BEIJING: IN FACT, NOT MUCH PROGRESS ON HUMAN RIGHTS

By Fred Hiatt

The Washington Post/The International Herald Tribune, Tuesday, December 8, 1998-12-08

Xu Wenli, who was arrested last week, knows what awaits him in the Chinese gulag. This isn't his first time. NU. Xu, now 55, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for advocating democracy back in 1979. He spent his first three years in solitary confinement, in a cell of about six square meters. When he managed, in 1984, to smuggle out an account of his trial and interrogations, his living space was cut in half and he was returned to solitary confinement. When in 1989 he was permitted, for the first time in three years, to see his wife, he could hardly speak; he spent most of the half-hour weeping uncontrollably. A prison official said solitude was "beneficial to Xu's individual reform." He did not rush to the ramparts when he was released in 1993. He spent time with his wife and daughter, who had been 8 when he went into prison. He read and traveled through China to catch up on all he had missed. He was, and is, known as a moderate in China's prodemocracy movement, levelheaded, rational, no firebrand. So as he

moved back into the leadership of the movement this year, he understood the risks, and so did his family. "I find him great as a person," his daughter Xu Jin, now 26, told me last week. "I wish I could know him better as a dad." Mr. Xu kept a packed suitcase near his door. He was followed, spied upon, harassed and many times, detained and released. His detention last week seems different. His friends and family fear the worst, for he has been accused of treason. They do not know where he is being held. His crime: once again advocating democracy in China. His arrest is one of many in recent days. Democracy advocates and Tibetan priests are being rounded up. Unauthorized churches are being shut down. The regime has promulgated a new repressive law regulating all organizations outside the Communist Party. This will permit China's regime to squelch freedom of association while still claiming to follow the "rule of law." Only a few months ago, President Bill Clinton spoke of the I real progress" that China bad m

ade in human rights. It had released several dissidents, he said; allowed a delegation of U.S. religious leaders to visit; promised to sign an intemational treaty on human rights. During Mr. Clinton's triumphal tour through China in June and July, this "progress" was cited as evidence that his policy was working - that "through engagement you can get a lot of serious things done and promote America's values and maybe even advance the process of change in China," as his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, said. Now, with China simultaneously signing and violating the human rights treaty, you have to wonder about the direction of change. Mr. Clinton is hardly the first American to want to believe in the benevolence of China's regime. Just last week the novelist John Updike reported in The New Yorker on his recent trip to China. His conclusion: "The Chinese seemed happy." The captain of Mr. Updike's tourist boat on the Yangtze seemed happy. The author's tour guide seemed happy. President Jiang Zemin, annou

ncing what Mr. Updike called a "new and broadened human rights policy," seemed happy. The novelist was impressed that his tour guides "touched boldly upon the mistakes of the past," even though "amiable" party cadres were listening in. He detected no KGB-style intrusiveness, "no hint of suppressed divulgence from our young Chinese guides." Mr. Updike does not present himself as an expert on China. Maybe he was not aware that many of the scenic Yangtze riverbanks are about to be flooded into oblivion, when China completes a gargantuan dam that is forcing the relocation of a million people. Maybe he was not aware of the three Chinese men who received sentences of 16 years to life for splashing paint on the giant Mao portrait he describes at Beijing's center. Maybe he did not know that Mr. Jiang's "broadened human rights policy " was in fact a prescription for more repression based on the notion, as the or ganization Human Rights in China recently noted, that "depriving citizens of their fundamental rights is p

erfectly acceptable, provided there is a written rule permitting it." But something else seems to be at work here, and for NU. Clinton as well. After all these Cold War decades, we outsiders are not accustomed to seeing free market enterprise inside a oneparty dictatorship. You might ar-gue that we have not seen such a thing since Nazi Germany. China is unquestionably bustling. Lideed, for Mr. Updike "the least agreeable aspect of present-day China is the rampant entrepreneurism that lines the path to every notable sight. " The country does not resemble the Soviet Union. It does not re~ semble the China of 20 years ago, where everyone dressed alike and worked for the state. Today, millions of Chinese are far freer to choose their place of residence, their jobs, their clothes and lifestyles. Mr. Clinton argues that in the long run China's enterprise cannot coexist with China's repression, and he may be right. The day after Mr. Xu's arrest, nearly 200 dissidents across China issued a statement of protest an ac

t reflecting remarkable coordination as well as courage. But it is one thing to assert that repression must ease, another to assume that it is easing already. In recent years China has not made much progress on human rights. To pretend otherwise is to diminish Xu Wenli, who is once again facing the "beneficial" effects of solitude.