The New York Times

February 16, 2000

China's Latest Theft

By TONG YI

Reports that the Chinese government intercepted $25,000 in foreign donations intended for the families of those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests may have shocked some, but not me.

In 1994 I tried to deliver $5,000 collected from American donors to Ding Zilin, a retired philosophy professor in Beijing who formed a network of families of victims after her son was killed in the 1989 crackdown; the Chinese police detained me, took the money and never returned it. And last year the Chinese government blocked the delivery of $20,000 to Ms. Ding's organization from Human Rights in China, a human rights group based in New York.

Since founding the families' network in the early 1990's, Ms. Ding and her husband, Jiang Peikun, have regularly been followed by agents from the State Security Ministry as they go about daily tasks like shopping and taking out the garbage. Agents on the street listen in as Ms. Ding and Mr. Jiang talk to friends. On sensitive days, like anniversaries of the 1989 killings, agents appear in front of their house by the carload.

Ms. Ding is just one of many Chinese being punished by the government for keeping the memory of the Tiananmen uprising alive and pressing the government for accountability. Jiang Qisheng, who worked closely with Ms. Ding for years, was arrested last May and tried on vague charges in November; he now awaits sentencing.

The Chinese government has also called Human Rights in China a hostile organization, and Chinese diplomats successfully lobbied United Nations member states to prevent the organization from gaining the nongovernmental organization status needed to take part in the annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva next month.

The Chinese government clearly looks bad when it blocks humanitarian aid. Why does it take such risks? Perhaps because the United States, in its effort to open trade with China, has not made the consequences of such actions tough enough. In fact, by uncoupling its trade policy from human rights issues in 1994, the Clinton administration has given the Chinese government an even freer hand in stifling people like Ms. Ding and Jiang Qisheng.

Congress, which begins debate on China's entry into the World Trade Organization today, must not overlook the detainment of peaceful protesters and political dissidents, or the pilfering of foreign aid for the families of the victims of Tiananmen Square.

(Tong Yi, a former aide to the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, spent two years in a Chinese prison. She is a student at Columbia Law School. )