My Life in Prison: Memoirs of a Chinese Political Dissident by Jiang Qisheng, and: Heart for Freedom: The Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and Her Quest to Free China’s Daughters by Chai Ling (review)

Both authors considered here were active in the student democracy movement of 1989, and both remain critics of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regime, Jiang Qisheng from within the country and Chai Ling from without. Jiang was head of the Beijing Student Autonomous Federation and was among those who met with then Premier Li Peng in hopes of engaging in a dialogue with the authorities. He served a brief prison sentence after the movement was suppressed, and was re-arrested in 1999 for helping to organize a demonstration with the Tiananmen mothers on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the massacre. His book recounts his time in the Beijing Detention Center while awaiting trial and at the Transfer Center prior to being sent to prison. It does not discuss his four years actually in prison. One gets the impression these years were the easiest part of his ordeal.

Chai Ling was the “supreme commander” of the hunger-strikers at Tiananmen. After the army seized the square, she and her husband, also a prominent activist, managed to escape. She and her husband were soon divorced. She eventually made her way to the United States. After receiving an MA from Princeton, she remarried a wealthy Boston businessman-politician and founded Zenzabar, a successful Internet company. In 2009, she converted to Christianity, and the book constitutes a kind of apology (in the classical sense of explanation) for her life. The last few chapters are mainly a devotional meditation.

Both works are addressed to an English-language audience, probably primarily an American audience. Both, one assumes, are designed to influence American public opinion, with the ultimate aim of encouraging that opinion to push for more humane political order in China. It is hard to know how effective they will be toward that end. The American relationship with China is more complicated now than it used to be and more complicated than the old American relationship with the Soviet Union. From 1976 to 1989, China truly did seem to be undergoing what its rulers purport most to fear, a peaceful evolution, with the political system on a trajectory not necessarily toward liberal democracy but toward greater openness and tolerance to match the growing liberal economy. There was much goodwill between the aware publics in both countries. After the June 4 massacre, this goodwill vanished. However, China’s economic performance in the subsequent decades has fed into an increased military capacity, to the point where, for good or for ill, America can no longer take for granted its ability to exercise political influence in the Western Pacific. Also—and here is the crucial difference from the old Soviet Union—China’s growth has brought about a symbiotic intertwinement of the two countries, such that despite many political, economic, military, and moral frictions, the political establishments of both countries are highly motivated to avoid major stresses in the relationship.

Thus, in contrast to the media attention that used to be showered on Soviet dissidents, these works will probably receive minimal notice. In 1989, the American embassy in Beijing was sheltered the outspoken physicist Fang Lizhi for months, despite President George H. W. Bush’s reservations about taking an overly moralistic line toward the PRC. The United States was later able to arrange for Fang’s safe departure. In 2012, the United States declined to give asylum to the Chongqing police boss Wang Lijun. Wang certainly seems...