Word: weis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital, doesn't normally handle admissions, he made an exception when a call came in from Dr. Connie Mariano, who is Bill Clinton's personal physician. It wasn't the President who needed treatment but someone who would soon be getting just as much attention: Wei Jingsheng, China's most renowned dissident. The White House had been tipped off that Wei, who had spent most of the past 18 years in prison, would soon be released, and the Administration was helping make arrangements to whisk him away to the U.S. Since he was ailing and China...
...Wei's lack of medical insurance didn't seem very important after he arrived last week, making Henry Ford the focal point of a major international news story. While a hospital spokeswoman kept the crowds of reporters at bay, doctors gave the 47-year-old exile a thorough going-over. He was suffering from high blood pressure, and he needed glasses, but otherwise he was remarkably healthy for someone incarcerated so long in a country not noted for humane treatment of prisoners...
...Soon Wei was showing just a touch of the spirit of defiance that got him into such trouble back in China. He was caught smoking against doctors' orders and later demanded a speedy release from the hospital. By the time he flew to New York City late in the week for his first public appearance, he was the same outspoken champion of freedom who won admiration around the world for daring to stand up to China's communist leadership. At a press conference held in the New York Public Library, Wei said, "Those who enjoy democracy, liberty and human rights...
...Clinton Administration considered Wei's release to be a payoff from its policy of "constructive engagement" with China. Wei was such a leading light of the dissident movement--and thus considered so dangerous by the Chinese government--that his supporters sometimes feared he would never go free. A former electrician in Beijing, Wei first gained notoriety with a 1978 essay advocating that Deng Xiaoping broaden his campaign to carry out "Four Modernizations"--of industry, agriculture, science and the military--to include democracy as a "fifth modernization." The next year, after writing a wall poster that accused Deng of being...
Even behind bars, though, he could not resist needling Deng in a series of letters that were smuggled out of jail and published overseas. "Your problem," Wei wrote Deng in 1987, "is that you have too much ambition, too little talent and you're narrow-minded." And on Nov. 11, 1989: "You say, 'We are not afraid of going it alone, and no one has the right to interfere in our domestic affairs.' You unscrupulous schemer! Do you think that treating the people of China as a joke makes you some kind of hero? It's time to loosen...