Beijing Campaign Against Dissidents in U.S. Disclosed

A secret document ferreted out from the Chinese Embassy in Washington by a defecting diplomat last week discloses that China is attempting to isolate and discredit Chinese student leaders and pro-democracy organizations in the United States.

The document--which the defector, Xu Lin, supplied to The Times on Thursday--describes how senior officials from China’s Ministry of Education and China’s embassies and consulates in the United States and Canada gathered in Beijing last March to devise new, clandestine strategies for counteracting the influence of Chinese student groups.

“At appropriate moments, we should single out their influential leaders who have committed extremely vile acts, to expose and attack them publicly,” the document says.

” . . . When concrete evidence is obtained, their status as overseas students and scholars must be revoked; they are to be ordered to pay back all the expenses related to overseas studies. Their applications for passport extensions must be refused. We can cancel the passports of some of them. They will not be allowed to return to China before they abandon their anti-government position and commit concrete acts of repentance.”

A second secret document on the same meeting in Beijing indicates that the Chinese regime issued new instructions aimed at strengthening underground Communist Party organizations among Chinese students in this country.

It also shows that by March, the Chinese regime had made a new, pessimistic analysis of its chances for improving relations with the Bush Administration, which at that time had just allowed publication of a highly critical State Department report on human rights in China.

“We cannot expect that the relations will improve in the near future,” said the document, which was signed by Premier Li Peng. “. . . The pressure on China will further increase if the United States has its way with the Soviet Union.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington could not be reached Thursday night for comment on the secret materials.

The second document was originally obtained by Chinese students in Canada and was later authenticated by Xu, the diplomat who defected in Washington last week.

Xu, 32, had worked in the education section of the Chinese Embassy here. As part of his job, he was assigned to keep watch over 1,000 Chinese students in Utah, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota. Two student leaders in Utah befriended him and helped persuade him, in effect, to join their movement.

He slipped away on the night of May 2. One week ago, at a press conference organized by the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars, he announced his decision to defect and said that most of his colleagues within the embassy quietly support the pro-democracy movement.

In an interview with The Times on Thursday, Xu revealed that he waited to defect until his wife and daughter were safely out of China. They are now in Hong Kong and are planning to join him in the United States. Xu’s wife had been working as a teacher at Qinghua University, one of the leading academic institutions in China.

Xu said that his own boss, Ni Mengxiong, head of the education section at the Chinese embassy in Washington, attended the secret meeting in Beijing last March. Xu said that Ni showed him the secret document recounting details of the meeting. Xu secretly copied the document and later brought the copy with him when he defected.

“Our work related to overseas studies is facing an extremely critical and complicated situation,” the document says. “It has become a fierce political struggle and a struggle over human talents.”

Describing the current situation, the document gloomily reports:

“About 70 to 80% of the total number of our government-sponsored students and scholars in the United States and Canada will not return to China in the near future. . . .

“About 10% of our students and scholars actively participate in activities against our government. There are about 100 core anti-government activists. These individuals collude with American and Canadian right-wing anti-Communist forces, the reactionary forces in Taiwan and the escaped elements from China in conspiring and organizing activities against our government, in an attempt to establish a bourgeois republic.”

The Chinese officials concluded they had little hope of persuading Chinese students to come home right now.

“In the near future, the basic mphasis of our work . . . will not be on the issue of overseas students and scholars returning to China, but on the issue of whether they are patriotic or not,” the document says.

It says Chinese students in the United States should be separated into five different categories, depending on their degree of loyalty to the regime. Students in the last category were described as “reactionary core elements who actively organize and plan anti-government activities.”

“They are the targets for us to expose and strike at,” the document says. It mentions several organizations by name, including the IFCSS, the leading organization for the more than 40,000 Chinese students currently in this country.