, reserving particular harshness for labor unions and human rights activists.

Times staff writer Maggie Farley in Hong Kong contributed to this report.