World Tibet Network News Tuesday, June 16, 1998

BEIJING, June 16 (Reuters) - Prominent Chinese dissident Qin Yongmin said on Tuesday that an upcoming landmark visit by U.S. President Bill Clinton did not signal that Beijing had improved its human rights record.

``The biggest beneficiaries of Clinton's visit is Clinton himself and the relevant authorities in China,'' Qin said by telephone from his home in Wuhan.

``Clinton needs to use diplomatic achievements to cancel out his many well-known problems, and relevant Chinese authorities want to use this to shake off the diplomatic difficulties caused by the June 4 incident,'' Qin said in a statement seen in Beijing on Tuesday.

Clinton will make a five-city tour of China from June 25 to July 3, becoming the first U.S. president to set foot on Chinese soil since the June 4, 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in the centre of Beijing.

Qin said he hoped Clinton would put human rights, long a thorn in the side of Sino-U.S. ties, at the top of his agenda during his summit with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

``We hope President Clinton can help China improve its human rights conditions,'' Qin said.

Qin also criticised China's village elections, saying the country's much-publicised experiment in grass-roots democracy often did not produce results that reflected the people's wishes.

``Most of the villages in China have not had any elections,'' the statement said. ``Even if some places have started grass-roots elections, they are strictly controlled.''

China says most of its more than 900,000 villages have held elections to choose local leaders. U.S. observers have said the polls generally appear fair and democratic.

U.S. Ambassador James Sasser said in comments made public on Monday that China was making progress on human rights, raising hopes that U.S. sanctions left over from the 1989 crackdown would be lifted soon.

But in remarks made less than two weeks before Clinton's trip, Sasser said he saw few signs that Beijing would release more political prisoners.

China has shown increasing willingness to engage the West over human rights but critics say Beijing still has a long way to go, pointing to Beijing's stifling of political dissent and its heavy-handed policies in Tibet.