CHINESE POLICE ARREST 2 DISSIDENTS

Longtime activists demanded the release of political prisoners

The International Herald Tribune, Thursday, May 30, 1996

BEIJING - The police detained two Chinese dissidents after they sent a petition to Parliament demanding the release of political prisoners and a reassessment of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, relatives said Wednesday. The fathers of Wang Donghai and Chen Longde said their sons were picked up Tuesday in Hangzhou, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, but were unclear about the fate of the remaining five dissidents who signed the document. "I saw my son in the street at around 3 P.M. on Tuesday," Mr. Wang's father, who declined to give his name, said Wednesday by telephone from Hangzhou. "He said he was going to meet some friends, but then he disappeared. I did not see him again until about 10 o'clock this morning, when two policemen came to my house with him." The officers handed over a formal notice of his son's detention, saying he had been picked up for "illegal activities," but gave no indication of when the veteran activist would be released. The father of Mr. Chen, 36, said three policemen had come to

the family home at about 4 P.M. Tuesday and taken his son away, before also returning Wednesday morning with the formal notice of detention. Mr. Chen's father also declined to be named. The detentions come a week before the seventh anniversary of the massacres near Tiananmen Square and shortly after Mr. Wang, Mr. Chen and five, other dissidents from Zhejiang sent a petition to the Parliament. Their five demands included the immediate release of political prisoners such as Wei Jingsheng, Chen Ziming and Wang Dan and a parliamentary inquiry into the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing on June 4, 1989. It said the government should make a public apology for shooting hundreds of unarmed demonstrators and compensate the victims' families. The government should start a roundtable with people from all walks of life to discuss the constitution, to guarantee free speech and freedom of the press, it added. Mr. Wang, who was also active in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, and Mr. Chen spent t

wo and three years in prison, respectively, for their roles in the 1989 demonstrations.

Their petition was one of two sent recently to the Parliament, with a second one filed by 31 parents who lost a family member during the crackdown. Ding Zilin, a 57-year-old university teacher whose 17-year-old son was shot, said by telephone that the document, signed mainly by women, also called for an inquiry into the bloodshed "to find those responsible and punish them according to the law" and for compensation. Mr. Ding has long been fighting for a revision of the official judgment on the disturbances, which brands the prodemocracy agitators as "counter-revolutionaries." In previous years, the run-up to the June 4 anniversary has often seen a spate of petitions written by dissidents and intellectuals - quickly followed by a wave of detentions. The Zhejiang petition, disseminated through the group Human Rights in China, reflects the neutered state of China's dissident movement, with all its leaders either in jail oroverseas exile.