Wei’s Hold on China Could Slip in Exile

Eight years ago, Fang Lizhi was a cause celebre. He was the fiery champion of democracy blamed by the Chinese regime for the mammoth demonstrations that spread through the cities and universities of China in 1989.

After the Tiananmen Square massacre, he fled to the safety of the American Embassy in Beijing. There, he became the focus of a year of frenetic negotiations between the George Bush administration and China before he was finally allowed to leave the country.

Now, Fang Lizhi lives a life of quiet obscurity in Tucson. He teaches physics at the University of Arizona and struggles with his English. “I have a distance from China, so I have much less influence with Chinese students and Chinese society,” he mournfully admitted in an interview this week.

The marginalization of Fang underscores the obstacles faced by Wei Jingsheng, China’s most prominent dissident, as he confronts his new life in exile in the United States.

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It has become clear that any political opposition to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party must for now be based outside of China. Wei’s flight into exile on Sunday, after many years in prison inside China, demonstrates that the regime is unwilling to tolerate open dissent inside the country.

What are the chances for success of a Chinese democracy movement in exile? Can Wei succeed from overseas in perpetuating the causes and ideals to which he dedicated his life inside the country?

Chinese history shows that the task is not utterly impossible. At the beginning of this century, Sun Yat-sen led the opposition to the Qing dynasty while in exile in the United States, Britain and Japan. When the dynasty fell in 1911, Sun first read about it in the newspapers on a train from Denver to Kansas City.

James R. Lilley, who as U.S. ambassador to Beijing led the negotiations for the release of Fang Lizhi, recalls that at the time, the underlying fear of the Chinese leadership was that Fang might follow down this same path. Chinese officials didn’t want Fang to become “the new Sun Yat-sen,” Lilley says.

But as Fang’s fate in America illustrates, the modern-day precedents for Wei Jingsheng are not so encouraging. The Chinese dissidents who have come here over the last decade have had trouble attracting a following even among overseas Chinese, much less in China itself.

Fang can describe the obstacles Wei faces. “This is the first time he [Wei] has been abroad,” Fang says. “He knows nothing about overseas Chinese, and the White House and the American people and the media. It means that in the first period, he will have to learn these things, to get basic information.”

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Another prominent exile, Liu Binyan, once a crusading journalist in China, notes that the democracy movement overseas has been beset by internal divisions and has been largely abandoned by the Chinese students who were so active during the 1980s.

“So many people betrayed the cause of democracy,” observes Liu bitterly. “More than 60,000 students and their relatives got green cards [allowing them to live in the United States], and soon after that, they forgot everything. With the improvement in the economy [in China], they wouldn’t join in any demonstrations against the government.”

Still, Wei has some opportunities here. When he first began to challenge the Communist Party leadership from inside China in 1978-79, the primary means of communication for Chinese dissidents were wall posters and underground newspapers. Now, from exile, Wei will be able to make use of radio, faxes, the Internet and other modern means of communication.

Liu Binyan believes that in this way Wei could conceivably have more of an impact from outside China than from within.

“If he [Wei] makes some speech on Radio Free Asia, or the BBC, or the Voice of America, it will be heard by hundreds of thousands of Chinese inside China,” says Liu. “If you publish an underground journal in China, you wouldn’t have 1% of that audience.”

Wei Jingsheng has one other advantage, too: a tenacity that extends far beyond that of any other Chinese dissident.

He has spent virtually all of the last 19 years in prison. When he was released for a few months in 1993-94, he immediately resumed his work on behalf of Chinese democracy, realizing that he would probably be thrown back in prison again. It seems unlikely he will abandon his efforts now.

Many other exiled opponents of the Chinese regime have been intellectuals whose lives were divorced from the lao bai xing, or ordinary people, inside China. Wei, by contrast, is a worker; like Poland’s Lech Walesa, he was trained as an electrician.

Other Chinese leaders have settled easily into the world of American universities, where they can carry on their professional work. Fang, for example, admits that his intellectual life as a physicist at the University of Arizona these days is not too different from what it was back home.

“For my personal life, I tell myself I am almost in China,” said Fang in the interview. “I teach the same things, the same classes. I use the same books. I even have some of the same [Chinese] students.”

It will be Wei Jingsheng’s task to make sure he does not fall into the comfortable irrelevance of the exiles who preceded him. The betting here is that Wei can meet the challenge.