Chinese Dissident Is Back in Custody After ‘New Crimes’ : Rights: Wei Jingsheng’s most grievous affront may have been his Feb. 27 meeting with a Clinton envoy.

Only six months after he was released from prison to sweeten China’s unsuccessful bid for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, leading dissident Wei Jingsheng is back in custody facing another term in prison for what authorities described Tuesday as “new crimes.”

The official New China News Agency reported that “the Beijing Public Security Bureau has decided to investigate suspected new criminal offenses by Wei Jingsheng.”

Although the crimes were unspecified, they appear to involve allegations that Wei violated conditions of his parole last September banning him from engaging in political activities for three years.

During his brief taste of freedom after serving 14 1/2 years of a 15-year sentence stemming from his leadership in the 1978 Democracy Wall movement, Wei immediately picked up where he left off--writing articles critical of China’s human rights policy for foreign newspapers, urging Chinese citizens to voice their grievances against the government and meeting regularly with foreign reporters.

But in the eyes of the Chinese government, Wei’s most grievous affront may have been his Feb. 27 meeting in a Beijing hotel with John Shattuck, an assistant secretary of state and President Clinton’s special envoy on human rights.

In the 90-minute meeting, Wei, 43, reportedly advised Shattuck that the United States should insist on human rights improvements before granting China most-favored-nation trading status when it comes up for renewal in June.

Chinese officials claimed the meeting was a violation of Wei’s parole.

The Chinese also seized on the Wei-Shattuck encounter in the China World Hotel as an example of bad faith on the part of the U.S. government on the eve of the March 10-14 visit to China by Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

In a news conference following the frosty Christopher visit, the Chinese minister of foreign affairs charged that by meeting with Wei, Shattuck violated Chinese laws and “interfered in the internal affairs of China.”

During the Christopher trip, Wei was ordered out of town by Chinese officials to prevent another such rendezvous with U.S. officials.

When Wei tried to return to Beijing over the Easter weekend, he was stopped by a caravan of what witnesses said were seven security vehicles. At first, the Beijing Public Security Bureau claimed Wei was released after questioning. But after family and friends reported no sight of Wei, the security bureau said Tuesday that he was still in custody at an unnamed location.

In a telephone interview, Wei Ling, Wei’s sister, said she did not know where he was being kept.

“If the report is true,” a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said, “we regret that the Chinese have taken this step. To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Wei had only made use of the universal right of freedom of opinion and expression.”

The detention announcement was made on Ching Ming, the day normally set aside for sweeping graves and honoring the dead.

In the past, Ching Ming has also been a day for political acts of defiance. On Tuesday, Tian An Men Square, site of the 1989 democracy movement, and grave sites of some of the victims of the army crackdown on the democracy protesters were under heavier than usual security. The Associated Press reported that police hustled away a young man who tried to lay a wreath in the central square.