Wang Wanxing
| Wang Wanxing Chinese: 王万星 |
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| Born | October 10, 1949 Beijing |
| Known for | Democracy advocate |
Wang Wanxing (Chinese: 王万星, born October 10, 1949) is a prominent Chinese pro-democracy activist who was a prisoner of conscience for 13 years in Chinese detention centres and psychiatric institutions called Ankang. Wang was the only person to have been discharged from such an institution to a Western country. In 2005, he was released and now lives in exile in Germany.
Wang's parents were a labourer and an office worker. Wang grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and attended a middle school in Beijing. His activism was influenced by the death of his grandmother, who starved to death in a rural famine.
In 1968, the communist authorities sent him to a collective farm in Heilongjiang, a province next to the Russian border.
Whilst in the collective farm, he wrote a personal letter to Mao urging him to reinstate the then disgraced Deng Xiaoping. He was arrested in the middle of the night and spent the next month in jail.
In 1976, with mass popular demonstrations taking place in Tiananmen Square following the death of Zhou Enlai, Wang wrote to premier Hua Guofeng again in an attempt to seek the rehabilitation of Deng. He was branded a "reactionary" and jailed for 17 months. In February 1979, after Deng had returned to power, Wang was allowed to go back to Beijing, where he took a job in a vegetable warehouse. Wang participated in the 1979 Democracy Wall Movement. He was involved in the student-led democracy movement of 1989, when he attempted to advise the students on strategy, and to mediate between them and the government. In December 1998, wrote an open letter to China's leaders, pleading for leniency against Xu Wenli, Wang Youcai and Qin Yongmin, jailed for establishing the China Democracy Party.
Wang was again arrested on June 4, 1992 when he, acting alone, unfurled a banner in Tiananmen Square on the third anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He was swiftly arrested and locked up in a psychiatric hospital near Beijing, with a concocted diagnosis of "political monomania".
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