(ADDS details, background, Human Rights Watch/Asia comment)

by Veronica Smith

WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (AFP) - China stamped out active dissent in 1996, despite increasing trade ties with the United States and other countries, the State Department said Thursday in its annual human rights review.

The highly critical report calls into question President Bill Clinton's policy of pursuing trade with the communist country to encourage respect for human rights.

"In China, where Marxist ideology has in recent years given way to economic pragmatism and increasingly robust ties of trade and commerce with the United States and many other countries, human rights abuses by a strong central Government persist in the face of legal reform efforts and economic and social change," said the report on human rights in 194 countries and territories.

"No dissidents were known to be active at year's end," the report said, and nonapproved religious groups, including Protestant and Roman Catholic groups faced tighter scrutiny.

Tuesday Clinton admitted that his policy of "constructive engagement" with Beijing had not yet borne fruit, but insisted it would bring about change "just as eventually the Berlin Wall fell."

The report, which has faulted China's human rights records year after year, was blasted by the Chinese Foreign Ministry as inaccurate and intrusive.

"This report is published every year. In many respects it is out of step with reality," Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen Guofang said in Beijing.

"We do not accept the attempts by certain countries to politicize the issue of human rights or those which use it to intefere in the internal affairs of another country," he said.

According to the State Department's report, China continued to commit widespread human rights abuses "stemming from the authorities' intolerance of dissent, fear of unrest, and the continuing absence of laws protecting basic freedoms."

Although China's constitution and laws protect basic freedoms, "they are often ignored in practice," it said, citing the killing and torture of prisoners, forced confessions, and arbitrary and lengthy incommunicado detention.

Serious human rights abuses persist in minority areas, including Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, it added.

Hong Kong's future autonomy when it reverts to Chinese sovereignty on July 1, a prime concern of the US government, had been threatened over the course of the past year, the department said.

"Hong Kong's civil liberties and political institutions were threatened by restrictive measures taken by the Chinese government in anticipation of Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese sovereignty," it said.

The report comes at a particularly challenging moment in US-Sino relations. For his second presidential term, Clinton has set out to give China a top priority on his foreign policy agenda, a close second only to Europe.

The new secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, is expected to visit China next month for talks aimed at reducing differences between Washington and Beijing, according to the Chinese foreign ministry. The State Department has not confirmed the trip.

Her mission would precede a visit planned in the next few months by Vice President Al Gore, seen as paving the way for a summit between Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin in the United States in late 1997.

The administration's insistence that human rights is not a litmus test for granting China Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) trading status came under renewed fire Thursday.

"Once again the administration has issued a hard hitting report on China but what's missing is a hard-hitting human rights policy on China," said Mike Jendrzejczyk, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch/Asia.

Noting Clinton's recent comments that "constructive engagement" with China would eventually work, Jendrzejczyk said: "On Tuesday the administration seemed determined to pursue 'constructive engagement' despite its utter failure to produce human rights improvements."

"On the basis of this report, we hope the White House will immediately initiate a high-level effort in Geneva at the UN Human Rights Commission to adopt a strong resolution" condemning China's human rights abuses, he said.