China Detains Dissident as U.S. Trade Mission Arrives

U.S. Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown arrived Saturday for a visit hailed by China as an economic fresh start after President Clinton’s decision not to link trade ties and human rights.

But the detention of a leading dissident earlier in the day made it clear that human rights questions will continue to nag Washington as it pursues closer economic relations.

Police detained Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 Tian An Men pro-democracy demonstrations, just hours before Brown and 24 American executives arrived in Beijing for an eight-day mission expected to produce billions of dollars in new contracts for U.S. businesses.

Brown is the first Cabinet official to visit Beijing since Clinton decided in May not to link China’s performance on human rights with its trade status. That decision freed the Commerce Department to pursue a high-profile policy of business promotion in China--one of the world’s most promising markets.

“We seek to set the stage for a new era of cooperation, growth and progress,” Brown said in a statement after his arrival.

China has enthusiastically welcomed the trade mission, which also will stop in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, as a fresh start for Sino-American trade.

When Clinton severed the linkage between China’s rights progress and its trading privileges, he said he was convinced the Chinese would act to improve human rights if the issue were separated from the threat of trade sanctions.

However, human rights activists have said that, since then, Beijing has ceased all progress on human rights issues, including the release of political prisoners, an accounting of political prisoners, the treatment of prisoners and the opening of prisons to inspections by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

On Thursday, Wang Dan issued a public statement protesting what he said was three months of harassment by police who follow him wherever he goes. “They don’t allow me, a citizen, to live the life of a normal person in China. And this is simply because I represent a different point of view,” Wang said.

In an article Saturday in the official China Daily, China boasted that it leads the United States in protecting human rights.

Using a welter of statistics, Yu Quanyu, vice president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, said China beat the United States on a number of indicators. Among the examples he cited were the death rate, the number of children living in one-parent homes and the murder and rape rate.