Democracy Award honors Heroes of Human Rights and Democracy in China In 1998, the National Endowment for Democracy honored the heroic efforts of two men that represent the two generations of the post-Mao democracy movement in China -- the generation of the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79,...

Wei Jingsheng was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1979 for circulating articles he had written advocating democracy -- most famously his bold essay "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy," which said that the regime's economic reform program called "The Four Modernizations" would be "a new...