This chilling revelation appears in a bylined UPI article by Susan Ruel, commenting on the tortured, smuggled 262-page journal of imprisoned mainland "Democracy Wall" dissident Hsu Wen-li, one of Amnesty International's really searing "Prisoners of Conscience."
Hsu, in a document that is, surely, historically outstanding as a manifesto of both personal courage and principle, underlines: They have not treated me violently, but I have heard the screams of people being beaten or receiving electric shocks....Some appear to have suffered nervous breakdowns. I am very afraid of having a breakdown, but for the sake of my wife and child I will not collapse.
Hsu pointedly states: My physical condition is sound. I don't have any fatal diseases. And Susan Ruel writes that the very clear implication is to convey "that his death in prison would not be from natural causes." Hsu, again: I will not kill myself, I will not escape, because I am innocent.
In spite of the danger, he goes on to take on Teng Hsiao-ping directly, declaring that despite laudable economic reforms, Teng makes the same repressive mistakes as Mao Tse-Tung himself.
Hsu's journal, titled My Defense, insistently portrays his position as that of a dissenter within the system, innocent of "counter-revolutionary" thought, and indicates the hope he may yet be freed. Nevertheless, he dauntlessly proceeds to defend the bluntest of mainland dissidents, such as Red China's top political prisoner, Wei Ching-sheng, who coined the term "Fifth Modernization" for "democracy," and demanded its full addition to Peking's so-called Four Modernizations policy (of industry, technology, agriculture, and defense).
Writing in the scholarly American journal Society (Jan./Feb. 1986 issue), Steven W. Mosher stresses the continuity of the relevant Chinese Communist police state policies: "The numerous campaigns that have been launched during the (Tengist) reign are not temporary throwbacks to a less enlightened time: they are a manifestation of the same commitment to violent political change and control that has characterized the Peking order from the beginning." He describes the Communist Chinese regime as among the most repressive in modern history, "one that denies that individuals enjoy innate human rights...."
Red China's vast system of penal institutions encloses not only all those who have demonstrated any sort of desire for political democracy, but those who, in the words of some Communist Chinese authorities (Amnesty International Report 1985), evidenced "Christianity fever." Though some of the aging priests and ministers languishing in Communist jails were released following the collapse of the "Cultural Revolution," those refusing adherence to official Communist church organizations continue to be imprisoned, and unknown numbers of others have since been arrested or harassed.
The world stopped to marvel when the courageous Anatoli Scharansky finally appeared, free, on its TV screens. And it sighed with at least marginal relief as Yelena Bonner was allowed medical treatment abroad on the basis of certain conditions imposed on her prisoner husband, the great physicist Dr. Andrey Sakharov. Yet great numbers more languish in the Gulags (prisons and "labor camps") of the Soviet Union, and a truly uncountable host of equally courageous political and religious dissidents—burning symbols of the human will for freedom—are lost within the even more massive Gulag system of Communist China.
We foresee greater hope only if all those in the world who care deeply for the state of mankind will extend to all those free spirits encased now within the vast Eurasian Communist Gulag network, the same profoundly human concerns and attention, with the same fervor they recently devoted to the great public "uprising" to succor the tragic victims of African famine.
We have all damaged ourselves and our societies endlessly, living so long with the Communist Gulags and their purposeful, mass destruction of the human spirit. We would all be exalted doing more, together, about it.