ABSTRACT
On October 16, 1979, Wei Jingsheng (having been arrested on March 29) was sentenced to 15 years in prison after a show trial in which it was charged that he had “betrayed his motherland by supplying a foreigner with state military information, … violated the Constitution by his writing of reactionary articles and, by his propagating counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation, … endangered the basic national and popular interests” (Wei 1997, 226). One week later, on October 23, halfway around the world in Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel (having been arrested on May 29) was sentenced to 4½ years in prison for “subversion of the republic … by assembling, copying, and distributing written material which the senate considered indictable: … mainly information about unjust judicial and extrajudicial procedures and practices in present-day Czechoslovakia” (Havel 1989, 1).
