repression against Chinese Democratic Movement Jacques and Jean TOSSI
On May 28, 1982, Wang Xizhe, and on May 29, 1982 He Qiu-two Cantonese activists of the Chinese Democratic Move. ment-were sentenced to fourteen and ten years imprisonment respectively.
He Qiu, former Red Guard, a worker from the shipyard in Canton, was first arrested on June 18, 973, for his nonconformist opinions' expressed in a letter to his brother. Released in October 1976, he was to join the Democratic Movement at its birth and become editor of the People's Road, a review published in Canton, which is one of the most widely read in the south of China. He was arrested a second time in August 1980, then released fifteen days later, and became, as from September 1980, the edifor of Duty, the paper of the National Federation of Unofficial Journals, Which he was one of the first to initiate.
Wang Xizhe, also a former Red Guard (both are slightly over thirty years od age), a worker in Canton, is a coauthor of the famous dizibao wall poster entitled On Socialist Legality (1973-74). Arrested in 1975 and freed in 1978, he
Dissident Editor Wei Jingsheng (DR)
expressed his views in several reviews, such as The Voice of the People and the
Research Bulletin, which he is in charge of. He is one of the few theoreticians of the Democratic Movement. Marxist, he does not hesitate to cite Trotskyist positions, in particular around the question of tendency rights. He has also written on socialist democracy and dictatorship of the proletariat.
Both Wang and He, who belong to the Marxist wing of the movement, had been arrested again in April 1981 with about thirty other editors of reviews Without news from any of them for more than a year, their 'disappearance' seems to fit into the same pattern as that of Ren Wanding from the Human Rights League, who had been under arrest/ disappeared since April 1979.
Both have been condemned for their counter-revolutionary activities as well as 'appeal to the masses to resist and sabotage, use of posters, articles, and other means to promote agitation against the dictatorship of the proletariat and the socialist system. (Paragraphs 1 and 2, Article 102, of the Penal Code). Furthermore, Wang was accused of having 'set up counter-revolutionary groups.
The prosecution did not find it necessary to respect its own legality-it is worth remembering that China has had a
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Penal Code since January 1980. It was their activities in the Democratic Movement which were generally under attack, when Liu Qing (editor of the April Fifth
Forum published in Peking) was sentenced to three years labour education for having distributed the minutes of Wei
Jingshen's trial. The Chinese bureaucracy was far from happy to have seen its decision challenged in the name of its own addition, the same Liu Qing managed to smuggle out from his camp a long letter, which reads both as a defence and a testimony, which has been published in September 1981 in Hong Kong and in France in April 1982.
that could have been involved dior indirectly in that affair, and document, have been prosecuted by the wrath of 'popular justice' heard, for example, of the arrest of Liu Qing's brother.
Referring to the so-called 'counterrevolutionary crimes', Liu Qing talked of such an instrument in the hands of the bureaucracy becoming a royal sceptre-a Penal Code states that 'the acts of any organiser or ringleader of a counterrevolutionary are considered as counter-revolutionary. Tautology reigns leaving the regime to interpret the law as it sees fit.
even the minimum of formal guarantees were not given to Wang
Even less were given to them than for Wang's trial, despite the implementation since then of the Penal Code and the Code of Penal Procedures. These "public' trials were held in an almost clandestine way, wound up in a few hours in about forty carefully selected people, without public notification of the trial even to the family. One can but call such a procedure shameful-shameful, to the point that the media in China have given no information about the affair.
The fact that the bureaucracy has passed such heavy sentence indicates that it has succeeded neither in silencing the democratic aspirations nor in integrating young people. But one may wonder why 'he bureaucracy has failed to use these tro sentences as severe warnings. Wt look at it carefully, this discretion sho. 'n by the bureaucracy appears to be a result of both constraint and calcula-
In fact, for those social layers sensitized by the Democratic Movement, essentially tie generation of the Cultural Revolution, nd the urban youth, the disappearance of the movement, and the suppression of democratic rights (by modifying the constitution to eliminate the four great freedoms, particularly the posting of dizibaos, (1) followed by the elimination of the right to strike in the 1982 version of the constitution) have shifted the focus of the struggle from the directly political terrain to the artistic and cultural field.
Million demonstrate after Hua Gaofang's
Then, after the attack was launched against the back line' of the movement
(The Stars' group, arrest of an artist from Sichuan, prosecution of Li Shuang)
at the time of the campaign against petty- bourgeois liberalism, which ended up with the self-criticism of the military writer Bai Hua, the focus has yet again shifted onto the terrain of morality, pecially on the question of pre-marital re-
Contests for the selection of the model family with the five merits (a good relationship between wife and husband, between mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw, respect towards the elderly, and love for the children) are being organised. Hu
Yaobang himself, chairperson of the Chinese Communist Party denounced 'the inconsistency in the matter of marriage' and advocated at the same time 'a sound social morality and a sound public opi-
At the moment, Yu Luojin, author of the New Winter Tale, who recently published A Spring, divorced, who had collaborated with the April Fifth Forum, is the target of a mo
The Chinese youth have not yet been got into line. Worse, on this question mass resistance is rather tending
In these conditions it would not have been advisable for the bureaucracy to revive the memory of the Democratic Movement. On the contrary, it is impor tant for them to disconnect forms of resistance from those that had appeared at a time of the 'Peking Spring'. The Chinese bureaucrats, drawing the lessons from the 'failure' of Wei's trial, which from their point of view was in fact counter-productive, very likely preferred to be more discreet.
probable that other sentences have been passed without the rest of the world knowing. spite of the proclamations on socialist legality, Wang's sentencing can be seen as a symbol-the Chinese bureaucracy continues to prefer the method of 'disapits new legality.
the vice-chairman information that some courage.
small thing.
It can be used as a platform for those who have engaged in struggle for democratic rights in China or that are ready to do so; international solidarity must develop around the demand for the release of Liu Shanging and Li
Zhiyi, He Qiu and Wan Xiżhe, Wei, Ren, b
Liu, and their comrades.
is
The Four Great Freedoms are 'great conebate —Mao's four methods for carrying or