西单民主墙Xidan Democracy Wall
What they did: In the autumn and winter of 1978, a wall over a hundred meters long on the north side of the Xidan intersection on West Chang'an Avenue filled with big-character posters. The first to post were victims of the Cultural Revolution and petitioners who had streamed into Beijing from across the country, writing out their grievances and demanding redress. The crowds reading them grew — night-shift workers, cyclists stopping on their way — until the pavement was impassable, and foreign journalists set up their cameras. It became known as the Xidan Democracy Wall. By late November the posters had turned from grievances to politics: some openly questioned the verdict on Mao Zedong, others demanded democracy and the rule of law. On December 5, 1978, Beijing Zoo electrician Wei Jingsheng posted “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy and More,” signed with his real name and work unit, and the wall reached its climax.
Prelude: The wall's immediate backdrop was the Beijing Party Committee's rehabilitation of the Tiananmen incident in November 1978. When the news spread, grievances and arguments suppressed for years poured out at once. Among those posting were April Fifth participants seeking redress and petitioners — peasants and workers from the provinces who camped near the petition offices. In January 1979 the “Chinese Human Rights Alliance” posted a Chinese Declaration of Human Rights on the wall, listing nineteen claimed rights including speech, publication and movement. On December 23, 1978, the first issue of the poetry journal Today was pasted onto the wall and handed out on the spot, with onlookers competing to copy it — one wall serving at once as rostrum, newsstand and publishing house.
The turn in official attitude: In its first months the Democracy Wall was not banned; it enjoyed a measure of tacit tolerance from the top. In late November 1978, Deng Xiaoping told a foreign guest that it was normal for the masses to put up big-character posters — “What is there to fear?” Word reached the wall, and the poster-writers were emboldened. Around the Third Plenary Session, the demands on the wall briefly harmonized with the Party's own correction of Cultural Revolution errors: rehabilitation of April Fifth, criticism of the personality cult — these were common topics on and off the wall. The harmony was short-lived. In January 1979, diplomatic relations with the United States were established and economic rectification began at home; the wall's sharp criticism of Mao and its questioning of the system itself came to be seen as loss of control. At the end of March, Deng delivered his “Four Cardinal Principles” speech, drawing the line explicitly. Wei Jingsheng's arrest on March 29 and the speech came in the same sequence — first the arrest, then the doctrine. The wall's fate was sealed that week.
The wall's everyday geography: The Xidan Democracy Wall stood on the northwest corner of the Xidan intersection, opposite the Cultural Palace of Nationalities — a stretch of brick wall fronting a bus stop, with crowds passing all day. Posting followed unwritten rules: new posters pasted over old ones was routine, but signed political essays were spontaneously protected by onlookers, who would not let anyone tear them down. Among the wall's fixtures were volunteers of an informal “reception desk,” registering and directing poster-writers who had come to Beijing from elsewhere. The film and tapes carried out by foreign journalists let the wall's words reach overseas radio the same day and circle back — many Beijing residents first heard Wei Jingsheng's name on “enemy station” broadcasts and only then went to Xidan to see the wall. This circulation, inside and outside the wall, was the distinctive information ecology of the winter of 1978. After the wall was moved to Yuetan Park in December 1979, attendance collapsed; as an old poster-writer put it, the wall was the same wall, but the readers were gone, and so the wall died.
Course of events: In the year and more that the wall survived, the activity around it went far beyond posters. A wave of unofficial journals appeared — Explorations (Wei Jingsheng), April Fifth Forum (Xu Wenli, Liu Qing), Beijing Spring, the poetry journal Today — mostly mimeographed, with readers queuing to copy each new issue by hand. On January 1, 1979, petitioning worker Fu Yuehua led several hundred petitioners in a march along Chang'an Avenue chanting “Down with hunger” and “We want democracy and human rights” — the first spontaneous street march in Beijing since the Cultural Revolution. On March 25, Wei posted “Democracy or a New Dictatorship,” criticizing Deng Xiaoping by name. On March 29, Wei was arrested; in October he was sentenced to 15 years for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” and for passing military information to foreigners. In December 1979 the city ruled that big-character posters could be posted only on a designated wall in Yuetan Park, with names and work units registered. In 1980 the constitutional clause on the “four bigs” — speaking out freely, airing views fully, holding great debates and writing big-character posters — was deleted, and the Democracy Wall formally ended.
Life at the wall: In the wall's most active days there were debates and speeches before it daily, listeners packed several rings deep. In September 1979 the Stars (Xingxing) group of artists — Huang Rui, Ma Desheng, Wang Keping among them — held an open-air exhibition on the railings outside the National Art Museum; it was shut down after two days, and on October 1 the artists marched to the Democracy Wall in protest, in another of that autumn's famous Beijing street actions. On October 16, the Beijing Intermediate Court tried Wei Jingsheng in public session. He read out a lengthy defense, refused to confess, and was sentenced the same day to 15 years. The court record and his defense statement circulated widely, at home and abroad, for years afterward.
The ecosystem of unofficial journals: The wall's real medium was the mimeographed unofficial journal. Around 1979, Beijing alone had more than a dozen — Explorations, April Fifth Forum, Beijing Spring, Today, Fertile Soil, Seeking Truth — and unofficial publications across the country numbered in the dozens. They had no funding and no paper allocation: their editors were workers, clerks and students by day; by night they cut stencils and pushed mimeograph drums, printing a few hundred copies of each issue to circulate at the wall and on campuses, promptly copied and reprinted in other cities. Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming, who ran Beijing Spring, were in their early twenties — young men who had come through the April Fifth Movement. Poetry, fiction, political essays, readers' letters: together the journals formed a brief public sphere. In 1980–81 they were banned one by one, and those who cut the stencils and those who read the journals were registered, warned and arrested together.
The petitioners: The wall's other face was the petitioners. From late 1978 into 1979 they arrived in Beijing in the tens of thousands, a mixed multitude: people branded as rightists and “black gang elements” in the Cultural Revolution demanding implementation of rehabilitation policies; sent-down youth demanding to return to the cities; veterans demanding placement; peasants who had carried their lawsuits all the way to the capital. Unable to afford guesthouses, they slept outside the petition offices and on the railway-station square, and pasted their complaints on the Xidan wall. What set Fu Yuehua apart was that she organized this loose sand of petitioners: registering them, linking them up, holding meetings, marching. In the January 1, 1979 procession, someone held a placard reading simply “We want food.” For the authorities, organized petitioners were more frightening than any poster. Fu was arrested that spring, charged initially with “defamation” — a signal in the campaign to restore order to petitioning.
The people: Wei Jingsheng was 29, from a revolutionary cadre family. He had served as a soldier in Tibet and worked as an electrician at Beijing Zoo. He posted under no pseudonym — his signature gave his name, his work unit, even a contact address. After arrest he defended himself in court and refused to confess. During his 15-year sentence he was moved between prisons and labor camps, held for long stretches in solitary confinement, his health badly damaged, writing petitions and appeals throughout. He was paroled in September 1993, arrested again in 1994 after meeting a visiting US official, and sentenced to 14 more years for “conspiracy to subvert the government.” In November 1997 he was put on a plane to the United States on medical parole — 18 years in prison in total. Factory worker Fu Yuehua had accused a work-unit leader of assaulting her and petitioned for years without result; she put her complaint on the wall instead, organized petitioners arriving from the provinces, and was sentenced to two years for “defamation” and disturbing public order. Xu Wenli, editor of April Fifth Forum, was a worker at the Beijing Railway Bureau; arrested in 1981, he served 15 years, then was sentenced to 13 more in 1998 for helping found the China Democracy Party, and went into exile in the US in 2002.
Original demands (sourced): The “Fifth Modernization” argued that beyond the Four Modernizations, a fifth was needed — democracy. It questioned the substance of the “people's democratic dictatorship,” warned that without democracy the other four modernizations could come to nothing, and held that the people must have the right to choose, supervise and replace their leaders. It was signed with his real name and contact details. (Source: Wei Jingsheng, “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy and More,” December 5, 1978)
International attention: The Democracy Wall stood before international cameras from the start. Foreign correspondents were fixtures at the wall, and Wei Jingsheng's essay was quickly translated into many languages. After his 15-year sentence in October 1979, Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience and campaigned for him for years. During his imprisonment he received several international human rights honors: in 1996 the European Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Wei, still behind bars, and he was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The fame did not shorten his sentence, but it kept his name known to the world long after the wall came down. Sent to the United States in 1997, he has remained a symbolic figure of the overseas democracy movement.
Aftermath: Between 1979 and 1981 the wall's activists were picked off one by one: Ren Wanding, who had spoken at the wall, was arrested and sentenced; the unofficial journals were shut down and their editors and writers jailed. In 1981 a nationwide campaign cleared “illegal publications and organizations,” and most of the Democracy Wall generation went to prison or fell silent. But they did not disappear: ten years later, in 1989, Xu Wenli, Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming — young men seasoned by the April Fifth Movement and the Democracy Wall — were among the most experienced figures in the democracy movement. See: Xidan Democracy Wall
Wei Jingsheng's prison writings: Wei Jingsheng served most of his 15-year sentence in prisons and labor farms in Qinghai. Held in solitary confinement, chronically malnourished, having lost half his teeth, he persisted in petitioning by letter — by the texts later made public, he wrote dozens of letters to the authorities from prison, ranging from demands to reopen his own case to complete proposals for the country's political reform. In 1993, on the eve of the vote on Beijing's Olympic bid, he was paroled; the connection was widely assumed. In his half-year of freedom he met journalists and foreign officials and prepared a human rights fund — then was imprisoned again. Many researchers note that the turns in Wei's sentencing, like his arrest in March 1979, followed a political rather than judicial rhythm: seized when tightening was needed, released when a gesture was.
Echoes: Part of the Democracy Wall's influence fell outside mainland China. In 1979 its essays and journals were translated in bulk, and Western discussion of China for the first time had to reckon with “what the Chinese themselves say.” Newspapers in Taiwan and Hong Kong reprinted wall selections in series, and Hong Kong's support organizations for the mainland democracy movement took shape in response — many who later staffed the Hong Kong Alliance and campaigned for June Fourth families had their political awakening reading Democracy Wall reports in 1979. On the mainland, the wall's generation reappeared at every critical juncture: behind the 1986 student protests, in the advisers' ranks in the 1989 square, on the founding lists of the China Democracy Party in 1998 — everywhere one finds people who posted or published at Xidan in 1978. For many of them, that wall divides a life in two: before it, obedience; after it, no way back.
What it left behind: “Democracy Wall” became a term in its own right — a name for any space where ordinary people state political views in public, and every later “wall” has been measured against it. Wei Jingsheng's “fifth modernization” entered Chinese-history textbooks in many countries. The poetry journal Today posted its first issue on the wall, and the “misty poetry” of Bei Dao, Mang Ke and Shu Ting spread nationwide from there, changing the course of modern Chinese verse. And there are the people themselves: the wall's editors and poster-writers, some serving out full sentences, others exiled abroad, remain the predecessors every later generation of protesters has had to reckon with.
What became of them: The fates of the Democracy Wall generation can be read in a few names. Liu Qing was sent to re-education through labor in the early 1980s; after his release he went to the United States and long chaired the organization Human Rights in China, turning his journal experience into decades of international advocacy. Ren Wanding continued human rights work after prison and went into exile after 1989. Fu Yuehua, her sentence served, returned to ordinary life and kept appealing her own case for many years. Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming were sentenced to thirteen years in 1989 as “black hands” behind the protests; Chen died of illness in Beijing in 2014, while Wang, exiled in the US, has run party-building work and Beijing Spring. The wall stood for less than two years, but the people who walked away from it spent most of their lives finishing what they had begun to say in the winter of 1978.
The procedure of the ending: The Democracy Wall was ended by administrative procedure. In December 1979, the Beijing Revolutionary Committee issued a notice: from that date, big-character posters could be posted only at a designated site inside Yuetan Park; posters had to register name, address and work unit; content must not divulge state secrets or make personal attacks. The night the notice appeared, the posters remaining on the Xidan wall were cleared away in one operation. In February 1980, the Fifth Plenary Session resolved to propose deleting the constitutional “four bigs” clause; in September, the National People's Congress amended the constitution accordingly. At the same time, the journals' editors received an ultimatum: cease publication and surrender stencil tools. A few, like Xu Wenli, went underground and kept publishing until their arrests in 1981. This sequence — register first, relocate second, amend the law third, ban last — became the authorities' standing template for public spaces of expression: your mouth is not sealed; your home is moved first.
A note on sources: The Democracy Wall's primary documents survive poorly: original posters are almost all lost, and the unofficial journals circulate through readers' private collections and overseas library holdings — several university libraries in the United States and Hong Kong hold relatively complete bound sets. Wei Jingsheng's two essays exist in multiple translations with minor discrepancies; this site follows the Chinese originals of 1978 and 1979. Sentencing details for Fu Yuehua, Ren Wanding and others were never officially published; the account here rests on their own later recollections and the case files of organizations such as Amnesty International. A few years and sentence lengths differ slightly between sources; this site follows the version most sources agree on, and says so here.
The last editors: In the 1980 clearance, the last to fall was April Fifth Forum. Under the ban, Xu Wenli took the journal underground, hiding the mimeograph at a friend's home and putting out a final few issues. In April 1981 Xu was arrested, along with several of the journal's editors and writers; Liu Qing was sent to three years of re-education through labor. At trial Xu received 15 years for “counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” and “organizing a counter-revolutionary group,” the evidence including articles he had edited in the Democracy Wall period. The ending has a symbolic neatness: the era began with a wall on which articles could be posted, and ended with a trial of articles. For more than a decade afterward, China saw no unofficial publications at scale; the editors were in prison, in exile, or silent in business. When the internet arrived at the end of the 1990s, the old editors watched a new generation redo, with forums and blogs, what they had done with stencils and ink.
The site of the wall: The original site of the Xidan Democracy Wall no longer exists. In the commercial redevelopment of the Xidan district in the 1990s, that stretch of brick wall was demolished along with the old buildings around it, and shopping malls and office towers rose on the spot; it is now one of Beijing's busiest commercial districts, with crowds denser than in 1979. The site bears no marker of any kind: no plaque, no relief, not one line of text telling passers-by that big-character posters once covered this place, and that a man spent eighteen years in prison for an article posted here. To the shoppers passing daily it is only a subway exit. Archival work sometimes begins exactly here: first confirm whether a place still exists, then discover that it does not — and all that remains is to write down the coordinates: the northwest corner of the Xidan intersection, opposite the Cultural Palace of Nationalities, November 1978 to December 1979.
How the dates are counted: The Democracy Wall's beginning and end are recorded with slight variance. Its start is dated either to the posting boom of mid-to-late November 1978, or to December 5, 1978, when Wei Jingsheng posted “The Fifth Modernization.” Its end has three versions: the December 1979 relocation order as the formal end; the 1980 constitutional deletion of the “four bigs” as the legal end; and the 1981 arrests of Xu Wenli, Liu Qing and the last editors as the actual end. This site's heading uses 1978–1979, following the wall's life as a public space, while the text records all three endings — because how a wall dies cannot be fully told without the administrative order, the constitutional amendment and the arrests, all three.
Fu Yuehua's later years: Beside names like Wei Jingsheng and Xu Wenli, Fu Yuehua is often passed over in a line of historical narratives — yet her trajectory is the standard trajectory of the petitioner. After serving the two-year sentence imposed in 1979, she returned to Beijing and kept appealing both her original complaint and her conviction, writing petitions for decades. Her home was once a waystation for petitioners arriving in the capital, full of people at its height; later the house was demolished, and she moved to Beijing's southern outskirts, in poor health and straitened circumstances, still receiving journalists and researchers and recounting the New Year's Day 1979 procession. When journalists visited her in the 2010s, she kept her judgment papers and appeal letters bound in volumes. She said she regretted nothing; she simply could not understand how asking for a mouthful of food became a crime. There are no ceremonies for Fu Yuehua's old age — which is why this site writes her name into the main text.
The forerunner, Yu Luoke: The people at Democracy Wall did not start from zero. In 1967, a young Beijing man named Yu Luoke wrote On Family Background, a systematic attack on the doctrine that a person's worth is fixed by their parents' class status; the essay circulated widely among Red Guards. On March 5, 1970, he was sentenced to death at a mass rally in the Beijing Workers' Stadium and executed on the spot, aged twenty-seven. After Democracy Wall rose, the unofficial journals reprinted his essay and his prison writings, his name was invoked again and again on the wall and in print, and his family campaigned publicly for his exoneration. In 1980 Yu Luoke was declared innocent. The Democracy Wall generation saw him as a forerunner: many of the demands they later posted had been written more than a decade earlier, by a man who paid for them with his life. Many of those reading at the Xidan wall had copied On Family Background by hand in their youth — two generations, thirteen years apart, meeting at the same wall.
Walls beyond Beijing: Democracy Wall was not only in Beijing. In November 1978, the Guizhou poet Huang Xiang and his companions came to Beijing, posting and reciting long poems in the streets to sensation; the Enlightenment Society they founded in Guiyang, and its mimeographed journal Enlightenment, were the emblem of the movement beyond the capital. Posting walls and unofficial journals also appeared in Shanghai, Tianjin, Wuhan and Changsha, covering everything from local grievances to national politics. After 1979 these organizations were shut down one after another, and Huang Xiang was detained repeatedly. The standard record usually describes a single wall in Beijing, but the archive shows a multi-city movement: Beijing's wall was the largest, and the way it was closed set the template — first move the wall, then require registration, then amend the law and ban — and the walls elsewhere mostly went dark in the same sequence.
What became of Today: The poetry journal Today, first posted on the wall, ran only nine issues before it was forced to close in 1980, but the writers it launched went on to define modern Chinese poetry: Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng, Jiang He and Yang Lian moved from the Xidan wall to literary magazines across the country, and misty poetry went from being derided as incomprehensible to a place in literary history in under a decade. Its way of working survived too: no registration number, no funding, mimeographed and stapled, premiered on a wall — a method countless unofficial journals later copied. Most of the original political posters are lost; the poems lived. Half of the wall's longest legacy sits in literary history — which is why, years later, commemorations of Democracy Wall so often remember the poets before the manifestos.