U.S. Seeks to Resolve China Dissident Issue

The Bush Administration summoned Chinese Ambassador Han Xu to the State Department over the weekend for two previously undisclosed meetings about the status of dissident Fang Lizhi, U.S. officials said Monday. The talks were apparently an effort to negotiate conditions that would permit the pro-democracy activist and his wife to leave the U.S. Embassy in Beijing without risking arrest.

“We’re trying to resolve it,” a senior State Department official said about the meetings Han held Saturday with Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Sunday with Undersecretary Robert M. Kimmitt. But the official refused to say whether any progress had been made.

China responded late Monday by ordering police to seal the nation’s borders to prevent Fang and his wife Li Shuxian from trying to escape. The action intensifies the growing Washington-Beijing confrontation over the issue but has little practical effect since the dissidents are not likely to leave the embassy until the matter is resolved.

Meanwhile, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, using some of the harshest language employed by a U.S. official since the current crisis began, said the Tian An Men Square massacre undercuts Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s reform efforts and turns to tragedy “the legacy he sought to pass on.”

Tutwiler also denounced as an unconvincing attempt to rewrite history, the Chinese government’s attempt to justify the military suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators.

“The whole world has seen what happened in Tian An Men Square. Large numbers of peaceful demonstrators were killed by army units. We condemn the use of live fire against unarmed civilians, which is what happened. . . . Labeling such people ‘counterrevolutionaries’ and ‘hooligans’ will do nothing to change the reality of what happened in Tian An Men Square on June 3.”

A senior official said Baker ordered the State Department’s China experts to prepare “a laundry list of options--the contingency list from A to Z,” describing steps the Administration could take in addition to the cutoff of military sales that President Bush ordered earlier. But the official insisted, “These are not recommendations.”

Baker has placed the deteriorating situation in China at the top of his agenda, holding two or three staff meetings a day on the subject.

“It is the first meeting the secretary has in the morning and the last one at night,” the official said.

Nevertheless, Tutwiler said the Administration is not seeking a confrontation with China. She described as “too sensitive to discuss” the case of Fang, 53, a respected astrophysicist, and his wife, a Beijing University physics professor, who sought refuge in the embassy as Chinese authorities began rounding up leaders of the pro-democracy movement.

But she said the Administration has no intention of giving in to Chinese demands to surrender Fang and Li. She repeated Baker’s promise last week that the two dissidents would not be required to leave the embassy as long as they felt they would be in danger.

A senior State Department official said later that the Fang situation was the only matter on the agenda when Baker and Kimmitt met with Han. The Chinese authorities issued an arrest warrant for Fang and Li on Sunday, bringing U.S.-Chinese relations to the highest level of tension since diplomatic relations were restored more than a decade ago.

The warrant was issued after Baker had described the U.S. position to Han. The ambassador was called back to the State Department for the meeting with Kimmitt after the warrant was issued.

Meanwhile, Richard Solomon, Bush’s choice for assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, told a Senate confirmation hearing that he anticipates that Deng will soon take steps to prevent the suppression of the democracy movement from undoing all of the reforms of the past decade.

“I don’t believe the Chinese leadership, and Deng Xiaoping above all, who had formulated this totally different approach to China’s modernization and moved 180 degrees away from Mao Tse-tung’s legacy, is going to want to see that evaporate, to disappear,” Solomon said.

However, Solomon and Tutwiler used similar language in describing the Tian An Men massacre as a “tragedy” for Deng’s reform program.

“If (Deng) was responsible for the brutal attacks on Tian An Men Square, he acted to undercut the very reform process he has sought to foster,” Tutwiler said. “That is a tragedy for China, its people and for the legacy he sought to pass on.”

In a little over a week since the Tian An Men attack, virtually all U.S. business executives have fled China, interrupting years of painstaking effort to build an economic relationship between the two nations. Tutwiler said that only about 1,100 Americans remain in China, with about 300 of them--including 118 U.S. diplomats--still in Beijing.

“Our best information is that all U.S. citizens who wish to leave have left or are on their way out,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department withdrew an export license for the sale of $500 million in nuclear power plant parts to China after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) protested delivery of the equipment, the Associated Press reported.

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