Moscow, November 5, 1997

Dear President:

I write you in view of your state visit to People's Republic of China scheduled for November 9-11.

I urgently request you to pay during Russian-Chinese negotiations the top-priority attention - apart of the issues of economical co-operation - to the problem of democracy and human rights in People's Republic of China. In particular, I ask you to express your concern on the facts of persecutions against Chinese dissidents and - first of all - to demand the immediate and unconditional liberation of two Chinese democrats and human rights activists: Wei Jingsheng, a Sakharov Prize winner, and Wang Dan.

Wei Jingsheng is leader of the "Wall for Democracy" movement between 1978 and 1979. Arrested on March 29, 1979 for "spreading secrets of State", Wei was sentenced to 15 years in prison for "counter-revolutionary crimes". To the four modernizations of Deng Xiaoping, he added a fifth one: "the democracy". In 1992, from his prison he wrote to Deng Xiaoping asking him to start negotiations with the Dalai Lama. Released in 1993, Wei continued to openly denounce human rights violations in China. Arrested again on April 1, 1994 he was detained in a secret place for 20 months with neither charges nor trial. On November 21, 1995, Chinese authorities sentenced him to a new 15-year term. In October 1996, he received the Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought of the European Parliament.

Wang Dan is one of the leaders of Beijing's spring of 1989. Wang Dan has become the pursued person number one of the regime following the repression on the Tien An Men Square. Arrested on July 2, 1989 he was sentenced on January 26, 1991 to 4 years in prison for "counter-revolutionary propaganda and instigation". Released in February 1993, Wang continued his activities in favour of democratic reforms. During the process against Wei Jingsheng in December 1995, Wang was accused for complicity in the project "aiming to collect the forces of different illegal organisations for preparing the take-over of the government". On May 21, 1995 Wang "disappeared" after he has launched an appeal in favour of the rehabilitation of movement of Tien An Men. After having been detained in a secret place for 17 months, Wang was sentenced on October 7, 1996 to 11 years in prison for "conspiracy aiming the take-over of the regime".

I also ask you to raise during your visit in Beijing the fate of millions of people from Tibet, Eastern Turkestan and Inner Mongolia, whose political, civil, cultural and religious rights are being brutally violated by Chinese authorities during the illegal occupation and annexation which lasts already almost a half century.

Dear Boris Nikolaevich, you are the first democratically elected president of free Russia. Therefore, it's possible to hope that it is not indifferent to the rights and democratic liberties of more than one fourth part of the entire world population which still lives under totalitarian communist regime - a regime whose crushing is fairly symbolized by you. Exactly the problem of human rights and democracy in the last communist empire on the planet, and not the anti-western rhetorics covered by the words about "a multi-polar world", should become the basis of Russian policy regarding China.

Yours respectfully,

Nikolaj Khramov

(coordinator of the Transnational Radical Party

in Russia and CIS)