Dissident Poses a Policy Dilemma : Diplomacy: What to do with Fang Lizhi? China’s best-known advocate of democracy remains holed up in the U.S. Embassy while Washington and Beijing debate his fate.

Four months after he fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Fang Lizhi, China’s most prominent dissident, remains sequestered inside the compound, and U.S. officials concede that they are stymied in efforts to persuade the Chinese regime to let him go free.

The U.S. decision to grant refuge to Fang has become a continuing but largely invisible source of contention between the Bush Administration and the Chinese government, which has branded Fang a “traitorous bandit” and accused him of “counterrevolutionary crimes.”

So sensitive is the continuing stalemate that the Administration acknowledges it is trying to say as little as possible in public about Fang’s case, apparently in the hope of letting passions subside.

“I can’t say boo about it,” a senior Administration official said recently when asked about Fang. The Fang case has become so touchy at the State Department that “around here, we call it the F-word,” another official said.

Much more is at stake than Fang’s personal freedom. The fledgling democracy movement of Chinese exiles and students in France and the United States has no single recognized leader, and Fang could well emerge as a powerful symbol and unifying force. Some U.S. analysts believe the Chinese are reluctant to work out a deal that could enable Fang to be politically active in the West.

“They are not entertaining what appear to be obvious solutions,” a U.S. official said, referring to proposals that Fang be transferred from the U.S. Embassy to some unspecified neutral country. “We’re at an impasse.”

Fang is an astrophysicist sometimes known as “the Chinese Sakharov,” after the Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov. In recent years, he has become the best-known and most outspoken proponent of a more democratic political system in China.

Last winter, when President Bush was in Beijing, Chinese security agents physically barred Fang from attending a banquet to which Bush had invited him.

In June, three days after the Chinese People’s Liberation Army seized Tian An Men Square from pro-democracy demonstrators, Fang and his wife, fearing arrest, took refuge in the U.S. Embassy. They have been there ever since.

U.S. officials insist that Fang is not restless, that he is hard at work doing research in astrophysics. U.S. officials are said to be providing him with the books that he needs.

Some Fang supporters have questioned the Administration’s resolve.

Princeton University scholar Perry Link, who befriended Fang while he was living in Beijing last year and took part in the talks leading to Fang’s seeking refuge in the embassy, said recently that the Administration is not doing as much as it could to obtain Fang’s release.

“He is stuck there for a while, probably until (Chinese senior leader) Deng Xiaoping dies, or at least until the State Department bargains him loose, which I wish they were trying harder to do,” Link said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

State Department officials reacted testily to Link’s assertion.

“Perry Link should mind his own business,” one official said.

U.S. officials said that although they would like to expedite Fang’s release, they don’t want to push too hard or seem too eager because doing so might strengthen the Chinese negotiating position.

“They probably feel it is a monkey on our back, that there’s more pressure on us to resolve this,” one source said. “That’s not true. . . . As long as he’s there, he’ll be an obstacle to improvement in our relations--and a big one.”

Bush Administration officials reject the argument that the Chinese leadership benefits from Fang’s confinement.

“While he’s in there, he’s a kind of martyr, a symbol of the pro-democracy movement,” one official said. “The Chinese could remove that symbol by doing right by Fang.”

Last August, Yuan Mu, spokesman for the Chinese State Council, told Japanese reporters that although the Chinese government will not forcibly seize Fang from the embassy, it will not allow him to be moved to a neutral country.

Some U.S. officials have suggested another solution--that the United States set Fang loose on Chinese soil if the regime will guarantee that he will not be prosecuted.

But it seems unlikely that China will accept such a deal any time soon. Chinese authorities last June issued a warrant for Fang’s arrest, and he has been officially charged.

“It may be impossible to settle this, given the current leadership struggle in China,” one U.S. analyst said. “Any Chinese leader who suggested doing so would be sticking his neck out.”

Bush’s reticence to talk about Fang contrasts with his often-repeated public support for Sakharov in the early 1980s, when the Soviet dissident was confined to Gorky and his wife, Yelena Bonner, was under house arrest.

In 1984, when Bonner was refused permission to travel to the West, then-Vice President George Bush told a NATO meeting: “It is hard for us to comprehend, let alone condone, a system where internal and external travel and communication are subject to such arbitrary state prohibition.”