The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison and Other Writings - Softcover

Wei Jingsheng is a fearless fighter for individual rights in China, and has spent nearly all of the last 17 years in prison. From his solitary confinement cell, he has written defiant letters to Deng Xiaoping and other communist leaders expressing his views on economic reform, foreign investment, Tibet and other urgent social and political concerns. This book also contains letters to family and friends and a selection of political essays and his moving defence statement from his first trial.

Wei Jingsheng, a former Red Guard, was working as an electrician at the Beijing Zoo in 1978 when he became a leader in the Democracy Wall movement. An outspoken critic of government policy and advocate of individual rights since then, he was imprisoned in China from 1979 to 1993. Rearrested and imprisoned again in early 1994, he is now serving a fourteen-year sentence. In 1996 he won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.