Breaking the Wall of Silence : * China: Dissident Lau San Ching was jailed for 10 years for pro-democracy activities. Now freed, he remains committed to speaking out against human-rights abuses.

From the moment of his arrest, Lau San Ching thought the People’s Republic of China was violating his rights.

It was midnight on a deserted street in Canton; the year was 1981. Four men in plainclothes got out of a car. They didn’t identify themselves, show him a warrant or tell him the charges.

“They asked me if my name was Lau San Ching. I said ‘Yes.’ They said ‘Follow us. Everything will be all right.’ ”

Lau--a participant in the “Beijing spring” of 1979, the prelude to the pro-democracy movement of a decade later--said he had been under periodic surveillance for two years and was not surprised by his arrest. He followed the men peacefully.

For nine months, he was isolated in a small room at a detention center. His only reading material was a Communist newspaper. Every day, he was questioned for six hours and threatened with death unless he provided names of his contacts in the movement.

“I just kept silent,” he recalls. “I almost never said anything.”

He is silent no more. After a decade in prison that ended Dec. 26, Lau embarked on a tour of North America and Europe to publicize his experience at the hands of the Chinese government. Like many dissidents jailed by Beijing, he has not given up hope that the democracy movement will succeed.

Visiting Los Angeles last week, he declared: “I spent 10 years in prison because I support democracy in China, not because of any crime I committed. To fight for democracy in China, you have to pay for it. In Tian An Men Square (in 1989), they paid with their lives.”

Amnesty International supports Lau’s version of his case. Its 1985 investigation concludes that he was jailed for his opinions. “There was nothing against him that would be called a crime, according to international standards,” says Arlette Laduguie, a researcher at Amnesty’s Asian department in London.

Another human rights group, Asia Watch, estimates that there are thousands of political prisoners in China although precise figures are unavailable.

For its part, China steadfastly denies any human rights violations and denounces the international outcry as interference in its internal affairs. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not return calls seeking comment on Lau’s case.

After his arrest, Lau was charged with slandering the Communist Party and providing money and books to “counterrevolutionaries,” as those who opposed the Beijing government were known. His court-appointed lawyer refused to advise him.

No witnesses appeared at his trial. The only evidence was a book that he says prosecutors never proved was his. The proceeding took less than two hours and the jury deliberated for 15 minutes, Lau says.

Sentenced to 10 years, he spent two-thirds of the time in isolation, including weeks alone in a dark room. He was allowed no visits from his girlfriend; his parents could see him every six months.

Still, Lau’s experience does not seem to have left him bitter. In a talk to Cantonese-speaking students at UCLA as well as in an interview, the short, bespectacled electronic components salesman used more irony than venom, poking fun at his former captors.

“I have no remorse,” he says. “It’s hard to be in prison, but in China, if you ask for what the government doesn’t want, they use repression. . . . We know very well what may happen.”

Perhaps Lau, 39, also feels charitable because in a few weeks he’ll marry his girlfriend of 13 years, a Hong Kong factory worker who wishes to be identified only be her first name. Christine not only waited for Lau, a native of Hong Kong, during his prison term but campaigned for his release.

“She waited because we have strong confidence in each other,” Lau says. “And the course of true love never runs smooth. I believe it was Shakespeare who wrote that.”

While studying at the University of Hong Kong, where he graduated in 1976, Lau became interested in democratic movements in China.

“We are Chinese . . . “ says Lau, whose parents migrated from China to Hong Kong during World War II. “The future of Hong Kong (which reverts from British to Chinese rule in 1997) depends very much on the future of China. Democracy can change China into a more modern state.”

His interest heightened during the “Beijing Spring” of 1979, when dissidents published pamphlets advocating democracy and human rights and defiantly put up posters on the so-called “Democracy Wall.”

Lau decided that the democracy movement was important because it developed from the grass roots. Between 1979 and 1981 he traveled more than a dozen times to Canton, which he called the center of the democracy movement in southern China.

On the two-hour train ride inland, he brought dissidents money and books. He returned carrying pro-democracy pamphlets and in Hong Kong organized university students to support the movement.

On Dec. 25, 1981, he went to Canton to visit the families of two dissidents who had been arrested. Apprehended outside a hotel, he was among the last of at least several dozen participants in the “Democracy Wall” movement taken into custody, an Amnesty International official says.

He was not beaten during his interrogation because he was well known in Hong Kong as an activist and the information could have embarrassed the Beijing government, he says.

But other prisoners were battered, Lau says. “I saw guards beat them outside my room,” he adds. “I could see through the cracks in the wooden door. I could hear their screams. They used high-voltage electrical prods. And they kicked them with their boots.”

Lau’s most difficult time in prison came when he says he was put into a dark cell for 20 days and, later, for a month. The first time was for refusing to confess his crimes, and the second was for smuggling the indictment in his case to the Hong Kong media.

“I tried to paste rice grains on the wall to count the days,” he says. “But . . . there were days I could not remember whether I had pasted a rice grain on the wall a minute ago.” Nevertheless, for most of his early years in prison Lau at least had contact with other inmates. That changed in 1985 when he was put in isolation after withdrawing a confession he had made under duress.

Transferred to another prison in 1988, he was isolated again. On a typical day he read newspapers, translated English into Chinese, worked in a small garden attached to his cell or exercised.

“My desire for democracy kept me going,” Lau says. “In this long time of isolation, if one can’t read and learn, one can get into great trouble, because you cannot control your mind and it will run wild. But when you learn something, you cannot think about other things. You have to concentrate.”

Since his release, Lau says, he has not read enough to know whether he approves of current U.S. policy toward China.

Under the Bush Administration, the People’s Republic has received most favored nation status, allowing it to export goods to the United States under the same low tariff rates as other nations. Sentiment in Congress is growing, however, to make the trade benefits conditional on China’s improvement in human rights.

But whatever the U.S. policy, the democratic movement on mainland China will succeed, Lau says. “I can’t predict when. But it will happen, and not far away,” he says.