China Presents ‘False’ Image, Wei Warns U.S.

Wei Jingsheng, China’s most famous dissident, says the United States has been engaging in “wishful thinking” about China, whose Communist Party leadership, he claims, is trying to obtain Western technology for military purposes.

“The United States seemed to be clearer about the threat from the Soviet Union. And it was also tougher with the Soviet Union,” Wei said through an interpreter in an interview with The Times on Saturday, a week after being freed from a Chinese labor camp.

By contrast, he said that when it comes to China, Americans have long harbored unrealistic hopes “that the Chinese Communists would turn into people like [those in] the Western democracies.”

Wei said there is, at the moment, a “false impression of stability” in China. In reality, he maintained, rising unemployment has the potential to cause unrest in the world’s most populous country.

Even in the camp where he was confined, Wei said, he noticed that some prison guards and police officers were being laid off in a way that would have been unthinkable when he was first locked up in 1979 for his pro-democracy activities.

“When the unemployment problem is very serious, and when the market has not been very good for the peasants who are also suffering from a lot of bullying from local officials, then how on earth can you call a country like that truly stable?” Wei asked.

Wei was permitted to leave China for the United States last Sunday after serving virtually all of the past 18 years in prisons and labor camps. He was first arrested in 1979 after putting up a famous poster in Beijing that called upon the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to open the way for democracy.

Wei appeared to be growing accustomed to a new life in the United States. As he sat for interviews in a hotel room supplied by human rights groups, he chain-smoked Camel cigarettes and snacked on takeout food from Burger King far different from the prison food he was eating a week ago.

“I’ll have to make some money for myself,” he said amiably when asked how he will live in this country. “I’ll probably write some books. At least in the eyes of Chinese, there are many opportunities to make money in the United States.”

A few of his old associates from Beijing now live in New York. Liu Qing, a friend who joined Wei in the 1978-79 interlude of free speech known as the Democracy Wall movement, is now head of Human Rights in China, a New York-based group. Tong Yi, the young woman who served as his assistant during six months of freedom in 1993-94, is now a student at Columbia University.

Wei’s arrival here would seem to make New York the capital of China’s exiled democracy movement. Yet Wei suggested that he plans to travel frequently rather than put down roots in the city.

“I don’t think it would be easy for me to settle in one place,” he said.

He rejected suggestions that he might become embittered or unhappy in the United States, as Soviet writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn did when he found refuge here after years in prison camps.

“I’ve had a very pleasant time in the United States, and I believe that in the future, especially after I learn some English, I’ll get along even better,” Wei said. “Americans are very easy to get along with, not as complicated as the Communist press [in China] makes out.”

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Wei acknowledged that some of his friends urged him to flee China and go abroad in 1979, just before his first arrest. But he says he rejected the idea because he thought it would hurt the democracy movement in China.

“At that time, I had the feeling that if this were to be a mass movement, and if the organizers of the movement were to leave the masses, then it would be like fish leaving the water,” Wei reflected. “They would not be able to survive for any length of time.”

Also, he recalled that back then, China was isolated from the rest of the world. “And so . . . for a person to leave China [in 1979] would almost be like becoming a person in outer space. It would be very, very difficult to influence people in China once you left China.

“It is now possible,” he added, “for people who are outside of China to continue to play an important role, to give support and assistance . . . and be involved in the struggle for civil rights in China.”

He insisted that there is still an active democracy movement among the 1.2 billion people in China. The movement “does receive broad popular support from the people. And that is why it has been able to last until this very day and will ultimately succeed.”

In some ways, he said, Chinese society was more stable in the 1970s. “There weren’t that many people who were out of jobs. To be sure, they had low salaries, but the number of people who were actually unemployed was actually very small. Nowadays, their salaries have gone up slightly . . . yet there has been a very large increase in the number of unemployed people.”

Wei said he believes that in some ways, Chinese President Jiang Zemin is similar to Deng, his predecessor as China’s top leader. “Both of them hope that without having to do political reform, they will be able to cause the economy to grow quickly and thereby ensure stability.”

But, Wei continued, Deng came from “a more idealistic generation” of Chinese leaders, those who fought and won the Chinese revolution of 1949. By contrast, he said, Jiang and his aides represent “more of a pragmatic generation. . . . They use communism and the Communist Party to uphold their rule.”

Wei said the country’s party leaders have always wanted the country “to be a powerful military presence.”

One of the reasons the leadership has taken steps to open China to the outside world, he said, was that “through these deceptive means, we can get both money and technology from Western countries in order to make ourselves a powerful military country.”

Wei said that when he was set free for six months in 1993-94 and living in Beijing, he was shocked to discover that the very eavesdropping devices China’s security apparatus used to overhear his conversations had been sold to the country by Western nations.