What is democracy? True democracy means the holding of power by the laboring masses. Are laborers unqualified to hold power? Yugoslavia has taken thi… - Wei Jingsheng
" "What is democracy? True democracy means the holding of power by the laboring masses. Are laborers unqualified to hold power? Yugoslavia has taken this road and proved to us that even without dictatorial rulers, big or small, the people can work even better.
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About Wei Jingsheng
Wei Jingsheng (Chinese: 魏京生) (born 20 May 1950) is a Chinese human rights activist and dissident. He is most prominent for having authored the essay "The Fifth Modernization", which was posted on the Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1978. As punishment for writing his manifesto, Wei was arrested and convicted of "counter-revolutionary" activities, and he was detained as a political prisoner from 1979 to 1993. Briefly released in 1993, Wei continued to engage in his dissident activities by speaking to visiting journalists, and as punishment, he was imprisoned again from 1994 to 1997, making it a total of 18 years he has spent in various prisons. He was deported to the United States of America on 16 November 1997, on medical parole. Still a Chinese citizen, in 1998 Wei established the Wei Jingsheng Foundation in New York City (now based in Washington, D.C.) whose stated aim is to work to improve human rights and advocate democratization in China.
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Jingsheng Wei
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Additional quotes by Wei Jingsheng
In ancient China, there were such maxims as "A cake in the picture can appease hunger" and "Watching the plums can quench the thirst." These witty and ironic remarks were quite popular in ancient times, but today, after a long and continuous development of history, people should never take such stupid remarks seriously. Yet some people not only believe in them but also carry them out in practice.
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Actually, Chinese demands for democracy didn't begin just yesterday. Chinese started demanding democracy almost a hundred years ago. Democratic thought influenced a lot of Chinese. Slowly, it's become popular and now, everyone wants democracy. So it's been a gradual process. However, I was different from previous democracy activists in one sense: since the 1950s, they were asking for democracy under communism. Yet, I feel that, if we're already under communist rule, where is the democracy? So this is where I mainly differed with them.
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