China Frees a Dissident Leader of 1989 Protests : Rights: Wang Juntao leaves for U.S. Beijing also announces some ‘understandings’ about prison visits.

In a move apparently timed to influence President Clinton’s crucial decision on U.S.-China trade relations, Chinese officials on Saturday released leading dissident Wang Juntao from a hospital cell where he had been receiving treatment for hepatitis and other ailments.

Under an agreement coordinated with the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, Wang, described in a government report as one of the “black hands” behind the 1989 pro-democracy movement, was granted release on bail for medical treatment in the United States. Saturday morning, authorities placed him aboard a United Airlines flight to New York, where his wife and fellow dissident, Hou Xiaotian, is a visiting scholar at Columbia University.

In another development that is likely to be viewed as a positive step by Clinton Administration officials, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Saturday that some “understandings” about visits to Chinese prisons have been reached with the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross.

U.S. officials have said repeatedly that Red Cross prison inspections would constitute an important sign of progress on human rights in China. Representatives of the Swiss Red Cross office have been meeting with Red Cross Society of China officials here all week.

“Both sides agreed that the meeting had produced positive results,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

The developments come just weeks before Clinton must decide whether to renew China’s most-favored-nation trading status. The United States is China’s biggest export market for products ranging from clothing to toys, but Clinton has said he will renew the trade benefits only if Beijing makes “significant progress” on human rights.

Wang, 35, had headed U.S. and human rights organization lists of political prisoners in Chinese jails. He is the most prominent activist from the 1989 democracy movement to have been released by authorities here.

In a summit meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Seattle last November, Clinton specifically called for the release of Wang, thought to be suffering from a heart condition as well as hepatitis B, a potentially fatal disease that attacks the liver. He contracted the hepatitis during treatment by a prison dentist, his wife said.

In recent weeks, beginning shortly before an official visit to China by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, police have conducted a series of detentions and arrests of dissidents. Celebrated dissident leader Wei Jingsheng was arrested, released, then arrested again April 1.

Although some diplomats characterized the detentions as a purely internal matter, they were also widely viewed as a defiant gesture on the part of the Chinese leadership against U.S. human rights policies.

Consistent with past practice, the Chinese waited for a major American news event, in this case the death of former President Richard Nixon, before releasing Wang. In doing so, they hoped that news of his release would be lost in the volume of stories on Nixon, who reopened relations with China with a historic visit here in 1972 and who was described in the Chinese press as “an old friend of the Chinese people.”

Human rights advocates reacted with mixed feelings to the release of Wang.

Robin Munro, chief of the Asia Watch office in Hong Kong, said the release of Wang had “great symbolic significance” but worried that it also might be a form of forced exile that will prevent Wang from returning to China.

Wang began his political career in 1976, when he was jailed after participating in protests critical of Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese leaders. Since then, he has been an outspoken advocate of democratic reforms.

Following the 1989 democracy protests at Tian An Men Square, Wang was tracked down after a nationwide manhunt and branded a mastermind, or “black hand,” behind the protests.

From the opening days of the movement, Chinese authorities said that hundreds of thousands of naive students, and later millions of ordinary citizens, were being manipulated by a small group of “black hands” intent on overthrowing the government.

For his part in the protests, Wang was put on trial in 1991 on charges of conspiring to subvert the government and engaging in counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation.

He was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment--a term Western diplomats criticized as harsh in light of Wang’s moderate, nonviolent speeches and actions during the Tian An Men movement.

Researcher Kevin Platt in The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.