New York Times, Editorial - January 2, 1997

Last week, the Chinese Government gave a 30-year-old scholar of Tibetan music an 18-year prison sentence for espionage. Even by Chinese standards, the sentence is astonishingly long. It is also a warning to Tibetans that their already scarce liberties are now further endangered.

Ngawang Choepel fled Tibet with his family when he was 2 to the Tibetan exile community in Dharmsala, India. He came to the United States in 1993 to study and teach at Middlebury College. In 1995 he went to Tibet to capture on video traditional songs and dances that he feared were being lost.

The basis of Ngawang Choepel's conviction is unclear, but even taping Tibetan culture for export could qualify as espionage under Chinese law. Since its invasion of Tibet in 1950, Beijing has gradually increased its efforts to erase Tibet's identity. China has arrested those who protested the takeover and tried to eradicate the people's affection for the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama.

In the 1960's and 1970's, the Chinese killed thousands of monks and nuns and destroyed virtually all Tibet's monasteries. China later tried a slightly softer line, but riots in 1987 brought another crackdown. Monks have been asked to repudiate the Dalai Lama or face expulsion, and at least 700 Tibetans are now in prison for political offenses.

China's repressive policy is wrong both morally and politically.

By smothering Tibetans' ability to speak, worship freely or express their culture, China risks driving them to violence.

Last week, a powerful, sophisticated bomb blew up outside a Government building in Lhasa.

Although the Dalai Lama has never wavered in his commitment to nonviolence and denies any link to the bomb, the Government quickly blamed the bomb on "the Dalai clique" and has vowed to retaliate.

The Chinese Government went out of its way to link Ngawang Choepel to the United States, charging that Americans underwrote his trip and that he was gathering information for a foreign agency. Indeed, Chinese officials seem to delight in taunting the United States over human rights issues. During a visit by Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1994, Beijing arrested China's leading democracy campaigner, Wei Jingsheng. In May of that year, Washington ended the linkage between China's behavior on human rights and its preferential trading status. Only two months later, hard-liners at a Communist Party meeting pushed through a policy that increased Chinese control of Tibet.

To be sure, American officials have scolded Beijing about human rights abuses in Tibet, Hong Kong and China itself.

But the Chinese know they can safely ignore such talk.

The Clinton Administration, unwilling to damage its relations with Beijing, has failed to impose any real cost on Chinese repression.

Whether or not Beijing intended Ngawang Choepel's sentence as a specific message to Washington, Washington should read it as an indication of China's continuing contempt for its weak defense of Tibetan rights.