A Voice from Peking's Gulag

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Jailed without a trial, a dissenter describes his ordeal

One of the early victims of the current Chinese drive to crush dissent was Liu Qing, deputy editor of the April 5th Forum, the most widely respected of the unofficial journals that sprang up during the ill-fated democracy movement of 1978-79. A copy of Liu's account of how he challenged China's legal system and what happened to him afterward was recently smuggled out of the labor camp and obtained by TIME. Some excerpts:

When Ren Wanding [head of the Chinese Human Rights League], Wei Jingsheng, Fu Yuehua, Chen Lu, Zhang Wenhe and others were arrested in March 1979, the event was followed closely by the Chinese and foreign press. Why this concern about the fate of a few ordinary Chinese citizens? It is because the arrests had created a cold March wind that was blowing across the Chinese political horizon.

Wei Jingsheng had violated the law against divulging secrets, but the court convicted him of two other more serious crimes and sentenced him to 15 years' imprisonment and a loss of his political rights for three years. This kind of harsh judgment is a mockery of the Chinese judicial system, and it is a warning to everyone to be very cautious in speaking one's mind. Real liberation of thought and true freedom of expression must wait until man is willing to struggle for them.

Liu took on the job of spreading the word about Wei's unjust punishment. "If I had not pointed out this unfairness," he writes, "I would have had to be either a coward or the worst kind of human being." On Nov. 11, 1979, Liu went to "democracy wall" in Peking to sell some of the 1,000 copies of the Wei trial transcript he had mimeographed. Agents of China's secret police, the Public Security Bureau (PSB) arrested some of the buyers. Liu then went to the PSB headquarters in Peking to seek redress for them.

I was confident that what I did was all legal and that the PSB had no legal basis to defend its arrests. After seriously thinking things over, I decided that I must never retreat. Those who enforce law must have respect for the law.

My insistence on the law and on legality enraged the PSB interrogators. Finally one of them said angrily: "Now that you are here, you don't have to answer our questions. But as long as you refuse to answer our questions, you'll never be allowed to leave."

I reminded them that detaining me without proper papers was illegal, and that I had no intention of submitting to illegal detention.

Their reply: "This is the office of the dictatorship."

Without a trial, Liu was detained for more than six months in prison, where, still insisting upon his innocence, still demanding that the authorities observe their own laws, he was held in solitary confinement for over five months. "Even for real criminals, "he notes, "solitary confinement is illegal."