Wei Jingsheng, an electrician and writer who had posted essays calling for democracy and human rights on Beijing's famous Democracy Wall, was arrested by Chinese authorities. His essay 'The Fifth Modernization,' which argued that political democracy must accompany Deng Xiaoping's economic modernization drive, made him a target for a government unwilling to tolerate open dissent.
Wei's arrest came less than five months after he had begun publicly posting essays on Xidan Democracy Wall, a stretch of brick wall in Beijing where citizens pasted handwritten posters criticizing the Cultural Revolution and calling for political reform. His writing directly challenged Deng Xiaoping, arguing that without democratic institutions, China's 'Four Modernizations' program of economic reform would simply replace one form of authoritarian control with another.
He was tried later that year and sentenced to 15 years in prison for 'counterrevolutionary' crimes, including allegedly leaking military information to a foreign journalist. His trial, unusually, was partially open to foreign press, and his defiant self-defense speech was smuggled out and became a landmark document of Chinese dissident literature.
Wei spent a total of nearly 18 years in Chinese prisons across two separate periods before being exiled to the United States in 1997, where he continued campaigning for human rights in China. He is often called the father of the Chinese democracy movement, and his arrest marked the effective end of the brief Democracy Wall era.