Two Trying to See Baker Are Reported Held

Dai Qing, a former political prisoner who is one of China’s most famous woman journalists, was detained this weekend while trying to arrange to see U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, sources here said Sunday.

A second woman, Hou Xiaotian, the wife of a jailed dissident, was also detained in a separate arrest aimed at preventing her from meeting a Baker aide. After her release Sunday evening, Hou said she had been well-treated while in confinement at a guarded guest house outside Beijing and had spent much of the time playing mah-jongg with her women guards.

Hou was to have met Saturday with Richard Schifter, assistant secretary of state for human rights. Her husband, Wang Juntao, is serving a 13-year sentence for helping to organize pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square in 1989.

Members of Dai’s family said this morning that an official from her newspaper, the Guangming Daily, had telephoned with the news that she was being released and would return home later in the day.

When asked about Dai’s arrest at a news conference Sunday just before he left to return to Washington, Baker said he did not know much about what may have happened. “If it’s true it would be distressing news, and it’s something that I would like to ask our ambassador to inquire into of the Chinese government,” he said.

The treatment of Dai--who has been unable to get permission to leave China to accept a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University--contrasts sharply with promises Baker said he received from Chinese leaders during weekend meetings with them here. One of those promises seemed specifically aimed at people such as Dai and, if honored, should mean that she would soon be allowed to travel to the United States.

“Having raised the issue of denial of exit permits to prominent intellectuals and families of Chinese personalities now abroad, we were assured that any person against whom no criminal proceedings were pending would be allowed to leave after completing the usual formalities,” Baker said.

Some human rights advocates in the United States had publicly urged Baker to meet with Chinese dissidents at the American Embassy during his visit here, and apparently some embassy staff members put out discreet feelers before Baker’s arrival to see if any of Beijing’s tiny band of active government critics wanted to meet him.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said later that Baker was unlikely to meet with any dissidents because he feared they might suffer reprisals if he did so.

The authorities’ treatment of Dai and Hou was reminiscent of the less harsh but dramatic official harassment of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi in February, 1989, when President Bush visited Beijing and invited Fang to attend an official banquet at a hotel. Police halted the car of an American scholar who was driving Fang to the banquet and ultimately barred the entry of Fang and his wife after they walked to the hotel. Fang, at that time China’s most prominent dissident, now lives in exile in the United States.

Dai had initially declined to meet with Baker or Schifter. On Saturday morning, however, she made a telephone call trying to reach someone who could put her in touch with the American Embassy. Emily MacFarquhar, a contributing editor of U.S. News and World Report who was visiting Beijing, said Sunday that she answered Dai’s call by happenstance and that Dai said she was willing to meet Baker, even though staff members of her newspaper, the Guangming Daily, were trying to dissuade her.

Dai left two telephone numbers where the embassy might contact her, MacFarquhar added.

MacFarquhar said she learned Sunday that Dai was detained about midday Saturday at a hotel having one of the telephone numbers left by Dai. “As far as I know, she is still in detention,” she said.

Relatives of Dai confirmed Sunday that she had been detained.

A spokesperson for the embassy said Sunday evening that U.S. Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy “takes the instruction from (Baker) very seriously, and the embassy will be making every effort to find out what happened.”

As the adopted daughter of Ye Jianying, one of China’s revolutionary heroes, Dai, 50, has close family connections high in the Chinese government that provide her some protection against brutal punishment.

Even so, she was imprisoned for 10 months after the 1989 Tian An Men crackdown for allegedly supporting the student protesters.

Although Dai is still on the staff of Guangming Daily, she is not allowed to write. The state-controlled newspaper claims that she is no longer a journalist and thus is ineligible to accept the Nieman fellowship, which provides journalists a mid-career opportunity for a year of study at Harvard. The newspaper has proposed four other staff members as candidates for the fellowship in her place.

Chinese citizens must get permission from their employer before authorities will issue a passport, and the Guangming Daily has refused to grant Dai such approval.