China’s Dissident Movement at Low Ebb as Beijing Steps Up the Pressure : Asia: Disappearances and forced exile suppress dissent during uncertainty over ailing Deng. People are turning to business.

On April 1 last year, dissident Wei Jingsheng was in a private car traveling toward Beijing from the port city of Tianjin.

According to his secretary, the car was surrounded by seven police vehicles and pulled to the side of the road. Wei, who had already served nearly 15 years in Chinese prisons for advocating democratic reform in China, was detained and has not been seen in public since.

Chinese authorities first said he was under “residential surveillance,” then that he was “under investigation for additional crimes.”

Wei’s English-speaking secretary, who served as a translator for Western journalists who flocked to Beijing to interview China’s most famous dissident, was also arrested and sentenced without trial to a prison labor camp on an unrelated minor charge.

The arrests, coupled with President Clinton’s decision last May to “de-link” human rights questions from trade issues, had a chilling effect on dissent in China. Except for several mildly worded petitions preceding the recent meeting of the National People’s Congress in Beijing--including one signed by dissident intellectual Chen Ziming in his first political act since release from prison last year--few dissidents have dared to speak out.

Some of those who did raise their voices were arrested or disappeared.

According to author and China scholar Orville Schell, the level of dissent in China is at its lowest point since the end of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

“It’s an amazingly defoliated landscape at the present time in terms of political pronouncements of a thoughtful, profound nature,” Schell said during a recent visit to Beijing.

“There is only a tiny, extremely fragile dissident movement in China today,” agreed Robin Munro, the Hong Kong-based representative of Human Rights Watch/Asia. “The movement is at its lowest point in more than 10 years. Basically, any dissident (who) puts his head up is likely to have it chopped off.”

In the uncertainty caused by the failing health of China’s 90-year-old leader, Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese regime has made it clear that even mild dissent will not be tolerated lest it snowball into the kind of political movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to Tian An Men Square in 1989.

In her recent tour to France and the United States to promote her fawning profile of her father, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter, Deng Rong, said the main mistake of the Chinese government in 1989 was its failure to act more quickly to halt the demonstrations.

In its crackdown on dissent spanning the year since Wei’s arrest last April, the Chinese authorities have employed three highly effective new tactics: unexplained disappearance, the use of minor criminal charges to jail political activists and forced exile of dissidents.

The first, evident in the case of Wei, is the relatively new practice of disappearance.

Previously, in most high-profile cases against political dissidents, the Chinese leadership felt compelled to give a justification for their actions and even hold trials.

In his 1979 trial on charges of leaking military secrets to a foreign reporter and conducting “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement,” Wei was allowed to deliver a long statement in his defense.

Although the trial was closed, Wei’s impassioned statement soon found its way to supporters and to the foreign press, which dispatched it to publications around the world.

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But since his rearrest last April, Wei has been kept completely out of sight, even from his family.

“Wei has now been disappeared for a year,” Munro said. “It is unprecedented for a well-known dissident to encounter such treatment. We’ve known it to happen in the past for obscure figures to disappear without a trace, but it has often been because of a lack of access to information. We don’t even know that Wei is alive. That’s the problem with disappearances.”

The second, relatively new tactic that has also been effectively used by the government is the forced exile of dissident leaders, mainly to the United States and Europe.

As in the case of Wang Juntao, accused by the government of being one of the “black hands” behind the 1989 democracy movement, prominent dissidents are allowed to leave China, often for emergency medical treatment, but are not allowed to return.

According to sources, there are now 49 Chinese citizen activists living overseas--including Wang, dissident labor leader Han Dongfang and crusading journalist Liu Binyan--who are barred from returning to their homeland.

“The people that they’ve kept out,” Schell said, “are just withering on the vine . . . in the United States and Europe. They’ve sort of had their oxygen supply cut off, and their oxygen supply is their country, China.”

The third tactic employed increasingly often is the use of minor criminal charges to sentence political prisoners to prison or, without the benefit of trial, to “re-education through labor” camps.

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According to a recent interview with a senior Chinese prison official, almost 200,000 people are now inmates in such camps.

Among them is Tong Yi, the 26-year-old translator and secretary to Wei Jingsheng. Tong is serving a three-year administrative sentence, imposed without trial, for the alleged crime of forging a document applying for overseas study.

In a letter smuggled out to her mother early this year, she said she had suffered beatings from her fellow inmates at the Hewan Re-education Camp in Hebei province near Wuhan.

Partly because of the use of administrative sentences instead of the more traditional charges of “counterrevolutionary crimes” against political dissidents, Chinese prison authorities are able to claim that the number of political prisoners in China has been reduced by half since 1989, the year of the massive pro-democracy demonstrations in Tian An Men Square.

A senior prison official recently told foreign reporters that there are 2,679 inmates charged with political crimes now serving in Chinese prisons.

Human rights groups blame the United States and other Western countries for dropping the ball on human rights in China because of their greed to exploit the Chinese market.

“When President Clinton de-linked human rights from MFN (most-favored-nation) trading status last May, he claimed that this would lead to a decrease in tensions and an improvement in human rights conditions in China,” Munro said. “But what’s happened since then has given the lie to it. Even the U.S. State Department said there has been a marked deterioration. I would say the deflation of international pressure has allowed China to use the occasion to mop up on dissidents. Only a few are left to speak out.”

To keep pressure on China after Clinton separated trade policy from human rights, the United States in early March pushed hard for a strong censure of China’s human rights policies by the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

The measure, first proposed by the European Union, was narrowly defeated but was still viewed as a setback for China, which lobbied hard among its Third World allies for its defeat.

Visiting senior U.S. officials, most recently U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, invariably bring up human rights concerns in their meetings with President Jiang Zemin and other Chinese leaders. But the procedure has become so pro forma that it seldom sparks reaction.

And last week, Clinton made good on a promise in his speech de-linking human rights from trade that his Administration would draft a voluntary code of conduct for U.S. businesses operating overseas. The code, which does not specifically mention China, asks U.S. business leaders to set a good example by refusing to permit discrimination in the workplace and respecting the right of free association and collective bargaining.

But Schell contends that the decline in dissident activity here has as much to do with the desire of Chinese to get rich under the new liberalized economy as with government crackdowns or the reduction of foreign pressure.

“There is a great irony at work here,” Schell said over lunch in the coffee shop of the Grand Hotel overlooking Tian An Men Square. “I think China is freer than ever before in a general sense, and yet more restrictive than at any time since the late 1970s politically. It is not simply government control, but an astute decision by the Communist Party to save itself through capitalism to give the people some space to breathe.

“I think that people aren’t so much repressed now--of course dissidents are--as they are diverted. They are making their own choice, and it’s not for art or culture or politics. It’s for business.”

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The most notable exceptions in the last year of relative quiet on the Chinese dissident front were a handful of petitions presented before the meeting in March of the National People’s Congress.

One petition, authored by 1989 student leader Wang Dan and signed by 27 others, called for the government to observe basic human rights and gave three examples of cases in which protesters had been punished for expressing their views.

Another weightier document, signed by leading dissidents Chen Ziming and Xu Wenli, called for a nationwide cleanup of public corruption through the establishment of an independent judiciary and the formation of “citizens’ whistle-blowing centers” and a newspaper to be called the Anti-Corruption News.

Needless to say, none of the petitions were accepted for formal presentation before the National People’s Congress. But they proved that, while greatly diminished in scale, the dissident movement still has some life.

Said Munro: “The petitions were the real notable exception to the kind of low ebb that the movement was in last year. They were very significant and very brave. They revealed a longer-term strategy by the dissidents, offering alternatives now rather than wait until Deng Xiaoping dies and the picture becomes clearer. The big question is how long it will be before the signers of the petitions are also dealt with.”

Besides the wait to see if the government punishes the petitioners, other significant human rights tests in coming months are the scheduled release from prison in June of leading 1989 activist Liu Gang and the September meeting of the U.N.-sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women.

Liu, 33, was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of sedition for his leadership in the democracy movement.

A senior prison official said recently that Liu, the last of the major 1989 Tian An Men leaders still in jail, will be released when his term expires in June.

As for the U.N. women’s conference, organizers are already complaining about Chinese government restrictions on organizations from abroad permitted to attend.