After doing some time as a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, Wei returned to Beijing, where he was working as an electrician in the Beijing Zoo in the late 1970s. Wei Jingsheng was particularly active in the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-1979. Like other activists, he wrote posters expressing his ideas and pasted them onto the “Democracy Wall” on a street corner in Beijing. The poster calling for China to pursue a “Fifth Modernization” was written in response to the Communist Party’s emphasis on building the “Four Modernizations” (i.e., agriculture, national defense, industry, and science/technology). In an unusual gesture, Wei signed the poster with his name and address.
His activities — including this poster, co-editing an unofficial magazine, and another poster in which he suggested that Deng Xiaoping was becoming a new dictator — earned Wei Jingsheng serious attention from the authorities. He was arrested in 1979, charged with passing “military secrets” to a foreigner, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Released in 1993, Wei was arrested after six months and sentenced to another 14 years on charges of “counter-revolution.” He was released in 1997 and exiled to the United States.
