Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 13:59:38 -0800

From: Chinese Community Forum, Wednesday, November 20, 1996

Dear Sirs Who Serve Human Rights Watch/Asia:

From your article "Wang Dan's Trial and the New 'State Security' Era", I take two passages:

" If Wang Dan is found guilty as charged, the international community must not stay silent: -- China's chief trading partners, including the United States, the European Union, Australia, Canada and Japan, should postpone plans for any official trade missions to China, where government ministers accompanying corporate representatives for the express purpose of signing major business deal. There should be a moratorium on such ministerial-led visits until major human rights improvements, including the release of key political prisoners, take place."

"Meanwhile, hundreds of other known political dissidents, unofficial religious activists and believers, independent labor-rights advocates and ethnic-minority rights campaigners in Tibet, Xinjian and Inter Mongolia who have been rounded up by the security authorities and sentenced ..."

How good a human rights manifesto! But who are you? Are you Chinese? If you had been, I don't think you are now. Are you China's friends? If you assumed you were, I don't hesitate to declare that you are absolutely China's vicious enemies. I don't know what are your basic criterion by which to analyze international and internal affairs and to guide your activities. Is it morality? What a noble motive! But it is really a pity that you satisfy yourselves psychologically and morally at the expense of China's fundamental economic interests. If you don't agree to my conclusion, how can you prove you are sincerely responsible for China's democracy and prosperity? Have you ever calculated the benefits and costs when insisting on imposing economic sanctions against China just in order to step up the improvement of China's human rights?

Human rights defenders of HRWA, here is your quotation from one of Mr. Wang Dan's published articles, "China today is like a country sitting on the top of a volcano, like the wind-filled tower awaiting the coming storm." What is the "volcano" and "the coming storm"? Is it the internal problems brought about by China's economic transition and relatively slowly transformed super-structure? Yes, it partly is. However, in nature it is the "noble" efforts of the international anti-China forces who applaud not China's democracy and power but its collapse and turmoil. These forces invest their resources to aggravate China's inevitable problems both from outside and from inside rather than make kind-hearted, realistic and constructive recommendations to solve these problems.

Human rights defenders of HRWA, I am sure you have noticed the powerful Soviet Union, China's "old brother" have jumped into an abyss at least during an unexpected period. So the next logical conclusion seems to be why China not to try its great jump to democracy. The answer is self-evident. Russia, still a horrible military superpower, has been recently under attack even by Teliban and Abhazian militants. Please imagine what will happen to China, if the "noble" international community had imposed economic sanctions against China, if Chinese Government had bowed to the "dissidents" in "Tibet, Xinjiang and Inter Mongolia", if Chinese government lose its control due to radical and ideal China-style "glasnost" and "democratization", and in the meantime, China's economy haven't reached a certain level which can assimilate hundreds of thousands unemployed caused by economic transition and can mitigate the serious social conditions caused by immediate political pluralism, and in the end if all powers from all c

ontinents would excitedly "visit" China when China had collapsed and been thrown into conflicts without enough self-defense capabilities.

Human rights defenders of HRWA, I have to tell you that we Chinese who have been humiliated to live in the world for 150 years, will never tolerate the possibility that our country will return to a warlord era. The world can be destroyed , but China can't collapse.

Human rights defenders of HRWA, every Chinese, who is responsible for China's stability, China's integrity, China's future democracy and China's prosperity can at once see through the tricks of some of you, intentionally or unintentionally gnawing China's basic interests in today's unfavorable international environment.

Human rights defenders of HRWA, I tell you who is Mr. Wang Dan. Mr. Wang Dan, a classmate of mine in Peking University, has been a thoughtful and sophisticated student, with intense historical responsibility for his homeland. I fully understood and supported him in the student movement of 1989, and certainly sympathize with his sentence today. But during China's transition from authoritarianism to democracy, China need both hard-style governing and liberal democrats. This a painful dilemma which will haunt all Chinese in a certain period.

Human rights defenders of HRWA, if you really are China's friends and sincerely to promote the improvement of China's human rights, I urge you to select proper means to achieve your ends. If not, all of you , stop and shut up.