Departments
|
Week of 15 January 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 19 |
Feature
Article
Dissident's daughter seeks justice
By Eric McHenry
Chinese political dissident Xu Wenli, father of Xu Jin (SFA'00), belongs to an exceptional class of idealists that includes Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Like these predecessors, he has placed his life entirely in the service of a single cause. And as they did, he is paying a terrible price for his commitment.
|
|
|
Xu Jin divides her time
between graduate study at SFA and lobbying for the
release of her father, Xu Wenli, from a Chinese
prison. In December, Wenli was sentenced to 13
years for organizing a democratic political party.
Photo by Kalman Zabarsky
|
Xu Jin is working hard for the release of her father and for a way of living that is true to his ideals but does not demand so utter a sacrifice. Right now she is pursuing justice for Wenli while fulfilling her academic requirements as a second-semester visual arts graduate student, which include the teaching of two classes.
"It's not easy," she says. "I have to strike a better balance, because I can't do this all the time."
When Wenli and other organizers of the China Democratic Party were detained in late November, Jin went to Washington, D.C., where she lobbied the U.S. government and met with diplomats from Canadian, French, German, and British embassies. She gave interviews to such publications as the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and fired off an editorial that appeared in the New York Times. In the week before classes resumed at BU, while preparing her part of a first-year graduate student exhibition in the 808 Gallery, Jin was giving additional newspaper interviews and submitting testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations for its inquiry into her father's case. Jin says her goal is to keep the international community's attention from lapsing.
"I don't think he'll be in prison for another 12 years," she says, "but it will still be a long battle, because as time goes by the pressure to have him released goes down. I want to go to Washington and lobby constantly, to keep that pressure up all the time."
It was external political pressure that brought about Wenli's release from prison in 1993, Jin says. Her father had been convicted of "counterrevolutionary activities" for producing a prodemocracy journal, April 5 Forum, in his apartment. He was held for 12 years in Beijing's No. 1 Prison and allowed only limited human contact. Jin and her mother, He Xintong, saw him for 40 minutes once every two months, except during a three-year period when he was kept in a tiny cell and allowed no visitors whatsoever. In 1993, at the urging of the U.S. government, he was released. China was applying to host the 2000 Olympics at the time, Jin says, and wanted to soften its image where human rights was concerned.
Wenli lived under house arrest for the next five years, with around-the-clock police surveillance and periodic searches and seizures. He nonetheless continued to be a public proponent of democracy, working on behalf of other prisoners of conscience and his party. On December 20, he was convicted of "subverting the government" (not "counterrevolutionary activities" -- a semantic change that might bespeak some small measure of political progress, Jin says). The charges against him included talking to a foreign reporter and receiving $500 from a friend.
"Five hundred dollars is subverting the government of China!" says Jin incredulously. "Right!"
In addition to refusing exile, Wenli has said that he will not appeal his conviction. In the December 20 trial, which lasted only three hours, he was represented by a government-appointed attorney and effectively muzzled by the judge, Jin says. Wenli believes the appeals process would be a similar charade. He's hoping that external pressure will again force the government to let him go. China, Jin says, is very sensitive to international scrutiny. "The Chinese government is very afraid of losing face. I think attention from the media is his best hope at this point."
Despite the job's demands, Jin says she doesn't mind being what one of her friends jokingly calls Wenli's spokeswoman. "It's the best thing I can do to help him," she says.
Jin, who graduated from Bard College last spring, came to the United States less than a year after her father's release. As the daughter of a well-known dissident, she was not going to be permitted an advanced education in China. Jin says her experience at BU has been rewarding thus far, and that SFA faculty members, aware of her extraordinary story, have been particularly conscientious.
"We're constantly struck by her fortitude," says Carol Keller, SFA assistant professor of sculpture. "She's seen so much adversity, and has managed to use it very constructively. She's turned her difficulties into occasions for reflection or used them as ways of focusing herself."
Jin is a specialist in three-dimensional art and likes to use branches, bark, and other organic materials when creating her mixed-media pieces. Boats, she says, have been a consistent motif in her work and provided the theme for her senior art project at Bard. Jin built her first representation of a boat at the age of 10, out of bark and string. At the time, her father had been in prison for over a year. She named it The Waiting. The vessels that recur in her work today, she says, carry the same hopes for freedom and reunion with her family.
"It's still a wish for me," she says. "It's still waiting for me."
The works of Xu Jin and other first-year SFA graduate students are on display January 15 to 28 in the 808 Gallery, located at 808 Commonwealth Ave. Hours are 1 to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. For more information, call 617-353-3350.