《紐約時報》1997年報導魏京生在鄧小平死亡時從獄中給他家屬寫慰問信

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美國報紙《紐約時報》1997年報導魏京生在鄧小平死亡時從獄中給他家屬寫慰問信的事實

Mr. Wei said he sent a letter of condolence to Deng's family when the 92-year-old leader died in February.

魏先生说，这位92岁的领导人在二月死亡时，他有信慰问邓的家人。

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Dissident's Advice to Clinton: Only Pressure Sways Beijing - The New ...
www.nytimes.com/.../dissident-s-advice-to-clinton-only-pressure-sways-beiji... - 翻译此页
1997年11月22日 - Wei Jingsheng, China's most prominent democracy advocate, says he will tell ... a democracy movement has been neutralized and his effectiveness as a ... Mr. Wei said he sent a letter of condolence to Deng's family when the ...


Dissident's Advice to Clinton: Only Pressure Sways Beijing

By PATRICK E. TYLERNOV. 22, 1997

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/22/world/dissident-s-advice-to-clinton-only-pressure-sways-beijing.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Wei Jingsheng, China's most prominent democracy advocate, said in an interview in New York yesterday that he would tell President Clinton that only continued pressure from the West could help free more Chinese political prisoners. He said he intended to use his time in exile to act as a campaigner for human rights.

''This will be the very first issue that we discuss,'' said Mr. Wei, who is expected to meet Mr. Clinton later this month or early in December. ''If you want to have a dialogue with a Communist Government, you have to use pressure, otherwise they will never talk with you.'' [Excerpts, page A5.]

Still weakened by his 16 years of imprisonment, Mr. Wei nonetheless appeared to be in fairly good health. Reports that he was suffering from life-threatening illnesses appear now to have been part of a strategy by family members and rights groups to press Beijing's Government to release him on medical parole, as it did last weekend.

Mr. Wei's assertions that he intends to become a strong public advocate for improvements in China's human rights situation could complicate relations between Washington and Beijing.

Mr. Wei's message may prove controversial to the Clinton Administration, which won praise yesterday from rights organizations for pressing Mr. Wei's case in private meetings with Chinese leaders in the last three years. Mr. Clinton has stepped back from the campaign of trade pressure on China that he advocated at the outset of his Administration, arguing that ''engagement,'' not confrontation, was more likely to produce improved rights conditions in China.

Speaking at a news conference in New York and in an interview afterward, Mr. Wei said he saw himself becoming an evangelist for greater freedom and democratic reform in China using the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and other news media that would enable him to build an audience among the Chinese.

Many people in China do not recognize his name because it is banned from being mentioned by state-run news outlets and because he has been imprisoned almost continuously since March 1979.

''Most of the Chinese people would very much like to hear other voices,'' he said. ''Otherwise they would not know that they have choices. That is why this is very important.''

He quarreled good-naturedly in the interview at being labeled a dissident. ''Most of the Chinese people all want democracy,'' he asserted. ''And the people who are different are just this little group of ruling elites of the Chinese Communist Party, so they are really the dissidents.''
In the news conference, he exhorted China's democracy forces, saying, ''You should not pay attention to the immediate low tide, because after a low tide there is always a high tide that follows.''

The State Department earlier this year reported that political dissent in China had effectively been completely stifled through a campaign of repressive measures including jailings and forced exiles.

Mr. Wei's entrance this morning into a large hall at the New York Public Library packed by waiting reporters and well-wishers was greeted by applause and cheers. The 47-year-old activist wore a brown corduroy jacket and a red plaid shirt, his uneven prison crew cut looking in need of a trim.

In an opening statement, Mr. Wei thanked the ''people and governments around the world that have made enormous efforts to press the Chinese Government for the release of political prisoners'' and admonished those who already live in freedom in the world not to become complacent about those who do not.

''Democracy and freedom are among the loftiest ideals of humanity, and they are the most sacred rights of mankind,'' he said. ''Those who already enjoy democracy, liberty and human rights, in particular, should not allow their own personal happiness to numb them into forgetting the many others who are still struggling against tyranny, slavery and poverty, and all of those who are suffering from unimaginable forms of oppression, exploitation and massacres.''

Though he evaded questions during the news conference about what message he would deliver to Mr. Clinton, during the interview afterward, Mr. Wei was emphatic that he would seek continued pressure from Washington and other Western capitals for improvement of rights conditions in China and the release of prisoners.

The only reason Chinese leaders have ever engaged in dialogue over the country's internal human rights conditions has been pressure from the United States and other countries whose markets have become important export destinations for Chinese goods and a source of technology for China's modernization.

Mr. Wei said he would like to visit all parts of the United States in the coming months. While in New York, he has been assigned a New York police detective as a bodyguard. Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley have offered him office space and living quarters to pursue academic studies and pro-democracy work.

His immediate plans are to write a book about the beatings, abuse and psychological pressure that the Chinese prison authorities used to try to break him and, ultimately, to force him into exile by refusing him further medical treatment in prison.

Among the techniques were shutting off heat in his cell, using other inmates to torment or beat him and housing him in a cell where lights were left on 24 hours a day as a way of denying him sleep.

Mr. Wei was released from Jidong Prison, about 150 miles southeast of Beijing. ''When I was a prisoner there in 1989, they used to brag that they were the largest salt factory in Asia, exporting to Japan and many other countries. But when I returned in 1993, I asked them if they were still exporting salt to other countries, and they denied it.''

Mr. Wei indicated that international criticism of China's use of prison labor for exported products had caused the prison authorities to change their story.

He said that if he becomes active as an opposition figure in the United States, he is concerned that the Communist authorities might retaliate against members of his family left behind in China.

''I am concerned about their security,'' he said at the news conference. ''They have suffered a lot. But there are hundreds of millions of Chinese who have been oppressed, and I am concerned about them equally.''

Beijing's leaders are apparently calculating that with Mr. Wei out of the country, his threat to rekindle a democracy movement has been neutralized and his effectiveness as a political troublemaker will be minimized by his distance from China.

But rights groups based in the United States, with Mr. Wei's cooperation, already appear to be developing a strategy to give him a new voice in China, something he has scarcely had since 1978-79, when he pasted his pro-democracy essays on a stretch of wall in central Beijing that became known as the Democracy Wall.

Among Mr. Wei's first interviews yesterday were with correspondents for the Chinese-language service of the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and a major Chinese daily newspaper in Hong Kong. He was also interviewed by The New York Times.

For a man who has spent long years in solitary confinement and watched as more than a dozen teeth dropped out from years of malnutrition because of a poor prison diet, Mr. Wei seemed to enjoy parrying the questions of a New York news conference.

Asked about his views on Taiwan and Tibet, where there are strong independence movements with support in the United States, Mr. Wei was careful not to challenge China's claims of sovereignty over both territories.

''On Tibet,'' he said, ''this is a rather complex question. I don't agree with the Government's policy of oppressing and killing Tibetans and carrying out the destruction of Tibetan culture, but as to how to resolve this issue, I think that calm Chinese and Tibetans should sit down and figure out a good solution.''

Asked to tell the greatest lesson he learned from his 16 years of imprisonment for the views he expressed during the Democracy Wall period, Mr. Wei said: ''I have learned many things in prison, but the most important thing is that for a human being, there is no difficulty that cannot be overcome. You just have to rely on yourself and you can get through anything.''

The man most responsible for Mr. Wei's jailing was Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who emerged in the years after the death of Mao in 1976 and opened an era of economic reform that is turning the nation of 1.2 billion into an Asian powerhouse.

Mr. Wei's trenchant essays on Democracy Wall pointedly criticized Deng for failing to carry through with his promises of democracy as part of the program for China's modernization. When Mr. Wei called Deng a dictator in early 1979, he was arrested and Democracy Wall was torn down.

Mr. Wei said he sent a letter of condolence to Deng's family when the 92-year-old leader died in February.

''If he could have expanded reform to the political arena,'' Mr. Wei said, ''then -- even if he had abused me even worse than he has -- I still would not hate him.''

Mr. Wei took questions for a little more than 40 minutes at the library hall and then asked politely that he be excused because he was feeling tired and dizzy.