Published by: World Tibet Network News Issue ID: 97/12/29

by Patrick Baert

BEIJING, Dec 27 (AFP) - Chinese dissident Qin Yongmin complained of police harassment Saturday after writing an open letter calling on China's state sector workers to unite against massive layoffs.

In an open letter to the UN Human Rights Commission, Qin said his telephone had been tapped and an interview with an international US radio station on Wednesday was interrupted a dozen times.

The 44-year-old dissident, who has spent 12 years in prison, also said his mail had been intercepted and his neighbors had been ordered to spy on him, according to a copy of the letter obtained by AFP.

Plainclothes police had also used several pretexts to enter the small bookstore he keeps in Wuhan in central China, he wrote.

In another open letter released Monday, Qin called for state sector workers to form independent unions to oppose the massive layoffs decreed by Beijing in an effort to reform loss-making state enterprises.

The restructuring of the public sector is forcing thousands of failing state companies to fold, throwing millions of people out of work.

Qin's call for independent unions won the support of the Federation for Democracy in China, a US-based group comprising Chinese dissidents living overseas.

In a declaration received by AFP, the group suggested that Chinese workers who want to organize should contact the International Labor Union for help defending their rights.

And another dissident, Leng Wanbao, said in a statement faxed to AFP that he was forming a non-official group for "defenders of the Convention of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights."

The convention, signed at the end of October by the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, guarantees labor union freedom. But China contends the convention is not applicable until it is approved by the parliament, which has not yet scheduled it for ratification.

China's government should "allow workers to create their own organizations and choose their representatives to negotiate with heads of enterprises and with the government," Leng said in his statement.

The 38-year-old dissident was freed from jail for medical reasons in 1994 after being arrested in 1989 during the bloody crackdown on the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.

He was then pardoned last June by a court in the northeastern province of Jilin which overturned his 1989 conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes.

Leng also called for the release from jail of dissidents Wang Dan and Liu Xiaobo and stressed that President Jiang Zemin had said during a trip to the United States in November that the Chinese government sometimes made mistakes.

"Criticism of the government cannot therefore be considered a crime," he wrote.

Jiang had used the word "errors" in response to a question on the behavior of the Chinese government during the anti-democracy crackdown.

But Beijing later stated there was no question of overturning the official verdict calling the student demonstrators counter-revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the regime.

Wang Dan, 27, one of the principal leaders of the democracy movement, was sentenced to 11 years in prison last year for attempted subversion.

Liu Xiaobo was also sentenced last year for having written a letter demanding a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader who is anathema to Beijing and lives in exile.