As punishment from the government for writing his manifesto, Wei was arrested and convicted of "counter-revolutionary" activities, and was detained as a political prisoner from 1979 to 1993.
[1][2] Briefly released in 1993, Wei continued to engage in his dissident activities by speaking to visiting journalists, and as punishment, he was imprisoned again from 1994 to 1997, making it a total of 18 years he has spent in various prisons.
[4] He lived in remote rural areas in Northern China and was able to speak with peasant farmers about the widespread famines that had occurred a few years before, during the Great Leap Forward.
[5] He uncovered the role that the communist government under Mao Zedong played in causing the famines, and it forced Wei to start questioning the nature of the system under which he lived.
[3] Wei would later write about this period: "I felt as if I had suddenly awakened from a long dream, but everyone around me was still plunged in darkness.
[7] Of course, internal problems cannot be solved overnight but must be constantly addressed as part of a long-term process.
We need no gods or emperors and we don't believe in saviors of any kind...we do not want to serve as mere tools of dictators with personal ambitions for carrying out modernization.
[8]Wei differed from the mainstream of the Democracy Wall movement (which believed that the primary conflict was between a bureaucratic class and the people) because unlike the majority of movement participants, he argued that a totalitarian political system was the source of the people's grievances.
He published a letter under his name in March 1979 in which he denounced the inhuman conditions which existed in Beijing's Qincheng Prison, where the 10th Panchen Lama was imprisoned.
[16] Although he was released shortly afterward and sent into exile in Tianjin, Wei was arrested once more on 1 April 1994 when he tried to return to Beijing.
[16] He was sent to the United States due to international pressure, especially the request by US President Bill Clinton.