International Herald Tribune

February 7-8, 1998

WEI JINGSHENG IS INCONVENIENT, AND NOT JUST FOR BEIJING

By Jim Hoagland

WASHINGTON - Tyrants jail and exile rebellious, free spirits like Wei Jingsheng for speaking truth to and about them. As the Soviets feared Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Chinese Communists fear Mr. Wei's intuitive understanding of their corrupt and inhumane system. The Chinese kept this former electrician and pamphleteer in prison for most of the past two decades to silence him.

That silence is now broken. Mr. Wei's enforced exile in the United States provides him a vast platform. The secret diplomacy that led to his release and expulsion in November have not tempered his truth-telling.

Gulping in the oxygen of freedom in the United States, Mr. Wei has begun- to write opinion pieces and to deliver speeches that strongly challenge the view that China, with American engagement, is slowly evolving into a stable free-market democracy and U.S. ally.

China's expulsion of Mr. Wei may someday be seen as one of those seemingly smart moves that turn a problem into a disaster. It may rank with the shah of Iran's decision to force the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini into exile in Paris, where Mr. Khomeini used modern communications to stir rebellion in Tehran.

Mr. Wei clearly was not part of the deal Beijing thought it had with the Clinton administration to keep him on a tight leash. At a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last week, Mr. Wei denounced Washington's embrace of Beijing as "selling out their friends and interests" in China

and helping a regime he labeled "the enemy of the United States."

The language was stark. It clanged as extreme on the cars of some of the academics, politicians, labor leaders and others present. As he spoke, the calculated risk Beijnig's rulers decided to take in launching this dissident into the orbit of foreign exile became clearer: Away, from Chinese soil he may be unable to sustain the acuity indignation and knowledge that have illuminated his denunciations of a rotten system.

This is where the Solzhenitsyn analogy runs deep. Encountering Mr. Wei's version of U.S.-Chinese relations is reminiscent of the shock of reading a Spanish newspaper in 1975 reporting the Russian writer's unreserved admiration and approval of the Franco and Pinochet regimes. How can a genuine hero and rebel so acute about his own country be so misguided on others?

After asserting that the United States "unwisely ceded all the Eastern European countries to Stalin," Mr. Wei argued that "to save a few pennies, to settle certain personal scores" and acting "on the basis of lies spoken" by "so-called China experts," the United States helped Mao Zedong's Communists take power in Beijing.

"The American people have become carried away by their own greatness. They refuse to draw lessons from their failures," Mr. Wei continued. Richard Nixon went to China to see Mao, "the greatest butcher of this century, and rescued the Chinese Communist regime from the jaws of death."

That version of history is not familiar to most Americans, and afterwards some in the audience seized on it to discount the rest of Mr. Wei's fiery, unyielding message. A counterattack to Mr. Wei' s denunciations is forming among Beijing's friends here.

But it should come as no surprise that a man who has just spent 18 years in prison does not have a sophisticated grasp of international relations. Nor should Mr. Wei's views of American motives, however flawed or one-dimensional, detract from his penetrating analysis of the Communist leadership in China.

Instead, Americans should be alarmed at the prospect that Mr. Wei's views represent a broad feeling among Chinese democrats about U.S. reliability and intentions.

His general warning is that the United States is building up a future crisis with China by supporting a discredited regime. His specific warning, repeated several times at the Council meeting, is that America must not back away from criticizing China on human rights, to buy the freedom of dissidents or anything else.

Wei Jingsheng is an inconvenient man for governments. Exile in America has not lessened his ability, and determination, to speak unsettling thoughts to power. Beijing' s wager that he will do them less damage abroad may turn out to be a historic miscalculation.

The Washington Post.