Thirty years ago today, on a wall at the intersection of Xidan Avenue and Chang'an Avenue in Beijing, an electrician from the Beijing Zoo, Wei Jingsheng, put up a big character poster (dazi bao) entitled, "The Fifth Modernization." He would pay dearly for this act of political courage: long years in hard jails until finally gaining his release and exile.
The main point of Wei's argument was that if China was to successfully modernize, following the call of Deng Xiaoping (and before him Zhou Enlai) to enact the "Four Modernizations" (Agriculture, Industry, Technology, Defense), then a fifth modernization would be necessary: democracy. He was quite straightforward:
We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors.
We do not believe in the existence of any savior. We want to be masters
of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their
wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the
people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing
modernization. Without this fifth modernization all others are merely
another promise.
He came to his views not through study of Western thought or exposure to foreign thinkers. During the Cultural Revolution he had been sent to Inner Mongolia and there encountered first hand the tyrannical abuse of power. He demanded democracy from within his own life's experience.
Jeffery Wasserstom today suggests that Wei might have been wrong in one regard:
Interestingly, Wei didn’t present democracy (the “fifth modernization”)
as an abstract good but as a pragmatic necessity. Without it, he wrote,
great obstacles would block China’s material development.
Obviously, China's material development has been very significant in the past thirty years.
But there is another way in which Wei was correct: modernization in China continually calls forth, of its own accord, the demand for democracy. That is what the protesters in 1989 demanded; that is what the activists of the China Democratic Party demanded; that is what Hu Jia and the many other democratic dissidents continue to demand.
And in that sense, Wei is a Mencian. Mencius was famous for standing up to people in positions of power and demanding that they listen to the people: Heaven hears through the ears of the people and Heaven sees through the eyes of the people. Wei, too, stood up to power holders. Mencius believed that the people must be respected and preserved, not trampled upon by corrupt and unscrupulous tyrants. That is Wei's message, too. Of course, Mencius did not call for democracy in the manner that Wei did, the concept and practice did not exist in ancient China. But the idea of electoral competition and contestation for executive power as a means for maximizing political accountability of rulers to the people is certainly in the spirit of Mencian government.
Wei Jingsheng wan sui!
The Useless Tree 
Leave a comment