Challenge The Communist Regime

Guang Yang， May 2018

Late 1970's in Mainland China. In the final years of the Cultural Revolution turmoil, the ruling Chinese Communist Regime made a series of reforms reverting the previous radical policies, including the restoration of the university matriculation exam system that had been abolished since 1966, the year the Cultural Revolution began. Working as a high school physics teacher at age 22, I took part in and passed the first such exam held in the later days of 1977, and entered the Peking Poly-Technical University as a first-year student for Theoretical Physics in early 1978.

In late October 1978, as I was travelling between the university campus in the eastern Beijing suburb near DaBeiYao (Big North Cave大北窑) and my home situated in the western city district on most weekends, I noticed from the glass windows of the No. 1 bus I usually took along Chan'An street (Beijing City's major east-west thoroughfare), some big character posters along the Xi'Dan（西单） street west of the City Centre, posted on the walls of the Bus No. 37's depot, and the surrounding pedestrian readers braving the bitter and chilly Autumn wind. Big-Character Posters（大字报） --- usually large papers displaying big characters written with Chinese Calligraphy brushes, stuck on walls, poles, trees etc to attract readers ---  had been quite common ever since the chaotic Cultural Revolution years, but fewer and fewer were seen as the political movement wound down and the government increasingly shifted their propaganda focus from generic political slogans towards the economy.

One day, out of curiosity, I jumped out of the No.1  bus at the Xi Dan stop, walked over towards the Big Poster area, and joined those readers. Except for some appeals for help based on personal or family injustices caused by the state and the local authority's political persecutions, the contents of the posters were mainly politically oriented, concentrating on state policies, in particular sensitive issues such as the official evaluation of late paramount party leader Mao Ze Dong and other major communist leaders, most of them (except Mao himself) having been denunciated during the previous radical years and some of them having just been reinstated, or were in the process of becoming reinstated.

As a young student, like most intellectuals in the harshly oppressive communist country, I had naturally been harbouring in my heart a strong dislike towards the communist government's various extreme and radical policies aimed at controlling every aspect of our lives. I had found no obvious and convenient mechanism to openly express these feelings safely: many people had been persecuted and killed on ridiculously fabricated crimes such as accidentally sitting or stepping on Mao Ze Dong's photo printed on  newspapers or books, let alone openly questioning the state's policies. The big character posters on the Xi'Dan walls, mostly along the No. 37 bus' depot area that later was called the Democratic Wall, piqued my strong curiosity and impulse to just express personal feelings against this stupid and absurd country and its even more stupid and absurd rulers, probably very similar to the feelings of most of the big character poster writers or even the readers along the Xi'Dan wall.

Most of readers were men wearing serious and solemn expressions as they read and ambled around. I spent several weekends wandering along the Xi'Dan big character poster wall area reading and observing the surrounding people who might not all be innocent pedestrians, since this kind of unauthorized situation would usually attract plain clothes policemen mixed in with the ordinary people, like predatory animals observing their prey.

Out of pure strong discontent against the ruling communist regime, I put down my denunciating words towards the late sacred communist regime founder Mao ----- who had been worshipped as a god throughout the country ever since the communist regime seized power in 1949 ---- into a hand-written small-character poster, since I was in a hurry and couldn't find a convenient way to produce a big character poster which would require a brush, ink and large papers. I used ordinary exercise book pages and a fountain pen to write a rather lengthy article blaming all the disasters and problems the country was facing on the ridiculous policies and decisions made by Mao Ze Dong and his senior protégés, proclaiming Mao as a non-god responsible for the previous 29 years' problems, who must be comprehensively criticized and whose erroneous policies should be corrected and reversed. Knowing these strong words would arouse state police attention and hostility, I chose a time late one evening after darkness had fallen on the street. I sat on the back of a bicycle being ridden by one of my close friends, and as we rode towards the poster walls, we first made sure from our gut-feelings that no suspicious plain-clothes police were around, then quickly splashed some glue on the back of my posters  and stuck them onto some uncluttered wall space at reading height then quickly snuck away. We later rode the bike back towards the wall area and found several dozen readers around my poster. Under the dim street lamp light a woman was in the centre of the audience loudly reading out my poster's contents, because its small words were not easily read by people at the back of the group. Surprised by the strong interests, we rode back home with a kind of adventurous satisfaction.

Afterwards, I visited the wall area again, sometimes even during university lecture intervals. Apart from enjoying the scene where my own poster had attracted a fair amount of readers and even discussions, I noticed that, like myself, almost none of the writers left their real name at the end of their postings, the prevalent fear being the potential persecution by the state authority. One day, however, I found some  small character posters similar to mine that did have a signed name at the end: Jin Sheng (金生) and there was even a telephone number there! The content of this post also strongly denounced the communist regime policies. What a brave man, I marveled. No ordinary household at that time had a private telephone, except if you were in a very high-level bureaucratic family. I decided to ring this brave writer, so one night I used the public street phone booth to dial the number on his poster. The other phone was obviously another non-private one since someone asked me to wait and went to get the person I wanted to talk to. After initial questions and mutual introductions, "JinSheng" and I decided to meet at his place, which actually was not far from where I was living (my father's home): it was the Economic Planning Commission dormitory(国家计委宿舍） near the FuWai Street(阜外大街）, approximately 1.5KM from my home.

One day, I finally met the man who wrote under the pen name "JinSheng" , and learned that his real name was Wei JingSheng(魏京生). Wei was an ordinary young Beijing man who was 28 years old that year, 5 years older than me. He was of a medium but solid build, and had a round face with a pair of shining eyes that smiled from time to time when he talked. We discussed the Xi'Dan posters and various other political issues, as these were hotly debated topics amongst many young and middle-aged men in Beijing. After initial contact, we gradually ended up meeting a few more times, eventually being joined by two other people who were also attracted by Wei's poster’s contact details: Lu Lin(陆林), a factory worker the same age as me, and Liu JingSheng(刘京生), a bus driver one year older than me. As per Chinese honorific custom, we referred to Wei JingSheng as "Old Wei"(老魏) since he was the eldest, and he addressed us as "Xiao Yang" (小杨), "Xiao Lu" (小陆), and "Xiao Liu"(小刘) respectively, where “Xiao” simply means younger. At that time, Wei JingSheng was working as an electrician in the Beijing Zoo near the Bai Shi Qiao(白石桥) area northwest of our homes. He had far more social experience than all of us three youngsters combined: he had been actively involved with the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, in particular the Western City Picket Organization (西纠红卫兵) which was composed of children from medium to senior Communist Party officials’ families. The organization was in opposition to Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who was extremely powerful in the state politics throughout the late 1960's to 1970's, then was later persecuted by the communist authorities, together with her closest radical allies. Wei JingSheng later joined the army as a soldier, as many communist veteran bureaucrats' children did ---- joining the army was an honor and a privilege during those years. Wei's father was a medium-level party bureaucrat, a stern old man who seldom smiled. I met him a few times during my visits to his home, which was an apartment in a building belonging to his father's working unit, an old dull-coloured 1950's built Soviet-style 4-storey building similar to all other state ministries' dormitories. On the building’s top level, Wei's family had a separate room inside another apartment where another family was living --- probably allocated to his family as an extra extension to their main residence. This top-storey separate room was the place Wei JingSheng used to meet visitors and friends of his; the four of us had many meetings within the first few weeks of knowing each other, where we discussed the country's political situation and the Xi'Dan Wall activities. Wei and I wrote a few more articles to put out onto the wall, including his famous essay "The Fifth Modernization", which was posted by myself and a few friends, after I first asked one of my school friends to copy the entire article onto Big Poster papers using a Chinese Calligraphy brush, since my school mates Sun and Mei were excellent calligraphers --- and a big character poster written in beautiful calligraphy usually attracted more readers.

Wei JingSheng suggested we set up a publication -- such as a magazine -- to formally declare our intention to question the communist government's policies and the prevalent Marxist-Leninist theory. As young men born and bred in a society completely sealed off from the outside world, we had been subject to constant and relentless brain washing during our entire lives, without knowledge of anything contrary to the communist state's propaganda. So-called Marxism-Leninism was touted by the regime as the only universal truth, and was always used to justify state policies no matter how disastrous they could be. The reason we felt so sick of the regime's policies was more because they were so absurd and contrary to everyday human common sense, rather than because we knew much about the theories the regime was touting as the foundations of their policies.

Wei JingSheng suggested the magazine to use the name "Exploration"(探索), as this would best represent what we wished to do: explore ways to criticize government policies and discuss better ways to replace these constant absurdities. He also suggested using his article "The Fifth Modernization" as part of the contents of our new magazine, as it was a well-written political essay. So to publish and distribute a magazine of political essays became our common objective. However, this could not simply be hand-written like the big character posters, and we had no physical tools to print words onto papers as a magazine. We realized that we would at least need some kind of printing mechanism and accessories to publish multiple small-sized magazines, as Wei JinSheng and his Red Guard friends did during the Cultural Revolution, which probably served as inspiration for his new magazine idea. I suggested to try asking my old primary school friend Mei, a girl who was teaching a high school in the SanLiTun(三里屯) area near my old ChaoYang district (朝阳区) home dormitory. Mei agreed to let us use her school's typewriter to type up an article, and led Wei JinSheng and I to her school's typewriting office. We tried to type out a short foundation page for the new magazine but the amount of people coming and going in and out of the office greatly disturbed us. One article's typing was such difficult let alone continuously typing all magazine contents, which we were trying to keep somehow secret to avoid negative effect on my friend Mei, so we eventually abandoned the idea of using Mei's school typewriter.

Using someone’s office typewriter proved to be too risky, so we started looking at other possibilities. Using publishing houses and factories seemed to be even more difficult because they were always under strict government control, and we had no immediate acquaintances who could help us sneak into any of these facilities to use their equipment. I then thought of a mimeograph in my university's office that belonged to our grade’s Communist Youth League branch. One of my classmates Zhang had the key to this room since he was the branch secretary of the Youth League  ----- I was an ordinary Youth League member. I had borrowed his key a few times to use the telephone inside. The mimeograph sat at the top of a filing cabinet and seemed to be seldom used. I decided to steal that machine. My classmate Zhang didn't have any suspicions when I asked to borrow his key again, and one afternoon I smuggled the mimeograph out in some cloth wrappings without too much hassle with no one taking notice of my actions.

During those weeks, the Democratic Wall at Xi Dan experienced several mass meetings, public speeches, gatherings and open discussions. In the later days of 1978, around November 25^th, there was a rumour in the streets that the newly reinstated state strongman Deng Xiao Ping had praised the Xi Dan Democratic Wall during an interview with an American journalist. This rumour fanned the passion of those who were seeking state sanction and recognition of the activities around the Democratic Wall. In the evening of the supposed interview’s conclusion, there was someone standing around the Xi Dan Wall claiming that Deng had praised the Xi Dan Democratic Wall as good, or at least tolerable, paraphrasing that the "mass was exercising their democratic right". Upon hearing this news the people surrounding the self-claimed street reporter cheered and held an impromptu kind of street celebration, then as a continuation started walking towards Tian An Men Square(天安门广场), the epic centre of Beijing city that had been viewed for centuries as the state’s power centre regardless of who was in power. Many excited discussions had been randomly going on amongst the participants of the celebration and marching, where topics were certainly politically oriented, concentrating on state and government policies while intertwining with political philosophical theories, in particular the so-called Marxism-Leninism and Maoism theories, although nobody really knew or understood much of what these so-called "theories" were. Street rumors, gossip, fake, real or half-real and half-fake news was constantly being exchanged, especially regarding the senior state leaders who had been persecuted during the radical Cultural Revolution years, and the possibility of them re-emerging as state power holders.

Several of the spontaneous meetings I participated in were held in a young man's home not too far from the Xi Dan Posters Wall. One of my university classmates, Hu Xiao Dong(胡小东), had been coming with me to join in on these spontaneous discussions and poster readings. Hu had a rather round face and slightly dark skin, wore a pair of nearsighted glasses and was one year younger than me. We sat side by side in class at the same wooden desk. He was enthusiastic about discussing political topics with an unorthodox flavour. His father had been a medium-level bureaucrat in the state broadcasting bureau, and committed suicide by jumping to his death from a high building during the Cultural Revolution. Hu and I were close friends in university and aside from politics, we were both enthusiastic about theoretical physics, dreaming to become theoretical physicists one day. Hu in particular liked the fashionable terminologies and hot topics in physics.

When some of the young people in the discussion group suggested we publish a magazine compiling the Democratic Wall articles, Hu and I actively participated. The stolen mimeograph machine was put to use for printing the small magazine, which we fittingly named "The Democratic Wall", and Hu  wrote an article summarizing the up-to-date activities in and around the Wall, using pen-name  "quark" as this was a hot topic in academic physics at the time regarding some basic physics particles. I was named editor-in-chief of this Democratic Wall magazine with my name printed on the cover page, most likely also with my article denouncing Mao Ze Dong included in the compiled article excerpts summarized from the Xi Dan poster wall. It was late 1978, and this would turn out to be the very first mimeographed publication appearing in and around the Xi Dan Democratic Wall, which we distributed freely by hand to the readers and bystanders around the Wall. However, this magazine was only published once, largely because the initial bond among the young men gathered around the wall at night was never tight and we gradually lost contact, even though the Democratic Wall activities continued well into the beginning of 1979.

In and around the Xi Dan Wall area there were some foreign people, mostly Western news reporters, embassy diplomats, students studying in Chinese universities, and some curious tourists. For the Chinese locals, it was dangerous to speak to foreigners on the street, as for this reason alone many people ended up in jail charged as spies or state enemies. One of the foreigners around the Wall was United Kingdom newspaper The Daily Telegraph’s Beijing reporter, Nigel Wade, whom I met during the big poster reading time. Nigel was a tall, middle aged man with a serious demeanour. Although Wade couldn't speak Chinese, I knew some English, so we managed to communicate and became rather acquainted. I would usually explain the Wall activities and poster contents to him. It was clear that Wade was excited to know some locals who could not only speak English, but also did not fear talking to foreigners. Being a foreigner and battling Beijing’s chilly Autumn wind day after day around the Xi Dan Wall whilst trying to understand the things happening there proved his dedication to his profession. We eventually had many talks and learned a lot from each other.

Wade told me he was reporting on the Xi Dan Wall events on to his newspaper, and was eager to know the reasons behind these activities. Through him, I learned that the outside world was paying attention to what was happening here at the Xi Dan Wall. As he showed great interest in knowing why we were participating in the Wall, one day I invited him to my home to have a long chat. Wade had a telephone in his residence and gave me his number, so that every time we wanted to meet I could call him first to arrange a mutually agreed time and location. This was why I had used my University’s Communist League Branch office phone several times after borrowing my classmate Zhang's key to the room, despite passing students' curious glances at overhearing a fellow student speaking English on a phone. On the evening Nigel Wade came to my home opposite the Yue Tan Park(月坛公园), I walked him past the open air garbage bin right next to our building and climbed up the murky concrete staircase. Similar to Wei Jing Sheng's family, our apartment was allocated to my father by the Light Industry Ministry where he worked as an engineer. We had two big rooms and a smaller half-sized side room that I usually slept and stayed in. My father thought Nigel was my university schoolmate so didn't ask much about him.  I poured a cup of hot malt drink for my guest, then sat with him in my small narrow room to answer his many question, which included interest in my opinion on topics such as my studies, family, past experiences and the communist state and its policies. While we talked, Nigel busily jotted things down in his paper notebook.

After several such meetings, I introduced Nigel to Wei Jing Sheng and sometimes the three of us would meet together. Nigel had a small sedan that the Government had probably allocated to him as a standard for western journalists, and he would occasionally drive Wei and I to a previously agreed spot to meet and talk. One of these places even included Nigel's residence in the Eastern suburb of Chao Yang, where most foreign embassies and diplomatic facilities were located. Nigel introduced several western journalists and diplomats to us, including the British Embassy’s First Secretary Roger Garside, a younger secondary secretary, the American Embassy’s First Secretary Smanski, and a French journalist named Dillon, whom Wei Jing Sheng seemed to also have encountered separately. Roger Garside of the UK eventually also led Wei and I to his residence inside the foreigners' residential compound. These residences were places ordinary Chinese people were forbidden to enter, and the gates were manned by armed Chinese guards who would always stop Chinese faces from even looking in. On each of our clandestine visits, Nigel and Roger drove us straight past the guards to park directly in front of their residences.

Roger Garside was a married middle age man with two lovely baby daughters, while Nigel Wade appeared to be single, or at least had no accompanying partner in China. Nigel had become quite acquainted with us over a relatively long time, in comparison to the other westerners he introduced us to – including Roger Garside, whom I found to be less easygoing than Nigel. Roger held a kind of arrogance in his attitude and delicate expressions whilst talking to us. One time, when Wei, Nigel and I were leaving Roger's home, he abruptly stopped in front of his bookshelf and gave me one of the volumes as a gift making me feel like I was accepting some kind of alms that I didn't ask for. During our conversations Wei and I had mentioned to them that the youth of Chins didn’t have a chance to read Western publications – in particular those that held different views from the Chinese Communists’ – and this probably caused Roger and Nigel to think that they were doing us a favour by gifting us texts published outside the Chinese mainland. Later, Roger also gave us some other documents, along with a thick English publication bound in a green cover about China’s human rights status as compiled by  Amnesty International.

Although most of the westerners we encountered did not speak Chinese, like Nigel, some of them could speak relatively well, including the Frenchman Dillon and the American Smanski. In those years, the Chinese Communist regime was very vigilant in cracking down on any citizens who tried to contact foreigners (Westerners in particular), so our contact with these people was quite adventurous. Apart from causing doubtful glances from ordinary people on the street, we were constantly under police surveillance whenever publicly in the foreigners’ company. Sometimes police cars could be spotted following Nigel’s or Roger's car when we were inside riding with them. In previous years we would have been arrested straight away from simply contacting these foreigners without authorization, but because of that special period of time that saw a political power struggle inside the ruling Communist echelon, the entire country was in an unusual transformative state of opening up, causing police power and control over ordinary people to be relatively weak. Due to this, the appearance of the Xi Dan big poster wall was not forbidden and street gatherings with political themes were tolerated, as was the rare contact of locals with foreigners.

Back in Wei Jing Sheng's single room on the top floor, four of us – Wei, Lu Lin, Liu Jing Sheng and I – started preparing our "Exploration" Magazine. Encouraged by my experience with the single issue "Democratic Wall" Magazine, we decided to use the mimeograph I stole from the University and pool our money to buy the rest of the necessary items from stationery shops. We also enlisted another young man from around the Xi Dan Wall named Ma Wen Du(马文都) for his superior calligraphy.

Printing with a mimeograph firstly requires using a steel pen to write on a special wax-plated negative: the pen pierces through the wax-coated paper so that the portions where the written strokes appear  lose their wax, creating a custom template that is then pressed against clean paper and scrolled over with black ink. We called this process "etching the steel plate"(刻钢板), so Ma Wen Du was actually our plate etcher.

Ma Wen Du was one year older than me, and lived by himself in a small, dilapidated room inside a courtyard near Xi Dan, not far from the Democratic Wall area. He seemed to hold a big grudge against the Communist regime due to his personal or family experiences but never mentioned his current family or job; perhaps he didn't have any. To my astonishment he often led some young women to stay overnight in his room, some of whom he claimed to have met on the street only hours ago. He would also often say how much he liked literature, books and poems, which struck a chord with me because I had admired writers and poets ever since childhood; one of the main reasons I went to the Xi Dan Poster Wall was so I could write about people's activities in fighting against this unreasonable regime, and record the lives of us ordinary people who had to live under it. Although Ma Wen Du frequently joined the four of us in the business of publishing the magazine, he never formally claimed to be one of the Exploration magazine editorial team, which throughout the following months only consisted Wei, Lu, Liu and I. Although during these months there were a few others who came to Wei's small room (i.e. the magazine's editorial office) to discuss, debate with or spy on us, no other person explicitly wanted to join us.

With Ma Wen Du's help, we compiled the first edition of Exploration and manually printed a few hundred copies. Wei Jing Sheng wrote the first editorial in which we claimed that “This magazine does not hold Marxist-Leninist Theories as our foundation, as these theories and all others are equally put under our examination, discussion and criticism, as the magazine name suggests.” This single theme laid down the radical tone of the magazine, because at the time all the people in mainland China, as individuals or organizations, claimed or had to claim that they were under the sacred guidance of these Marxist-Leninist theories since which were the supposed foundations of the ruling Communist regime. By openly questioning this very de facto and universal truth, we seemed to have challenged the entire legitimacy of the Communist regime: how could someone dare to express suspicion towards the regime's founding theory? This would have caused immediate arrests, jail or even death sentences if it were just a few years or months prior – but since it was right at the height of the Xi Dan Democratic Wall period and the regime's top officials were too busy dealing with their internal power struggles, a relatively safe political vacuum floated within society, so some completely unorthodox hand-made  publications were tolerated by the police force – at least temporarily.

The first edition of our magazine included Wei Jing Sheng's lengthy article "The Fifth Modernization", which I had previously asked my old schoolmate to copy calligraphically onto a Big Poster and posted on the Xi Dan Wall. The article was highly valued by himself, us and the many poster-readers around the Xi Dan Wall, since many people mentioned and discussed it with us. Even the Communist Regime paid great attention to it in their own special way: one night, they managed to throw human excrement onto this Big Poster ---- very few political posters accepted such honourable treatment from the government. Many poster-readers and Xi Dan Wall activists were quite vigilant at catching offenders who destroyed or tore off posters at the Wall; those who did so were called police running dogs and, once caught, were physically roughed up on spot, although not all of them were really working for the regime since some poor guys were probably just trying to clear off wall space for their own posters. However, the regime’s shit-hurling on Wei’s article was stealthily accomplished at night so nobody could identify the offenders. The excrement-smeared poster probably reminded Wei Jing Sheng that simply putting up posters would not be enough to spread good ideas and opinions, so he was eager to organize a proper printed magazine, as the Red Guards had done in previous years. For me, no matter how poorly printed it might be, the idea of publishing a magazine free of the regime's censorship was an exciting practice.

I wrote an article about the Chinese people's insensible worship of the late party leader Mao Ze Dong, sharply criticizing this blind following as primitive, uncivilized and medieval in its collective impulse. Lu Lin wrote a short poem satirizing Mao's mausoleum as an emperor’s tomb facing the Forbidden City palace. Overall, the entire edition was an unstructured and roughly printed booklet with "Exploration" written in big red characters on the cover page. During the printing process, each piece of wax paper could only be roller-pressed a limited number of times before becoming broken or torn, and our efforts rewarded us with roughly a hundred or so hand-printed booklets. We didn't make much fanfare around distributing and selling copies: we sold some of them around the Xi Dan Wall area, others went to our foreign contacts (including Nigel Wade, Roger Garside, the American Smanski and Frenchman Dillon), and the rest were sold to the new visitors who came to Wei Jing Sheng's small room (our magazine office) by tracing the address he had left on his big posters, much like I had done a few weeks earlier.

Each copy was sold for around one Yuan(元), which was an exorbitant price tag, considering the average working man’s monthly wage was a few dozen Yuan. Before I started my tertiary studies, I was earning 42 Yuan per month teaching High School. Likewise, while we were working on the magazine, Wei, Liu and Lu all earned around 40-50 Yuan per month each.

Although the sale of our first edition was a lukewarm success financially, our second edition sale was exceptional success. Several reasons caused this: a degree of fame via word-of-mouth earned through the first edition, our improved printing and selling techniques, and the increased number of copies: this time, we created roughly 300 copies altogether by making at least 2 pre-processed wax negatives for each page. We also organized a full day of sales activity at the Xi Dan Wall, where we sat outside the 37th bus route atop the half-dilapidated low walls, shouting and haggling with anyone passing by on Chang An boulevard, while waving magazine copies in our hands, much like a bunch of desperate professional salesmen.

Lu Lin had been named by Wei Jing Sheng as our treasurer, or ‘Finance Minister’ as Wei called him. That day, Lu Lin was carrying an old satchel bag to hold the money we collected from our magazine sales. While we had kept the same labelled price of around 1 Yuan or so, most eager buyers we encountered would simply throw over a bill exceeding the price, accept the magazine then quickly walk away without  waiting for change. This was partly to avoid unwanted attention from the plain-clothes policemen who were certainly watching this all unfold, and partly to express appreciation of our courage to so openly sell regime-unauthorized publications in broad daylight. Many foreigners joined the local buyers in handing over high face-value bills without waiting for change, usually 10 Yuan notes, which was probably the largest face-value RenMinBi(人民币) bill at those years. We spent the whole day on the low brick wall haggling and selling our magazine like real newspaper boys, and by the end of the day Lu Lin's bag was bulging with money overflowing the brim. With the usual private sales to the foreigners and some other days of street sales along Chan An boulevard and Wang Fu Jing (王府井) shopping area(Beijing's busiest shopping street), we collected over four thousand Yuan for our sales: an enormous amount for any of us. Among the articles included in this edition was Wei Jing Sheng's excellent "20th Century Bastille Prison", which for the first time exposed the Regime's secret political prison Qin Cheng(秦城监狱) Located in the suburban area of Beijing, which housed many persecuted governmental officials who were jailed and tortured, including the father of Wei’s girl friend Ping Ni(平妮) who was a senior Communist leader in the Tibetan Autonomous Area. Ping Ni's father's experiences would have contributed greatly to Wei’s article, the personal details making the article quite intriguing and convincing. For this edition we also included some lengthy abstracts from the Human Rights Report by Amnesty International which we had received from Roger Garside.  Nigel Wade and some of the other westerners we knew later also contributed payment for Explorer, quite often paying us with high face-value notes saying they wanted long term subscription to the magazine.

After we started selling our magazines, many readers wrote letters to Wei Jing Sheng's home address as that was the contact address we printed on the magazine. One day, however, Wei told us that most of the hundreds or more letters written to us had been confiscated by his dormitory’s janitor because the guy was suspicious of why so many letters had flooded in – this was exemplary of the vigilant and thoroughly brainwashed communist resident who would automatically defend the State whenever he smelt a hint of political subversion. Wei Jing Sheng managed to steal back only a dozen or so of those confiscated letters, some of them with attached money bills requesting subscription to our future editions. Some others still came directly to Wei's small apartment to meet us or just to chat about the magazine. All of our visitors were men, either young or middle aged. In those days, I would often walked into the apartment to find some complete strangers sitting there discussing and debating the political issues with Wei Jing Sheng.

Around the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, several other spontaneously organized and unauthorized publications like ours appeared around the Xi Dan Wall. These included the "April 5th Forum"(四五论坛）, "Human Rights Alliance"（人权联盟）, "Enlightenment" and "Today".  These were mostly political publications, except for "Enlightenment"(启蒙社) and "Today" (今天), which were literature and poem-based. Most of these grass-roots magazines were published using mimeographs similar to ours. However, apart from Exploration, none of them had non-Marxist declaration, they actually repeatedly claimed their loyalty to Communism and Marxism-Leninism and were only too eager to show their admiration of these –isms, which led me to wonder why they had popped into existence in the first place, since the regime already had years of propaganda overflowing on these –isms, praising, spreading and injecting them deep into every Chinese man, woman and child's blood stream. A reluctant answer to this seemed to be these regime-loyal publications were there to correct the mal-practiced or misunderstood –isms, as they claimed the government were a bunch of stray Communists.  Anyway, since we were all there publishing unauthorized magazines, we were the enemies of the State, no matter how we claimed our loyalties. All of these unofficial publications were later labelled non-State-sanctioned folk publications (民刊).

The "April 5th Forum"(四五论坛) was organized by Xu Wen Li(徐文立), Liu Qing(刘青), and a few others including Zhao Nan (赵南). Xu was a middle-aged factory worker living with his wife and daughter in an alley south of Chang An Street; he spoke and acted rather slowly in comparison to his close associate Liu Qing (who was said to be a factory technician somewhere outside Beijing) who was quicker on the uptake and more easily got excited. During those months I visited Xu's small, dim and crowded apartment many times to liaise with him and his associates. Xu and Liu were much less radical than Wei Jing Sheng in their criticisms of the regime and its theoretical foundation of Marxism-Leninism. The whole time we were in contact  around and away from the Xi Dan Wall area, they had been repeatedly cautioning Wei Jing Sheng and I against the radical overtones of our Exploration publication, sometimes to a hysterical degree, probably fearing that our outspoken views would lead to a more imminent and severe government crackdown on all the fork publications.

The "Human Rights Alliance"(人权同盟) was another organization that popped up around the wall. It was headed by Ren Wan Ding(任畹町), a bespectacled middle-aged man who was quite emotional in his speech and actions. His followers included Chen Lu(陈吕) and Zhao Xing(赵兴), both were living in HuTong(胡同) alleyways, along with some other young men, none of whom seemed to be intellectuals. As I remember, Ren's organization didn't have a regular mimeograph-printed work but instead regularly stuck their big posters on the Xi Dan Wall as their publications, and these concentrated more on reporting people's personal grievances and cases of injustice, which we all knew were in the millions, even in today's mainland China. Ren seemed to be one of the earliest people to constantly denounce and decry human rights abuses in China. Although Ren's Human Rights Alliance didn't publish mimeograph-based magazines (as not everyone can easily steal one), they were very actively involved in  the activities around the Xi Dan Wall, and their members were quite friendly and sympathetic towards us in the Exploration magazine. Both Ren and Xu's organizations had their own contacts with other Western reporters and diplomats.

Another organization was headed by a man named Xia Xun Jian(夏训建), a middle-aged scholar, who claimed to be a graduate student of Beijing University. Xia wore heavy glasses and spoke with an obvious southern provincial accent. A self-proclaimed Marxist, Xia was a very conservative allegiant to the regime and viewed all other organizations' stances as radical. His organization’s participation in the Democratic Wall was not as active as Ren's Human Rights Alliance and they didn't seem to have a regular mimeograph-based publication either. Xia would often expressed opinions that showed clear symptoms of the regime’s brainwashing programs; even the name of his organization, XX Combat Team (战斗队), was redolent of the Red Guard era in the recent radical years, and Xia's stubbornly pro-regime attitude quite often provoked laughter and sneers from the audience and fellow folk-publication organizers. 

In and around the Xi Dan Wall, all these grass-roots organizations not only published various big posters and mimeographed magazines together, we also organized political activities. Ever since the appearance of the printed magazines, rumours abounded regarding the regime's tolerance towards these unauthorized publications and organizations. Out of concern for our magazines' very existence, editors organized regular joint meetings in which strategies were discussed, opinions exchanged, and new pieces of information examined. One important joint meeting was held in a small courtyard residence in North Dong Si (东四北) in the middle of the city, the home of “April 5th Forum” co-founder, Liu Qing. The crucial point of that meeting was to meet a mysterious messenger from the regime, a young man in his early 30s who named himself Tang Xin(唐新) which we all knew was a fake one. Everyone around the Wall had heard ominous rumours, and we were eager to know from this self-claimed regime personnel what attitude the government had. In preparation for the meeting, Wei Jing Sheng had asked me to bring the cassette voice recorder he’d received from the French reporter Dillon, a bulky machine that we usually had limited use for. The meeting was in the evening, and about 20 or so members of various folk magazines had crowded into Liu’s small room. Tang Xin, the self-proclaimed regime representative, dodged most of the straightforward questions regarding the regime's attitude towards unofficial magazines and organizations, bragged about his connections with the authorities and commented on our activities in bureaucratic tones unsuitable for his age and typical of the regime. His cunning expression and sly wordage belied his professional training as a public security officer-type personnel.  I had no confidence in anything he promised or commented on, and thought the entire night was a waste of time. However, other participants of the meeting particularly those like Xia, who held greater expectations of the authorities to legalize the unofficial magazines in some way – seemed to have much stronger interests in finding positive meanings from Tang’s words. During the meeting, Wei and I had been fiddling with Dillon’s machine underneath the desk, stealthily trying to record the discussion. However when we later played it back, we found the recording result to be quite unsatisfactory, probably due to the heavy wooden desk that had prevented much of the audio from ever reaching the recorder.

At one of the other regular joint meetings among magazine groups, it was decided that we should all assemble in an area in Xi Dan to promote our magazines and deliver some political speeches. We advertised the public meeting with posters on the Xi Dan Wall, and it indeed eventuated one fine day on a street corner near the Wall. The initial theme of the speeches was to introduce each magazine and its specific editorial policy. Xu Wen Li (of the “April 5th Forum”) and Wei Jing Sheng were not present at this public meeting, Liu Qing and I were there instead, along with several others, to represent our magazines respectively. Apart from introducing his magazine’s policies, Liu Qing delivered some emotional speech addressing the government's possible crackdown, proclaiming that any bloodshed was not feared etc. It was a pretty impressive proclamation, and even some foreign reporters who attended the meeting later mentioned his speech to us. When it came to be my turn, I spoke about our Exploration Magazine's policy, and emphasized our editorial theme: every theory, including Marxism-Leninism, was our critical and explorative target and we at Exploration did not hold any of these theories to be universal truth, therefore, contrary to the communist state's  brainwashing and propaganda, we did not claim to be their disciples.

We also made use of the public meeting to distribute some of our unsold magazines, which seemed to be popular among the attendees. No uniformed police were there, and although there must have been some plain-clothed officers in the crowd, no jeers or objections were voiced. It was a successful public political gathering unsanctioned by the communist authorities and lacking in the usual swearing loyalty to the regime, which was not seen ever since in the following dozens of years. It was a sunny winter day, with around two hundred or so people standing around listening, including several westerners. I later heard from Nigel Wade that this public meeting was reported in his newspaper and other forms of the Western media.

Another joint political activity undertaken by the unauthorized magazines was the Fu Yue Hua(付月华) case. Fu was a young female worker who was raped by a powerful local government cadre. When she and her family tried to report the crime to the police, instead of investigating the details of the case, the police arrested Fu herself. Public power abuses and personal injustices such as Fu’s were widespread in communist China, and her case was definitely not even the most miserable one; everyday new posters would appear on the Democratic Wall detailing similar accounts of personal injustices inflicted by the regime. Wei Jing Sheng and several other editors felt Fu's story could be used as a case against the authorities by these magazines’ united effort, so one day several representatives including members of the April 5th Forum, Human Rights Alliance and Wei and I formed a self-proclaimed journalist group and went to interview Fu Yue Hua's family in her residence, a shabby house in a southern suburb of Beijing. Her father, a timid and unsteady old man, answered the door and led us inside the house. We asked the old man about the details of his daughter's trauma, and he wept the whole time.

Armed with Fu's father’s request for justice to be served, we marched into the suburb's public security bureau (Xuanwu 宣武district police branch) at Hu Fang Qiao(虎坊桥), announcing we wanted to see the officer in charge. The puzzled guards on duty called their senior officer to come out and meet us, having clearly never witnessed a group of people walk into a police station without pre-arranged approval from the authority. When Wei Jing Sheng told the incoming senior officer of 40-odd years, that we were "journalists", the officer was quite startled and repeatedly asked us which organizations we were from and if we had our "reporter certificates", it was obvious that he never expected any reporter to pop up in his office, let alone people from unofficial publications without government approval. After realizing that we were deadly serious and determined to get an interview in regards to Fu’s case, the man agreed to answer some of our questions and led us into a meeting room. We set up Dillon’s cassette voice recorder again, this time in the policeman’s full view, which despite our unkempt dress and appearance drew us closer in resemblance to professional reporters. The policeman insisted that Fu’s arrest was due to her disturbance to the public order and evaded questions on why the police did not investigate and pursue Fu's claim of rape against her perpetrator. Wei Jing Sheng kept asking sharp questions that the senior policeman had to constantly fend off in embarrassment and annoyance. We received neither concrete nor satisfactory answers from the police on Fu's arrest, but everyone from our cohort felt that the interview was a success in that it united us as a political group, and showed the collaborative strength of all our magazines.  Wei Jing Sheng's calm and skilful performance during the entire encounter impressed me very much.

Back to our own place we transcribed the police officer’s answers from the tape recorder, then put some big posters detailing the events on the Xi Dan Democratic Wall. Wei Jing Sheng and I also put up a big cloth-made posters square in front of the Forbidden City facing  Tian An Man Square(天安门广场), where millions of people streamed past daily. Again, as with around the Xi-Dan Wall, no one came over to interfere nor to ask what the poster meant: which simply bore a slogan stating "Strong Protest Against Fu Yue Hua’s Police Arrest". Forty years on, however, this kind of freedom has become absolutely unthinkable in that anyone who today dared to put up any poster in that square would immediately be dragged away into police car by a dozen armed policemen.

Among all the unofficial magazines published on and around the Xi Dan Democratic Wall, the literature and poem ones like Fertile Soil(沃土) and Today(今天) mostly did not participate in our political activities. The founders of Today, MangKe (芒克) and Bei Dao (北岛), did however attend some of our initial joint meetings. I remember having some casual meetings in front of the Xi Dan Wall with these two later famous poets; their tall statures and artistic temperaments impressed me, in stark contrast to the political activists, who often looked wretched and miserable. MangKe (芒克) and Bei Dao (北岛) seemed calm and spoke less radically in comparison to the people publishing more politically oriented magazines. Another prominent literature figure around the Wall was Huang Xiang (黄翔) who was also quite active in posting his works and organizing his literature magazine, but again didn't participate in any of our political meetings and activities. These literature-oriented magazine organizers were nonetheless sympathetic to our cause and we met and cooperated rather friendly because we knew all too well that in the eyes of the communist authorities, we were all rebelling against their authority and when the time came could be the same target of a forceful crackdown.

In early 1979, Beijing Spring Magazine (北京之春) made a relatively late appearance and was different in that it was the only one around the Wall that was published using typographic printing. Like the literary publications, the young people behind it also kept themselves at a distance from the political magazines. It was said that they consisted of previous Communist League leaders of the Beijing Municipality and had political connections through their families and relatives, which explained why their articles were moderate in terms of commenting on the state and its communist theories, instead devoting much space to concerns such as how and when the denounced senior government leaders would be reinstated. I only met some of their editorial members once in front of the Xi Dan Wall area when we were mutually introduced by a third party, followed by a diplomatic handshake. Their attitude towards the other unofficial magazines was lukewarm at best and contemptuous at worst. Beijing Spring later lasted slightly longer than the rest of the folk magazines, and unlike the fate of the other political magazine editors, there was no news of their organizers being arrested and ended up in jail.

Of all the political articles published in the various magazines on the Democratic Wall during those months, several written by Wei Jing Sheng would become the most influential and leave a lasting echo in modern Chinese history. "The Fifth Modernization" big poster and its reprint in our Exploration magazine was probably the most influential political essay of that period, in that his call for change to democratize the Chinese political system was a real wake up call to all politically conscientious Chinese people. His essay voiced an opinion that the brutal and dictatorial communist system that had existed since 1949 was not a modern and reasonable entity and therefore needed to be  "democratized", which was specifically set to be against the communist regime's red-hot propaganda slogan of the Four Modernization policy(Agriculture, Industry, Military and Science, and Technology). Wei's article "20th Century Bastille"(二十世纪的巴士底狱), which we published in Exploration, gave firsthand accounts of the government’s political jail system that were likely influenced by Wei’s girlfriend’s father’s experiences as the former leader of the Tibet Communist Party Committee. As a result of internal fighting, he was persecuted by his own comrades and locked up by the government; the conditions of the jail were comparable to the Soviet Union’s Gulags. The descriptive exposure of the article was not only a shock to Chinese readers, but also had a massive influence outside the country in the Western world, thanks to the reporting and writing by Nigel Wade of the British Daily Telegraph and other Western reporters sympathetic to Xi Dan Democratic Wall movement. 

Wei Jing Sheng's articles were written concisely in a sharp, direct to the point style. This contrasted greatly with most of the other political writers around the Xi Dan Wall, who typically always first piled up mountains of praise and allegiance-swearing towards the communist state before timidly raising up some mild suggestions or doubts as to the state's policies and practices. The April 5th Forum magazine was quite typical in this regard, in that each time we posted one of Wei Jing Sheng's articles on the Wall they usually managed to quickly post a "Discussion" (商榷) counterpart next to it which tried to water down Wei’s sharp political points and radical overtones. However, in daily dealings between members of our two magazines, ties were close and the atmosphere was quite friendly; we exchanged ideas, shared rumours and consulted each other on joint activities. We all knew that if and when the government crackdown came, we would all be targeted indiscriminately regardless of the political attitudes and tones we ever held in our unofficial publications.

As we entered February and March of 1979, the atmosphere around the Xi Dan Wall was getting tenser and many people were nervously talking about how the government's tolerance and patience towards the Wall and its unofficial magazines was running out. The plain-clothes policemen who continually tailed our meetings with the Westerners became more obvious; several times while walking in the street, we had to suddenly turn around to face them and tell them to back off, although they always seemed unfazed and denied that they were following us. They were always unremarkably dressed young to middle-aged men, but they couldn't fool us since the Beijing streets were just as familiar to us as to them, and so any unusual tailings were quite obvious and alarming for us native Beijing boys.

Wei Jing Sheng seemed to be calmer and more confident than most of the other magazine organizers, probably due to his experiences in the army and as a Red Guard. He often assured us three younger Exploration members that even in the face of the potential government crackdown, we still had much time to improve and perfect our publication. For some time we had been eager to find a better printing mechanism than our poor mimeograph-based duplication technique and Beijing Spring’s typographic capabilities invoked great envy and admiration in us, although we did not know where the hell they managed to achieve it, our best guess was that they had some kind of support from the government and thus access to a state-controlled publishing house. Once, we wrote a letter to a reporter named Qin Jia Cong (秦家聪) who often signed his name on articles in the Far East Economic Review, which appeared in the government's internally distributed "Reference News"(参考消息) that was the only alternative news channel from the West for ordinary citizens to counterbalance the usual state media propaganda. In the posted letter, we asked if Qin could help us purchase printing press equipment but received no reply.  Armed with thousands of Yuan in profit from our magazine sales, we wanted to update to more modern equipment for the publication but weren't quite sure how to proceed.

In the midst of our activities in the Democratic Wall movement, were the ordinary citizens of Beijing who watched us with a sceptical eye. Their scornful attitudes usually manifested in admonitions such as, “Don't waste your time, young men” and “Go back to work or study which is better for your future”. Dozens of years under the Communist regime's harsh oppression had caused an overwhelmingly common attitude of obedience and obsequiousness amongst the people, for good reason; the Communist rulers' past and present persecution and brutal suppression of even the slightest opposition to their regime had turned the entire nation into a silent jail where challenges were viewed as abnormal and futile, and people had to discipline themselves not to reveal even a hint of their true thoughts in order to simply survive. This sheer fear of persecution was particularly prevalent among middle-aged and senior intellectuals, who had been suffering extremely hard in one specifically targeted political movement after another, as they were the group most capable of nurturing opposition towards the regime through their examination of alternative theories and ideas. Often, these intellectuals also had families to raise and the communist regime enjoyed persecuting the offenders' family members so as to bring them to total collapse and surrender. Many young  intellectuals at the time were also just finding a promising way for their careers through the newly restored university matriculation system, so their interests in the Democratic Wall Movement were limited.

From the winter of 1978 to the spring of 1979, I was the only enrolled university student directly involved in any unofficial magazine publication.  My university classmate Hu Xiao Dong (胡小东)came to join me and participated in some of the Democratic Wall activities and Exploration, but he was not considered an active member of the magazine. We once found a student from the Beijing University of Finance and Economics who showed interest in our magazine and left a contact name and address in his dormitory for us, but when we went there we found that the address was fake. I had a feeling that young intellectuals from relatively perfect families tended to have more conservative attitudes. Among the four members of Exploration, three of us had already lost either a mother(Wei and I) or father (Lu) so we did not have intact family lives. The other two young men who were frequently involved in our magazine’s activities, Ma Wen Du and Hu Xiao Dong, had also each lost at least one parent.

Girls and women were seldom involved in our activities, and when there were any they were usually activists' girlfriends or companions, like mine, or Wei Jing Shen's girlfriend Ping Ni(平妮). Ping Ni was of medium height and around the same age as me, with a slightly darker skin, and a pair of shining black eyes that looked pretty much like Wei’s. Unlike most Chinese people who were of Han Nationality, she was Tibetan. Her father had held a senior party position in the Tibetan Self-Autonomous Region after the Chinese communist regime defeated the Da Lai Lama's uprising in 1959 and started full occupation and rule over that area. Ping Ni obviously grew up in Beijing, as she spoke fluent Mandarin like everyone else around the Wall. She often accompanied Wei  and frequently appeared in his small apartment room that we used as Exploration’s office. The rest of us didn’t realize her worries and fears about the authority's possible crackdown on us until Wei laughed about them in front of us. He liked to boast about his self-confidence and skill at handling dangerous situations when Ping Ni was present, often saying "As I said before, nothing is happening so no worries" , before bursting out a series of laughs. One night in the editing office, Ping Ni ordered Beijing Roast ducks with the accompanying thin pancakes and we all ate them together for dinner; that was the first time I ever ate the famous Beijing Roasted Duck, which I couldn't say was my favourite. Wei told us all several times that if we were to be arrested by the regime, we should just confess that all our activities were master-minded by himself so as to lessen the possibility of our harsh treatment by the regime, and Ping Ni showed no objection to this advice as if she had heard it before. While the rest of us were still naive about the regime's future crackdown on our magazines, Wei Jing Sheng seemed to have a full expectation of what would eventually come.

In February and March of 1979 there came more stern warnings from the authorities. The paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping was recently triumphant from crashing radical oppositions within the Party's top leadership, and despite his previously softer stance on the Democratic Wall, was rumoured that after his consolidation of power he had made some serious and threatening speeches against tolerating the Wall and any kind of street protest. In answer to this threat of a crackdown, Wei Jing Sheng wrote a new editorial for Exploration titled, "Democracy or New Dictatorship?"(要民主还是要新的独裁?) Ma Wen Du copied it onto a Big Poster in his neat calligraphic hand and we put it onto the Xi Dan Democratic Wall. This article directly challenged Deng Xiao Ping’s intentions as to whether he would maintain current tolerance of the Democratic Wall, or forcefully squelch it to renew a dictatorship. The radical tone of this big poster and its direct naming of the paramount leader Deng Xiao Ping scared and frightened quite a few people, including the editors of April 5th Forum, Xu Wen Li and Liu Qing. As a quick remedy they immediately put out a "discussing"(商榷) counterpart poster right next to ours on the Wall in an effort to water down the radical atmosphere around its contents, although in my eyes their poster or any other posters was unnecessary as to influence the regime’s attitude on possible crackdown. However, we later learned of rumours that this specific article written by Wei Jing Sheng and put out as our magazine's editorial poster did have caused Deng Xiao Ping's personal anger and indignation which eventually led to the arrest of Wei.

During March 1979 we had been busy preparing our new edition of Exploration that was to include Wei's article "Democracy or New Dictatorship?" among others, and other activists around the Wall also presented their articles posters, and magazines. Ren Wan Ding and his Human Rights Alliance were mostly interested in denouncing the communist regime's dirty human rights records and published a letter to President Carter in a big poster asking the new US administration to interfere. Some other obscure organization even invented some calls to Taiwan's president Jiang Jing Guo (蒋经国) to start unification negotiations with the mainland's communist regime, and the fellow who came up with this scheme bragged his idea to me one night in Xi Dan with an air of gleaming satisfaction, most likely because no one else had popped up with ideas like this. Other strange ideas and expressions were abundant around the Xi Dan Wall area. The April 5th Forum people pumped up their posters and magazine articles with discussions on what genuine Marxism-Leninism was, which they believed the Chinese regime had been deviating from. It became custom amongst the magazine editors to exchange new publications, but when they sent their new editions to us, the lengthy articles usually made me lose interest before finishing them. In fact throughout the entire Democratic Wall Movement, apart from several of Wei Jing Sheng's brilliant articles, very few political articles were truly impressive. A Guang Zhou trio pen-named "Li Yi Zhe"(李一哲) had their lengthy theoretical dissertation "On The Socialist Democracy and Law Rule"《關於社會主義民主與法制》republished on the Xi Dan Wall, but the tone and theme still fell within the communist regime's predefined scheme and terminology, without a clear break from the party line. The only typographic based magazine, Beijing Spring, had an even milder attitude towards the government’s theories and practices, so even though their printing quality was enviable, their articles were of even less interest to those of us interested in initiating real change.

While the Xi Dan Democratic Wall's influence spread slowly amongst people in Beijing city, other cities around the country started joining in. There was news that similar activities and organizations – even mimeograph-based publications – were popping up in Si Chuan (四川) province, Shanghai (上海), Nan Jing (南京) and Wu Han (武汉）. Tian Jing (天津), the closest metropolitan city to Beijing, was also said to have some posters and it was only about 120 kilometres away from Beijing. Liu Jing Sheng for some reason had access to a truck, which he initially said we could use to transport papers to print our magazine, so one day Wei Jing Sheng, Liu Jing Sheng, Lu Lin and I decided to set off to Tian Jing to see how their magazine and poster activities were going.  Three of us cramped into the front seat and one man was left to sit in the truck’s open back. Liu was a professional bus driver so drove very smoothly. We stopped somewhere along the road to take a rest, and then Wei Jing Sheng claimed he could also drive since he had done so in the army. He took over from Liu and started some rather turbulent and bumpy driving for quite a long distance with several dangerous near-misses with obstacles and bicyclists among our screams. We somehow arrived in Tian Jing city in one piece. After driving around for a while we found a smaller-scale Democratic Wall lookalike, upon which big posters were scattered just like ours in Xi Dan, although the contents were more concentrated on personal injustices and sufferings. We distributed some of our magazines and talked to passersby only receiving some lukewarm responses, but regrettably did not manage to find any political enthusiasts around, probably because it was a weekday and most people were at work. We drove back to Beijing in the evening.

During preparations for our new edition of the magazine, we moved the mimeograph equipment to Ma Wen Du's small room in Xi Dan so he could easily create the wax paper negatives. On the evening of March 29, my girlfriend and I went to see Wei Jing Sheng in his small apartment where he was expecting us. We climbed to the top floor of the building and crossed the threshold of the apartment's main entrance to find the door of Wei's small room open, and inside the room there was every sign of having just being ransacked, with furniture upturned and pieces of papers scattered around. Nobody was there. We stood there for a moment, surprised and puzzled as to what had happened. Then, the next door neighbour came over. He was a tall young male who used to nod to us when we went there and once claimed that he was Wei's childhood friend. He said that "Lao Wei was arrested by the police!"  We were really shocked and naturally asked questions, but he refused to tell us any more details. His attitude became rather rough after that, and he nastily told us that we should get out of there and never come back.

We left in disbelief and shock, and managed to ring Lu Lin at home from a public street phone. We met with him and discussed if the tall neighbour's news was true and the main question was: what should we do next? We all gathered in Ma Wen Du's small room, and then came Ping Ni's confirmation through phone conversation that Lao Wei was indeed arrested by the police. she had seen the so-called arrest warrant from the police, and he was now detained in the western district police bureau. Ping Ni had been asked to send in some clothes and daily necessities for him.

This was a real shock to all of us involved with the Exploration Magazine. I realized that I had been naive ever since Lao Wei had told us to push any criminal accusations towards him if any one of us were to be detained as a way to mitigate our troubles, if any. I had heard his words as a precaution but now it seemed that something really was coming to get us, and Lao Wei, the most experienced and matured soul among us, was in the police's hands.  A cold shiver went down my spine as I wasn't a boy who was used to getting in trouble with the police. However, this was not a time to reflect and regret – we had to react and plan to deal with the reality. I rang Nigel Wade of the Daily Telegraph whom I had been keeping in contact with and told him Lao Wei had been arrested, to which he asked what the charge was. According to Ping Ni, the warrant stated that it was "Counter Revolution"(反革命) which was the most serious crime that the regime had been using to punish anyone who dared oppose them; people accused of this had been handed long term jail and even death sentences. Then as Lu Lin and I had discussed, I told Nigel that in the name of the Exploration Magazine we denounce Wei’s brutal arrest in the strongest terms, and insist on our editorial declaration that our magazine was not a disciple of the regime's Marxist-Leninist theory and we maintain our rights to continue to explore and shed doubts on the regime and their theories. I expressed our wish that Nigel could let the world know through his report that Wei was arrested simply because we had been publishing a magazine (however simple in its physical form) that shed disbelief and doubt on the regime’s claims of so-called socialism, and he did just that. In the evenings following, Nigel and I secretly met again and he showed me his report that had been sent out to London, telling me that the Daily Telegraph and many other western new agencies had reported the news of Lao Wei’s arrest along with a written statement I wrote in the name of the Exploration Magazine. I still remembered the surprise expression Wade showed towards the anti-communism wording when I first read the statement to him.

In the following days we decided to continue on with publishing the next edition of Exploration, feeling lucky that our mimeograph was at Ma Wen Du's place the night Lao Wei was taken away. We wanted to include our new editorial denouncing Lao Wei’s arrest, as well as Lao Wei's "Democracy and New Dictatorship" and some other articles. As days passed by, it seemed that the government could come and take the rest of us at any time. The police started to ask about me around my family’s dormitory. I rarely went to university in the early months of 1979, but kept in contact with my classmate Hu Xiao Dong who gave me news  that the police were looking for me there, too. I avoided appearing both at home and the university dormitory, sometimes spending my nights at the train station in Dong Dan(东单) where I would present my previous work ID (工作证) as a high school teacher and improvised excuses when the patrolling guards checked travellers' IDs. However, dodging the police wasn't a long term solution for me. A fellow named Yu Ping(于平) had been hanging around with us in the recent months before Lao Wei’s arrest, and he suggested we go to the southern cities to have a look, as there were also democratic walls, unofficial magazine publishers. Yu Ping was a middle aged man from the north-eastern city of Dan Dong(丹东) and had been working as a salesman for some unverifiable entities, which I understood to be small and secret private enterprises since private business was a dangerous and illegal cause at the time. People involved with private business were usually in the remote countryside dealing with rural economies, as city-dwellers were more timid and did not dare to disobey the government's banning of these activities ---- almost every city-dweller at working age belonged to some kind of work unit and had a work unit-issued ID(工作证) that was proof of one’s legal status in a city. Yu Ping certainly wasn't one of these timid city-dwellers, and he seemed to know a lot about private economic dealings and people in the countryside. He had been helping us with the magazine’s publishing chores both in Lao Wei's small apartment and Ma Wen Du's small courtyard room. He wasn't an intellectual, but showed strong support for our Democratic Wall activities. After discussing Yu Ping's suggestion to look further afield, Lu Lin and I decided it was not a bad idea to take a trip to the southern cities to seek some support and possibly meet other democracy sympathizers. We also had several thousand Yuan in profit from the magazine sales and could afford the cost of a trip. We hadn't been in contact with Liu Jing Sheng since Lao Wei's arrest as we didn’t have his address and he did not have a telephone at his home. Lu Lin's home had a shared public phone in the alley so every time we called he would be notified by the phone-keeper. Lu Lin's elder sister Lu Fang was also sympathetic towards us and she often relayed our messages to Lu Lin when he was away. Since we still had the mimeograph and the unfinished wax paper for the next edition of Exploration, we decided to bring the mimeograph and its accessories so we could continue organizing the next edition along the way.

It was in the spring chill of April 1979 when the four of us started on our trip to the south: Lu Lin, Ma Wen Du, Yu Ping and I. We bought train tickets to Nan Jing city first, since we had previously received a letter from a foreign student at Nan Jing University named Luo Bin (罗宾) who expressed support and interest in our magazine and told us there were also similar big posters there. After saying farewell to close friends, we took the train to Nan Jing. Upon arrival we went straight to Nan Jing University, but nobody seemed to know a person by the name of Luo Bin nor was there any sign of big poster activities around the campus. Disappointed, we stayed only briefly in Nan Jing and then took a train to Shanghai where we had heard there were more unofficial magazine and big poster activities. Shanghai didn't disappoint us: we successfully met with several local activists, saw their democratic wall area around the People's Square(人民广场)in the city central, and read some of the big posters there, a significant proportion of which concentrated on generic politics and criticisms of the communist government's problems rather than complaints about individual mistreatment and suffering. An uncomfortable chill hung over the city and we were still wearing our winter clothes from Beijing as we spoke to the locals and read their posters. They only learned about Wei Jing Sheng's arrest and our magazine when we told them. We ended up following some of the demonstrations they held near the city’s government building in The Bund area, which was quite well organized and proceeded peacefully with no obvious police interference. The only mimeograph-printed booklet we saw in Shanghai was not widely distributed let alone publicly on sale; the limited copies were mainly distributed privately. The editor of the booklet  was a middle-aged worker who went by the surname Yang and invited us to his home, a crowded attic inside a small building he was sharing with other families situated in narrow and messy alley called Li Nong(里弄), similar to Beijing's Hu Tong alleys(胡同). In his attic we met with his fellow activists and discussed many political issues. Although there had been no arrests made yet, the Shanghai activists had always been harassed and monitored by the local police so they were more cautious than we had been in the past several months in Beijing, and Lao Wei’s arrest could only worsen their situation. Nevertheless, we were glad to have finally met some like-minded political enthusiasts who were taking the same political action against the regime; the only regret was that we hadn't known each other sooner. I noticed that the Shanghai activists were also mainly young and middle-aged workers with no obvious intellectuals, much like Beijing's situation. I had two intellectual uncles from my mother's side living in Shanghai but did not try to contact them.

The four of us booked a cheap hotel, and visited the local public bathhouse, the kind of which was widely available during those years at low cost in mainland China. We stayed in Shanghai for several days, some of which were spent in the home of a local resident's home whom Yu Ping claimed to know. During this time, we managed to use our mimeograph to produce copies of the statement I had written for Exploration denouncing the government after Lao Wei’s arrest. We passed some of these on to the local activists, and carried the rest with us to Qing Dao (青岛), a coastal city north of Shanghai in the Shandong Province. When saying farewell to the Shanghai activists, we agreed to write each other and keep in contact. The four of us then set off to Qing Dao via passenger ship. The open sea trip was my first such experience, and like many others on board I felt quite seasick. While succeeding in suppressing the desire to vomit, I still felt uncomfortable for a quite while even after setting foot onshore at the seaside city of Qing Dao.

In Qing Dao we didn't find much democratic wall activity, nor any obvious sign of big posters. At night, we threw our magazine editorial statement over the walls of several big yards that lined the main roads which looked to us like governmental organizations. In the statement, apart from denouncing the regime's crackdown, I called for the overthrowing of the communist government. We walked along the seaside beaches, slept in cheap hotels, then boarded a train bound for Shang Dong Province's capital city Ji Nan(济南). We found Ji Nan also lacking in any kind of Democratic Wall activities and empathetic activists. Ma Wen Du and I visited some famous parks like the Bao Tu Spring(趵突泉) , where we sighed at the time and fate while facing the rippling lake, exchanged and improvised some ancient-style poems, then left the city in search of some countryside villages where Yu Ping claimed to have acquaintances. We stayed only briefly in these remote villages, visiting households Yu Ping claimed belonged to his friends --- the wooden front doors of which he dismantled when the host wasn't at home --- and chatting to the local farmers who clearly had no idea or interest in the events happening in the remote capital city. Disappointed once again, we decided to head back home to Beijing, first by long distance bus and then by train.

Upon our arrival back to Beijing, I heard that the police were still looking for me at both my home and university dormitories. Over the past few weeks, my foot had developed a large blister which made it difficult to move around, so I firstly decided to stay at Lu Lin's home in Chao Yang district with our mimeograph and accessories, pondering where to go from there. One evening while Lu Lin was out of home, the police suddenly swarmed into his bungalow, where we were caught by surprise since there had been no sign that Lu Lin was wanted by the authorities. They asked Lu Lin's family if Yang Guang had been here, apparently not knowing what I looked like – one of them even mistakenly asked me, “You are Lu Lin's brother?” Surely I said yes, and Lu Lin's mother and elder sister didn't deny it either. With a feeling of lucky unease, I watched the police ransack the luggage Lu Lin and I had brought back from our travels. The police confiscated our mimeograph and its accessories, including the leftover printouts and unfinished wax paper. They warned Lu's family to report my whereabouts if they ever learned of them, and left without knowing I was standing alongside Lu's family watching them the whole time. In the early morning, Lu Lin's elder sister accompanied me as I left their home and we said goodbye in a narrow street nearby. I haven’t seen Lu Lin and his family since, but will forever feel great gratitude to their generosity and sympathy towards me and our practice. After my arrest by the police I learned they were repeatedly harassed by the local police for keeping me in their home that night without telling the authorities.

I limped on my blistered foot out onto the streets near Lu Lin's home, wondering where to go. I decided to head to my father's cousin's home in the Eastern Gate area (东直门) near the Capital Airport, where my uncle, who was 10 years my father’s junior, worked as an aircraft engineer. Back in my family’s Southern hometown, Fu Zhou (福州), he came from a rather poor family background and accepted a lot of financial help from my father's mother before the communists took power. This uncle was my closest relative in Beijing and he had shown great respect towards my grandma and father. I arrived at my uncle’s home and was greeted warmly; however, upon learning that I was not only involved in the Xi Dan Democratic Wall but also wanted by the authorities, my uncle's normal humour disappeared and was replaced by real worry and fear. His indirect hint that I should leave as soon as possible made it clear that I couldn't stay there, despite the warm words and welcoming smiles of my aunt and their young sons whom I had been playing with since at young age. Disappointed, but also thinking it is better not to cause them any undue trouble, I left my uncle’s home in the Airport Dormitory, and took pains to head back to the inner city. Buses between the remote Airport area and the inner city were scarce, and along the way I found myself limping alongside some farmland dirt ridges for quite a distance.

After arriving back in Beijing, I contacted some old school friends and secretly stayed in some of their homes to nurture my foot problem in the hope that it would heal quickly. I took the time to reflect on our Exploration magazine and Democratic Wall activities in the past months and wrote an article summarizing our lessons and achievements, roughly titled "The Xi Dan Democratic Wall Movement and the Exploration Magazine: What they explored"(西单民主墙运动与探索杂志：他们探索了什么？). I hadn’t returned home since Lao Wei was arrested, and when I could eventually walk properly again I went to see Lao Wei's girlfriend Ping Ni at her apartment in Hai Dian(海淀) district. Without any pre-contact Pin Ni was surprised and obviously happy to see me, and I asked her to return the cassette voice recorder to the Frenchman Dillon, and also ask him to help have my article published in the Western media. After reading my article she asked about some words she didn't know, then told me there was little news from Lao Wei except that he was still in police custody and there had been some more requests for daily essentials like toothpaste and clothes, which she had gathered and sent to the police station. Her calm manner while talking about the situation impressed me. When I left Ping Ni’s home it was the last time I saw her. The last news I heard about her was from Dr. Wang Bing Zhang(王秉章）in around 1988 who told me that she went to West Germany and married a German man there. My article passed to Pin Ni was indeed eventually published in the Western media, as I discovered years later in the late 1980's when a schoolmate in my Canadian university told me he read it in the US Congress Library.

In the article, I strongly denounced the Chinese Communist Regime as a dictatorial entity that used brute force to suppress free speech. It was – and still is – my understanding that the regime, with its  deep roots stemming from thousands of years of ancient feudal dynasties, can never be talked out of its dictatorial political structure peacefully; it needs to be forcefully overthrown so that a modern, democratic and civilized China can eventually integrate into global society. The 1978 Democratic Wall Movement was the first self-initiated anti-communist movement originating from a generation born and raised during the regime’s established hold on power; that is, its participants were educated and brainwashed since birth, but rebelled out of their own consciences and understanding of a civilized human society. Although we had lived our lives under the censorship of Western political, economic, historical and cultural information and theory, the Chinese youth of the movement still called for the Communist Regime to be changed in order for a modern and reasonable new society to be established in China, with Democratization being the essential first step. I lamented Xi Dan Democratic Wall Movement was mostly comprised of the ilk of factory workers and lacked more matured and influential intellectuals. Apart from Wei Jing Sheng, almost none of them possessed much artistic talent for political activity. More than political wisdom, it was courage, boldness, recklessness, curiosity, confusion and adrenaline rushes that drove the majority of the participants.

After having luckily avoided being taken in by the police I kept changing the places I stayed in, rotating among the homes of old friends, schoolmates, and people Ma Wen Du introduced to me while nurturing my festering foot. The police didn't have a clue where I was, even though one of the old classmate's home I stayed was inside the Light Industry Ministry Dormitory courtyard where my Father's home was. When I could walk relatively well again, I managed to ring Nigel Wade from a public phone booth, asking him if I could seek refuge in the British or American embassies. Nigel said he would ask embassy officials for me, and then in the evening he told me over the phone that yes, the US embassy would allow me to go in. We then agreed to meet the next evening at the front door of the US Embassy in the eastern Chao Yang District, so that he could take me inside. I understood that this was an extremely dangerous act, if the Communist Regime found out about it I would certainly be tried for treason, like many unsuccessful predecessors who were found out, arrested and eventually sentenced to death. Despite the danger, I had no hesitation in acting because by then I felt that this regime was forever my enemy and I needed to escape from its clutches.

Luckily later on even though I wasn't successful in going into the embassy the regime never knew this arrangement and nobody involved ever revealed this process, until now.  I am always grateful with Nigel Wade, his American Embassy friends (the Mandarin-speaking young US first secretary Smanski was most likely involved) and those limited close friends of mine helping me with this.

After telling my close friends and girlfriend about my decision, I decided to wander around the shops in Xi Dan(西单) during the day to buy some essential items to prepare for the night time meeting with Nigel and the US officials. At around lunchtime, when I was walking in a relatively quiet street to the south of the Xi Dan shopping area, a middle-aged man suddenly appeared by my side calling my name as a question, "Yang Guang?" Unexpected I automatically turned and answered yes, and then he immediately grabbed my arms while rapidly repeating, "Let's have a talk let's have a talk..." while a few other plain clothes policemen simultaneously popped up out of nowhere and surrounded me, and together they quickly dragged and pushed me towards their van that was already parked at the curb. My brain flashed over with the words arrest and abduction but I didn't struggle too forcefully as they pushed me in, knowing that that it wouldn’t be very useful.

Although being caught by surprise, I had been more or less expecting something of the sort to occur since Lao Wei’s arrest two months prior. To this day I remained puzzled as to how the authorities found me that afternoon in late May 1979: obviously they didn't know I was going to the US Embassy that evening and that was never been raised by anybody thereafter, and if they did, it won't be possible for them to eventually release me from the detention centre without formal jail sentence half year later. In the van while driving to detention centre I asked the young plainclothes policemen "how did you find me" and they kept silence without answering.

The police van drove towards the Western City Police Bureau(西城分局) and I was led out of the car to emerge in a courtyard. The policemen who arrested me stepped aside as a middle-aged officer with a pair of angry eagle eyes appeared. He ordered me to stand aside too, then moved me to the detention house of the bureau(看守所). There was no explanation or paperwork on what crime I was charged with or the reason for my arrest. I was put into a big jail cell with around a dozen other guys, mostly young men under 30 years old, their accused crimes mostly comprising of theft, robbery or street fighting. Judging by my manner of dress and speech, they immediately sensed that I was not a street hooligan like themselves and so their attitude towards me was not rough but rather friendly. They asked why I was there and upon realizing I was a political prisoner, they showed some sympathy mixed with respect. Most of the young men were really just boys under or around 20 years old, who were complaining about the authorities in various ways, so my appearance seemed to have strengthened their theory that the state was no good, even arresting people just for writing articles. I was not in high spirits and did not join in on their cursing and discrediting of the state, so to kill time I used a pen left over in my inner shirt pocket to recite some ancient poems on clean piece of toilet paper. When my fellow prisoners saw me writing they got even more excited and sighed a lot as I recited the poems (although I doubted they really knew them), one of which was the long Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ruo Xu's “Spring River Night Flower Under the Moon”(春江花月夜).

I was not interrogated during my short stay in the Western City detention centre. On the second or third day, I was led into one of their offices and shown a formal arrest warrant stating that my crime was for being a “Counter Revolutionary” (反革命罪), the same accusation used against Lao Wei two months ago. They asked me to sign the paper to acknowledge my understanding of it, and thinking that it didn’t make much sense to refuse, I did. I was then handcuffed, led into a police van once more and driven towards the Ban Bu Qiao (Half Step Bridge半步桥) detention centre situated in the southern Xuan Wu District(宣武区), which is still there to this day, functioning the same way and most likely still under the Beijing City Police Bureau’s administration.

Once inside the Half Step Bridge detention centre, I had to surrender all personal belongings as was the requirement for every prisoner, then received a haircut that rendered me fully bald. Initially I was led into a crowded cell as a normal detainee where there were about a dozen others; thankfully, no drama happened during the day I was there. Jail management then seemed to realize that I was a supposedly sensitive political prisoner, so I was moved to a smaller and specially dedicated cell for only three people. The other two guys were specifically selected from other normal prison cells to accompany me: the older one in his late 30's introduced himself as Wen Yang(文洋), while the younger one was around the same age as me, from Hong Kong with the surname Chen(陈). Wen Yang told me how to control the fleas I had probably brought over from the Western District centre by stripping off all my clothes and putting them into a metal basin with a porcelain surface which the prisoners used to wash their faces and clothes with, then spraying the clothes with enough detergent and pouring water so as to completely permeate the clothes fully thus to kill the fleas overnight. This was an excellent flea-control mechanism, resulting in my entire six month stay in the detention centre being flea-free. Another problem in the jail cell were the bedbugs(臭虫) that hid in the gaps of the timber bed and came out at night to bite and suck human blood, inciting my skin into a strong allergic reaction with the appearance of many extremely itchy bumps: although the regime had sent me to work with farmers for 2 years following my high school graduation, this was the first time I had encountered bedbugs and their biting  was unbearable, so to avoid them I sat on the tiny wooden table-like structure next to our timber bed that night. As a rule the cell's electric bulb was left on all night, so when the night guard peeked in through the watching hole he shouted at me, but Wen Yang and Chen helped me beg for an exception until daytime so I could avoid getting further skin reactions from the bedbugs. After seeing my red and swollen skin, the guard did give me lenience and didn’t insist any further on my return to the bug-ridden timber bed. The next day we asked the guards to bring over plenty of boiling water to pour through the gaps and cracks on the timber bed so that the hidden bedbugs could be eliminated. This had a significant effect, and I didn’t experience any more bedbug bites after that.

Wen Yang told me he had been a songwriter in the state's Naval Political Department of the Song and Dance Troupe(海政文工团) before being accused of adultery by his superior, and the whole time we were in the cell together he continued to claim his innocence. In those radical years, military and civil officials often accused their subordinates or colleagues of adultery as a handy trick to persecute those they disliked; the accused could easily end up in jail, be sentenced for many years of hard labour and have the added punishment of being morally denounced and shunned by everyone around them. Wen Yang had an intellectual's face, bright eyes, tender white hands, and spoke slowly and clearly, even when angrily denouncing his persecutors. After learning that I was involved with a current sensitive political movement he became convinced that I would one day walk out of the prison long before himself, so he secretly wrote his own appeal letters and asked me to mail them when I did get out. Six months later I eventually did so, although without any way of knowing the result.

The only reading material allowed for prisoners was the official People's Daily, which was distributed every morning. Being a typical intellectual, Wen Yang would read some of the paper and deliberately skip over other parts so as to have something to read in the afternoon to kill time. He had lived part of his life before the communists took power so was not completely brainwashed by the regime as most of the younger generation were. He was therefore extremely sympathetic towards my political activities, and everyday we talked about our common interests. He told me the detention centre had people who had been held there for ages, some even from the time when the communists initially took power in  1949. One day he introduced me to a bespectacled middle-aged man in the opposite window across from our building, who had been a student in the Beijing University, then arrested during the Cultural Revolution for a political crime and subsequently left in the centre without trial for the past ten years.

The buildings in the Half Step Bridge detention centre were constructed in a letter K shape (K字楼), with the centre of the letter housing administration offices and the rest of the structure forming adjacent sub-buildings. As these did not face each other in parallel, it made it difficult for prisoners across the way to talk properly across windows.

Together with Wen Yang and I in the cell was the Hong Kong youth Chen whom we called Little Hong Kong(小香港). Chen was short-built and spoke Mandarin Chinese with a strong Hong Kong accent. He was actually born in Malaysia to a wealthy Chinese merchant family. In the heydays of the Great Leap Forward (1958~1962), his grandfather was enthralled by the Chinese Communist Regime's propaganda and dreamed of China as a super power that would bring prosperity to all ethnic Chinese around the globe, and so sent Chen's family back to the mainland so that they wouldn't miss the great opportunity. This was quite a common practice among the South East Asian Chinese population at that time, and I had met schoolmates who were from similarly extreme patriotic families as well. Little Hong Kong obviously didn’t understand these political fantasies as a young boy, and despite his grandfather’s expectations his family members weren't treated like heroes either once they were stuck inside the turmoil of mainland China's human hell. His grandpa finally realized his mistake on his deathbed, as the oldman's last words to his son's family were "Come back as soon as possible...".  After the radical years when the regime agreed to let Chen's family to leave he stayed in Hong Kong and had being working there. He was detained recently in the centre, accused of being passing of state secrets to people in Hong Kong, although he claimed to have only passed on some newspapers called " The Reference News"(参考消息) to some Hong Kong journalists who promised to pay for them. He seemed rather naïve in his understanding of the mainland’s political affairs, and during the time I knew him he was eagerly cooperating with the police in the hopes of an early release. The mainland communists were extremely paranoid about anything coming from or relating to the territories outside of their control and in their eyes anything foreign fell into the spy category. Their main suspicion of Little Hong Kong would have been whether or not he was a foreign agent (特务嫌疑), which of course he vehemently denied. As a prisoner from outside the country, he was given special treatment by the jail authorities and had his southern-flavoured meals with rice specially cooked in a small kitchen (小灶), while all the other prisoners survived on rough northern-flavoured rations such as corn flour buns(窝头) that were tougher to swallow than cooked rice. Little Hong Kong would often share his special food ration with us behind the guards’ backs. He had been to the Xi Dan Democratic Wall several times, so we had some common experiences and conversation topics. Like Wen Yang he was sympathetic towards me, so the three of us had quite an amicable living atmosphere.

I was interrogated from time to time in the centre. There were usually two interrogators, one a lanky and swarthy senior officer around forty years old with the surname Liu, the other a younger scribe who would present his papers recording the conversation to me at the end of each session for verification. The duration of each interrogation wasn't fixed but would usually take between 1 to 3 hours. Their main aim was to get me to admit that our activities around the Democratic Wall and publication of Exploration was a crime. I refused to do so for quite a few weeks, with the feeling that the authority had decided to persecute us, so whatever they accused us of wasn't that important.  My main preoccupation was with how I could  leave the detention centre and regain my freedom. The senior officer Liu seemed to be an experienced interrogator. His methodology was to induce me to say that what I had been doing since the end of last year constituted anti-government criminal activities against  state’s interests. From his questions, I felt the authorities were mainly trying to find out what exactly the publishers of our unofficial magazines had been doing that could be counted as organized opposition against the state which, ironically, was what the communists themselves had been doing before grabbing state power in 1949 ---- their biggest fear was if anybody rose up in the same way against them. Another thing they were trying to uncover was the extent of our Western support, a paranoia that all dictators share. the Chinese Communists were forever suspicious of foreign money, weaponry and personalities aiding the internal opposition against their oppressive regime, and so their subsequent crushing of rebels was thus justified by a  nationalist creed. When the police harassed and interrogated political prisoners and dissidents, their over-excitement at having discovered a "foreign agent" in their midst was often due to extreme ignorance towards anything outside of the regime’s authorized boundaries. Associating targets with "foreign" factors not only satisfied the officer’s curiosity towards these unknowns, it also boosted the importance of their case, and could even earn them a reward or promotion from their superior, who in turn was in a similar state of ignorance and curiosity towards anything outside of China.

For me, anything I had done since becoming involved in the Xi Dan Democratic Wall Movement was perfectly open and clear, without being criminal at all. As for foreign involvement, there were only some reporters’ and embassy officials' personal support in reporting our activities, buying our magazines and publishing our articles, none of them being related to Western government activities. For several weeks I kept on refuting the interrogators' accusations. While they seemed annoyed, I did not suffer any physical abuses and in fact had not even been handcuffed since being brought into the Centre, but I certainly hated to be jailed here for political reasons: I wished to get back my freedom.

Meanwhile, my two cell companions had been rotated several times. The guards treated the small cell like a privileged place in comparison to the crowded common cell that held a dozen prisoners, and it was used as an opportunity to reward the two prisoners they considered to be the most well-behaved and cooperative at any given time. Wen Yang and Little Hong Kong Chen had been rotated out of after several weeks; before their departure, Wen Yang carefully asked me to hide his appeal letter and mail it out for him once I managed to leave the jail.

My new cellmates were two middle-aged men. One was a tanned and solidly built farmer, much like Yu Ping from Dan Dong, he had been doing sales work for some country based collective enterprises that were limited by the regime in what kind of trade they could do. The regulations on what was permitted and what was not were usually very vague, so depending on who was checking up on them on behalf of the authorities, the salesmen for these businesses could easily be categorized as doing either legal or illegal work. The farmer salesman was probably unluckily encountered some ill-tempered government officials and ended up in jail for reasons he himself didn't understand. He was frightened to serve a long jail term and kept telling me how he was begging the prison authorities to release him back to the village to do hard labour as he was a farmer anyway. "I would never dare to do these sales anymore," he often repeated when we chatted, bending his back as if he was still in front of the interrogators. He was friendly to me and expressed his sympathy after learning that I was a political prisoner, although he couldn't fully understand what I had done to end up in jail. His companion prisoner was a short, stout middle-aged man with a wrinkled face and a relatively more sophisticated mind. His accused crime was child molestation or something similar, and as this was a huge loss of face he was often depressed and  reluctant to talk. While quiet, he did give me one piece of useful advice, which was to cover the belly with clothes even on hot days so as to avoid catching a cold. Neither of my two new cellmates were intellectuals so their understanding of political affairs was limited, and instead they would often argue about trivial topics such as whether a professor or an academic’s Ph. D. title was higher in social ranking, after reading official newspapers, as in their view everybody should have a social rank like the state leaders. They were quite obedient to the jail guards, but I had no difficulty in maintaining a good relationship with them.

After several weeks of a cold stalemate with the police interrogators, I figured that bending down and showing a remorseful attitude could lead to leniency on my punishment. I sensed from the older interrogator's words that they could punish Lao Wei harshly as a lesson to all of the Democratic Wall participants – in particular the unofficial magazine publishers – but could be relatively lenient to others like me if we showed remorse and cooperated with the police. I also sensed that these prosecutors were quite curious about the West and my family's intellectual background, as my father had studied in the USA in the late 1940's: it was quite unusual and exotic, arousing curiosity in their poor minds that were otherwise bombarded daily by the regime’s meaningless and boring ideological propaganda. I gradually started talking about how I would acknowledge my mistakes, which the lanky Liu would quickly correct as to "your criminal activities". I wrote a lengthy confession tracing the origin of my "crime" back to my admiration of the Western lifestyle and ideology gleaned from reading books and my father's overseas studies, since this kind of tracing back was unusual and few, or more likely none of the democratic wall activists and unofficial magazine publishers had similar family background. My explanation seemed to be a plausible argument as the police interrogators accepted it and encouraged my confession to continue in this direction. While I was using remorse to obtain a favourable consideration from the officers so that I could hopefully get lenient treatment from the authorities, I was also facing an experienced police interrogator, in particular the senior Liu. His sly and well-camouflaged manner of speaking seduced me at times into forgetting the severity of the environment and the potential consequences for the people around me in the days leading up to my arrest. I exposed Lu Lin's family while explaining the near miss with the police at this home, as well as my secret stays in old classmates' homes, and even casual contact with my university classmate Hu Xiao Dong's family. This eventually led to Lu Lin's family, my classmates Lao Sun and Guo Lin, and even Hu Xiao Dong's sister and mother being harassed by police and their corresponding working units' political extremists, who were party officials and political activists eager to show their allegiance to the authority, and so harassing their suffering colleagues became their daily adrenaline rush, entertainment and achievement. My classmate Lao Sun was teaching in the No. 77 middle school when his connection to me was exposed and investigated by the police, and he was then harassed for a long time by a senior colleague Xie Cheng Ju(谢成举). The police visited Lu Lin and Hu Xiao Dong's families several times insisting on obtaining more information regarding their contact with me, as if there were so many more secrets we were all trying to hide. My classmate Guo Lin whose home was in the same courtyard as my father's, told the police he flushed the documents I left behind while staying in his home down the toilet, and luckily they didn't insist on pressing any charges against him. I deeply regret leaking information to the police that led to my friends being troubled by the state authority, and although I was too young to deal with the sophisticated police interrogator, I could have covered up more details so that fewer people were eventually chased down. To be a political dissident in communist China means that it is not only yourself that will suffer, but the people around you will suffer too, so it is crucial to conceal as much information about your connections as possible. In the end I was not formally sentenced and so nobody else around me received any more severe political trouble, but what they had helped me with and suffered from because of me to this day evokes my deepest gratitude and lingering feelings of regret and guilt.

Outside of interrogations, my fellow prisoners and I were allotted daily outdoor exercise time(放风时间). I saw Lao Wei once during this time, when he and his group of cellmates walked past me and mine; we nodded and smiled at each other, but didn't talk as the guards were right behind us. The prison authorities were extremely nervous about prisoners in the same case (同案犯) talking to each other in case they somehow ended up conspiring against the authority charging them(串供), so it was forbidden for these prisoners to even know the whereabouts of each other's cells. However, after that brief encounter in the prison yard a neighbouring prisoner passed the message to me that "Lao Wei asked you to try to get out". We had no more contact during my staying there.

In October 1979 I was told by the interrogator that Lao Wei would be formally tried for a counter-revolutionary crime. I was to attend the court to read a witness statement admitting that what I had done with him constituted criminal activity against the government, and apparently this would be my opportunity to show that I had enough remorse to avoid a similar trial. I wrote my witness statement admitting how my participation in the Democratic Wall movement and publishing Exploration were against the communist state and violated state law etc. On the court trial day I was hand-cuffed and led into a prisoner van flanked by several policemen, then driven to the Beijing Intermediately Court to the east of Qian Men (前门)in the middle of the city. Once there I saw Lao Wei again, this time in his defendant stand; both of us wore prisoner shirts and had the standard bald haircut. Lao Wei had several pages of self defence paper in his upper shirt pocket and was calm while giving me encouraging eye contact as I stepped up to the witness stand, read my statement and answered simple questions from the "judge", about who I was and how I got to know Lao Wei. After finishing my witness reading the "Judge" asked Lao Wei what he had to say on my statement and Lao Wei answered "Basically true".  I was not clear on what Lao Wei would be sentenced to until several days later during my next interrogation session, when the interrogator Liu told me he was sentenced to a long 15 year jail term. At the time I thought that they had sentenced him for our publication of Exploration and organizing the unofficial magazine publishers' meetings, but in actuality they charged Lao Wei for selling military secrets to Western journalists  --- I only learned of this ridiculously fabricated charge after I was released out of the prison the following month in November. It seemed that the authorities couldn't justify their charges and sentences on our publication of unofficial magazines alone, at least it wasn't convincing enough. As Liu told me Lao Wei's sentence, he also tried to console me by saying that my confession was good and deeply convincing enough so as to guarantee my lighter treatment. I later learned that my father had spent a lot of time and effort asking around his work place for testimonials to try and lessen my crime and get as much leniency as possible from the authorities. My eventual release from the prison without a formal jail sentence was probably due to many factors in the end, including my decision to express remorse, my confession, the efforts of people like my father outside the prison, as well as the authorities’ plan to punish the dissident leader (Lao Wei) heavily while treating his less important followers less harshly to set an example for other potential dissidents in the future.

During my last days in jail, the rotation of my cellmates continued. Two youths involved in the murder of a girlfriend came, as well as a young guy named Zhao who happened to know one of my neighbours back in my father's dormitory who was a well-known neighbourhood troublemaker. The two murder suspects were from a family of senior communist state officials and they often sneered at each other while claiming the other guy would eventually be sentenced to death for their murderous crime. The other guy Zhao was a street hooligan type with a mild attitude, who taught me how to sew papers into the inner layers of my cotton quilt. On my release day, the prison guards inspecting my personal belongings only did a symbolic check of the quilt without really feeling its inner cotton layers, so I successfully smuggled out Wen Yang's letter.

I was released from the Half Step Detention Centre in late November 1979 after being held there for half a year, in the name of "Release on Education"(教育释放）meaning that I was released without formal charge with rebuke. The prisoner slang for this kind of release was "Dry Up"(干上), referring to being released without getting wet(charged), and it was the best fate that all the prisoners in the centre were hoping for, even though most of them wouldn't get it. Upon my return home several schoolmates who lived nearby came to visit me, as did a reporter from the government’s Beijing Daily newspaper who asked me what thoughts I had about the release, to which I said none yet. However, the next day in their newspaper I found that the reporter had fabricated a response for me, where I expressed endless gratitude to the government for releasing me. Such lie-manufacturing was and still is commonly practiced by the communist media.

The government keeps a file on every citizen as a major mechanism for checking their loyalty and legitimacy throughout their lifetime. Although I avoided being formally charged and jailed, I had been expelled from the Communist Youth League in the university, lost my university student status and had a  political criminal stain on my personal file(人事档案）under "Released on Police Education". The stigma of once being a political prisoner had followed me wherever I went, from studying to working. When I was applying to participate in my graduate studies in Canada in the Autumn of 1985, the staff at the Beijing Public Security Bureau in charge of checking and issuing passport applications found my past prisoner record and questioned my eligibility to leave the country as a person with a "political problem". Coincidentally, that evening one of the staff members present in the discussions about this matter mentioned it to her husband Mr. Mo Yan Song(墨炎松)who was a part-time consultant in the private IT company where I had been working for over a year in the Zhong Guan Cun (中关村) High Tech area. Mr. Mo was a scientist in the High Energy Physics Institute of the Chinese Science Academy whose director Mr. Chen Chun Xian(陈春先）pioneered the high tech private enterprise where I was working. Mr. Mo knew me personally and we chatted from time to time. Upon learning from his wife that my passport application could possibly be rejected, Mr. Mo immediately asked her to persuade her colleagues to issue my passport: please manage to let Yang Guang go, said he to his wife. I only learned of this near miss afterwards from Mr. Mo and couldn't thank him enough.

Since then I have not proceeded any further with being a political dissident in communist mainland China, because as I understand it, democratic modernization in such a thoroughly oppressive society cannot be achieved through any non-violent processes  ----  these will achieve no substantial progress because they will always be brutally crushed by the government. The only way for mainland China to become a modern democratic and civilized society is to forcibly overthrow the communist regime completely, most likely through a military coup in which the top level communist leadership is completely wiped out personally; thus the entire country would be temporarily under military control to prevent any dictatorship-restoring rebellion, before a democratic constitution can be drafted and a national democratic election can be held.

When Lao Wei was eventually released to the United States in the late 1990s' and visited Australia in 1999, he came to meet me in my home and we chatted several times. I declined his kind invitation to join his and other overseas Chinese democratic organization activities. I had and will always hold extremely high respect for Lao Wei personally, but feel disappointed at the entire Chinese democratic movement inside and outside of mainland China, because they have not addressed the crucial point of the Chinese Democratization progress: namely to forcibly overthrow this brutal and oppressive regime comprised of people who have never hesitated to use bloody force to crack down on any peaceful opposition movement. Faced with such an absolutely nonsensical regime, any peaceful argument or protest is  insignificant in achieving democratic goals, and a peaceful transition from this dictatorial regime into a democratic political system remains a far-off mirage. I am not a politically-oriented person nor do I have  strong interests in participating in politics, but growing up in communist China and personally dealing with the regime's numerous personnel at various levels has taught me one fundamental lesson: this regime cannot be peacefully persuaded into giving up its brutality and taking up a democratic process by itself. To democratize mainland China, a military coup d'état is needed to overthrow the Chinese communist government. If in the 1970's, faced with communist brutality, absurdity and an almost complete iron curtain that sealed off cultural information from the outside world, the local civilian  youth could still spontaneously formulate their anti-regime impulses into organized political activities, then the 21st century Chinese military professionals (especially officers with a tertiary education and a global perspective) would certainly have a natural responsibility for democratizing the country. When this responsibility and understanding reaches a certain maturity, a military takeover from the communist ruling elite will happen. The best effort that the civilian democratic movement could contribute to modernize China is to promote and help such a military action to come sooner.