The Washington Post - Sep 23, 1995 - By William F. Schulz

A few weeks ago President Clinton journeyed over to Baltimore to watch Cal Ripken Jr. play in his record-breaking 2,131st game. Ripken's achievement over 13 years is an epic one, and it surely deserved the president's applause. But there is another U.S. citizen whose endurance record tops even Ripken's but who has yet to meet the president. Harry Wu spent 19 years in a Chinese prison camp and just barely escaped being subjected to quite a few more, but he has yet to receive an invitation to the White House. Why won't Bill Clinton meet with Harry Wu?

Like all presidents, Mr. Clinton uses invitations to the White House to curry favor with potential supporters and to signal his priorities. He meets with Boy Scouts and farmers and foreign dignitaries, and he gave a rousing welcome in June to Scott O'Grady, the U.S. pilot who survived six days behind Serb lines. But for the third time in a row he treated the Dalai Lama like an accidental tourist who just happened to be chatting it up with Vice President Gore when (surprise!) the president popped in, and he has avoided Harry Wu altogether, as if Wu had caught the Chinese flu during his seven recent weeks of confinement. Obviously the president is concerned that were he to receive Wu or the Dalai Lama formally, it would anger the Chinese. But, having insisted that the Chinese let Wu go before U.S.-Chinese relations could improve or Mrs. Clinton could go to Beijing, what kind of message does it send now to treat Wu like a persona non grata or allow Chinese President Jiang Zemin to act as the president's appoint

ments secretary? This is a particularly unfortunate signal following so closely upon the outrageous conduct of Chinese security officials at the United Nations World Conference on Women.

What Mr. Clinton has apparently still not learned is that when it comes to China, pressure works. When the United States insisted on reform of intellectual property laws and an end to piracy of U.S. products, the Chinese huffed and puffed and bellowed and scowled and then, recognizing intransigence in the U.S. position, they blinked. After President Clinton permitted Taiwan's President Lee to attend graduation exercises at Cornell, the Chinese ranted and raved and threatened to hold their breath until they fainted. Now, a short four months later, U.S.-Chinese relations are fundamentally back on track. And when Harry Wu was taken into custody, the United States held firm to its demands for his release, and today Wu is back home in California. What is important here is not so much Harry Wu himself. He will survive whether he meets with President Clinton or not; Bob Dole received him the other day and maybe, as far as Wu is concerned, that's good enough. What is far more important is that the United States send

China a consistent message about human rights instead of a garbled one. It has been said before, but perhaps it needs to be said again: What the Chinese are doing to their own people is despicable. They are imprisoning thousands of them for attempting to exercise the most elementary forms of free expression; they are torturing hundreds of them in the most barbaric ways; and they are executing people for such petty crimes as selling fake fertilizer. This is a mean regime we are dealing with in China, and it will not do to let them think for even a moment that we don't know it or have forgotten.

The other thing that is important is whom we honor. A people are defined in part by whom they consider heroes. Since not all of us can shake our heroes' hands, the president does it for us. Cal Ripken Jr. and Scott O'Grady deserve the president's attention. But after 19 years in prison and a lifetime devoted to putting an end to evil, surely so does Harry Wu.

The writer is executive director of Amnesty International USA.