END OF UNSAVORY TRAFFIC IN FAMOUS PRISONERS

by Jonathan Mirsky

The International Herald Tribune, April 21, 1998

The release from prison of Wang Dan, the Tiananmen student leader, and his flight to the United States may bring to an end an unsavory collusion between Washing ton and Beijing. It will now become all but impossible - for the two capitals to exploit well-known Chinese political prisoners whose release can be used as a pretense of respect for human rights. Wang Dan was the last one. This cynical game using celebrate prisoners as chips in bilateral dealings between the West and Communist countries was pioneered by the Soviet Union. The essential requirement was a supply of star "criminals," "counterrevolutionaries" or "traitors" who could be released by Moscow to get something in return - a trade concession, perhaps, or the return of a Soviet agent in prison in the United States. The procedure, later adopted by the Chinese, was always the same. The prisoner would be bundled suddenly onto a plane after his captors insisted, as Beijing recently did with Wei Jingsheng, that the release was for medical purposes on

ly and that the freed person was still regarded as a criminal. The Chinese benefit from this practice in several ways. The prisoner is out of China, where he could never be freed as a potential dissident leader. Once free, he is no longer an awkward issue in bilateral negotiations. An additional ad~ vantage is the praise of China by U.S. and other Western officials, who insist that there leases demonstrate that "quiet diplomacy," rather than "confrontation," brings progress in human rights. But, as Wei Jingsheng observes, calculated maneuvers are not a recognition of human rights. In March, when Mr. Wei asked British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to give him a single example of genuine human rights progress in China arising from quiet diplomacy, Mr. Cook conceded that he didn't have one. In any event, the game has always depended on the prisoner being well enough known in the West so that governments were under pressure from public opinion to secure the release. So valuable was Mr. Wei that Beijing briefly fr

eed him in 1993, hoping to persuade the International Olympic Committee to award the 2000 Games to China. When this failed, Mr. Wei was re-arrested. But late last year he was recycled into the game and released in exchange for President Jiang Zemin getting a full White House welcome when he visited Washington. Now, every Chinese dissident with a recognizable name in the West is in the United States, either by escaping from China or by being deported. Notoriety is the key ingredient in hostage diplomacy. There remain hundreds of Chinese political prisoners, but who knows their names? How many Americans have heard of Liu Baiqiang, a robber serving a 10 year prison sentence in Guangdong, who received an additional eight years in 1989 for writing tiny leaflets saying, "Long Live Freedom" and "Deng Xiaoping should resign," and attaching them to the legs of locusts which hereleased from his cell window? And what about those not so famous activists arrested in the weeks leading up to Wang Dan's release? Will Presid

ent Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright feel they are sufficiently glamorous to justify making more concessions to Beijing? How about Zhao Changqing, arrested in early April in Shaanxi Province for "endangering national security"? When Mr. Zhao was a student he supported the Tiananmen uprising, which inspired demonstrations in many other Chinese cities. In January he angered the local authorities by trying to enter the local elections that some foreigners have hailed as examples of burgeoning democracy. Arrested for a month and released, he is again in detention. Or Li Befeng, arrested in April in Sichuan Province after he wrote an open letter calling for international labor organizations to support factory workers laid off when their factories went bankrupt? He had already spent five years in prison after Tiananmen. Or Shen Liangqing, a former prosecutor, sentenced in late February in Anhui Province to two years in a labor camp for writing letters to officials urging respect for human rig

hts? The White House can hardly justify relaxing sanctions on nuclear technology for China because of such unknowns. However reluctantly, it will now have to abandon gestures involving celebrities and tackle the Chinese Communist system itself - its packed courts and show trials, and its suppression of free assembly and a free press - if respect for human rights is to have real meaning.