Case of Seized American Adds to U.S.-China Strains

A U.S. consular officer drove 24 hours across the western Chinese badlands but came back empty-handed. Appeals to the Chinese government from family and senior U.S. officials have gone unanswered. Warnings from the U.S. Congress have gone unheeded.

But U.S. efforts to make contact with human rights crusader Harry Wu have so far come up blank.

Almost three weeks after Wu’s arrest at a remote frontier outpost in northwestern China, Beijing announced today that the naturalized U.S. citizen and former prisoner of Chinese labor camps has been charged with obtaining state secrets, one of the most serious political offenses here.

“The Chinese have informed us [Wu] was arrested and is now in Wuhan. We will try to get in touch with him as soon as possible,” a U.S. Embassy spokesman here said.

Wuhan is thousands of miles from the border town of Horgas, in the far west Xinjiang Autonomous Region, where Wu was detained June 19.

Wu’s case may significantly worsen the already deteriorating U.S.-China relationship, with some Capitol Hill sources suggesting Friday that it may even imperil Beijing’s much-prized most-favored-nation trade status, which allows Chinese goods into the United States under the same low tariffs that apply to most countries.

“I am in beautiful downtown Urumqi [capital of the Xinjiang region] awaiting further instructions,” observed Charles Parish, the veteran U.S. diplomat who had been assigned to track down Wu, who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps before immigrating to America in 1985.

A frequent witness before Congress, Wu, 58, of Milpitas, Calif., almost single-handedly made prison labor an issue in U.S.-China relations. His recent testimony about the alleged sale of organs from executed prisoners to rich Asians needing transplants caused a furor in China.

Parish--a fluent speaker of Chinese with 14 years’ experience in the Foreign Service--had tried repeatedly to obtain information from Chinese authorities about Wu and the conditions of his detention. But there had been no word about Wu’s whereabouts until today.

*

On Monday, the U.S. diplomat drove through a dust storm to Horgas, on the border with Kazakhstan, where Wu was reported arrested while trying to cross into China. Inquiring at the Karamay Guest House, where a Chinese diplomat in Washington said Wu had been held, Parish was told by the manager that he had never heard of Harry Wu.

Parish, an Inglewood, Calif., native, carefully went down a long list of Chinese and English aliases used by Wu in several previous clandestine trips to China, sometimes in the company of foreign journalists, to document human rights abuses in China’s vast reform-through-labor camp system.

The manager of the guest house remained poker-faced. He had never heard of Wu.

In a telephone quest to find him, Beijing-based journalist George Wehrfritz of Newsweek said he was told by a reception clerk at the Karamay Guest House that Wu had “checked out.”

Another clerk gave the name of a hotel in Urumqi, where he said Wu had moved. A Chinese American with the surname Wu was listed as a guest at the hotel. But when Wehrfritz was connected to the room, a voice answered sharply in stilted English, “Harry Wu cannot come to the phone now.”

When reporters tried to reach Wu in the hotel later, they were told that he had checked out. Hotel operators refused to connect the callers to the same room.

After spending two days in Horgas being dogged constantly by a Xinjiang government official, Parish drove back to Urumqi, this time on a primitive asphalt road strewn with smashed and discarded vehicles.

“It was like one of the Australian ‘Mad Max’ movies,” Parish said in a telephone interview. “The road is hard to describe. In the sun, it was a black ribbon of molten asphalt that sometimes had to be watered down to make it drivable.”

In seeking a remote location for the latest in a series of trips inside China as part of his prison reform campaign, Wu had picked a spot to cross the border where he and his foreign companion, American assistant Susan Howell, would almost certainly be noticed. After being interrogated for four days in Horgas, Howell was expelled into Kazakhstan.

But an official of Wu’s Laogai Research Foundation said that Wu did not wish to provoke Chinese scrutiny of his trip, in which he planned to continue his investigation of Chinese labor camps. The official said Wu decided to enter China at Horgas because he “thought that security was less stringent at that border crossing than other places.”

Expressing American outrage at Wu’s detention, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said Wu had a valid Chinese visa in his U.S. passport and that should have guaranteed him a quick, courteous border crossing. If the Chinese had not wanted to allow Wu to enter their country, Burns said, the proper procedure would have been to deny him a visa.

*

But there are indications the Chinese did not realize when they issued him a visa that he was the same human rights crusader who had caused them so much trouble.

When Wu obtained U.S. citizenship, he legally changed his name from Wu Hungda, as he was known in China, to Peter H. Wu; most people started to call him Harry. The Chinese officials may have thought that Peter H. Wu was the sort of foreigner of Chinese origin that the regime likes to attract as tourists.

The New China News Agency statement released today said Wu is accused of “illegally sneaking into China by using aliases . . . obtaining China’s state secrets and conducting criminal activities.”

A chronology of the case issued by Laogai in Washington says Wu and Howell repeatedly demanded that they be allowed to telephone the U.S. Embassy in Beijing on the day after their arrest. The foundation said they were told that it was impossible to make long-distance telephone calls from public phones in the remote area.

“Nevertheless, Ms. Howell starts walking toward a public phone located about a half-block from the guest house [where they were being held],” the chronology says. “A plainclothes police official intercepts her 100 feet or so from the phone, and in the tussle, she strikes him with a plastic water bottle.”

Since the announcement of his arrest last week, American diplomats have been under heavy pressure from senior members of Congress, notably Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to bring Wu to safety.

“It must be made clear, in no uncertain terms,” Helms wrote to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, “that should harm come to Harry Wu while he is in Chinese custody, there will be severe implications for China in the U.S. Congress.”

*

One Capitol Hill source suggested that Wu may have been detained in retaliation for his congressional testimony. The source said that the lawmakers are determined to do everything in their power to obtain his release but that “there are precious few levers” available to Congress.

The Senate and House passed resolutions just before starting their July 4 recess condemning Beijing’s failure to allow U.S. diplomats to visit Wu.

With U.S.-China relations already severely strained because of last month’s visit by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to his alma mater, Cornell University in upstate New York, some diplomats fear that the Wu arrest could escalate into a major issue between the two countries.

“The Chinese have taken a number of steps to express their displeasure over the issuance of a visa [to Lee] for an unofficial visit to Cornell University,” Burns, the State Department spokesman, said. “But the Chinese have a responsibility to work with us to build a good relationship. They’re not dictating the terms. In fact, we have made it very clear over the past couple of days that we can’t imagine going forward to have good relations without this elementary case being brought forward to a mutually satisfactory conclusion--the case of Mr. Wu.”

Although Wu has many supporters and friends, particularly in the conservative ranks of Congress, his stridence on the prison labor issue has sometimes alienated policy-makers and even other human rights organizations. Because of the use of prison labor and sale of prisoner products by many U.S. states, including California, critics contend that it is the weakest of human rights issues raised with China.

U.S.-China consular agreements guarantee access within 48 hours to U.S. or Chinese citizens held in the other country. But until today, China had refused even to publicly acknowledge Wu’s detention.

In fact, in a news briefing Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Shen Guofang took the offensive, accusing the United States of failing to inform Chinese diplomats of two cases involving the shooting of Chinese citizens.

In one case, Shen said, Chinese citizen Li Xiaguan was wounded in a Philadelphia restaurant on Feb. 28. In another case, he said, U.S. officials failed to inform the Chinese Embassy about the case of 16-year-old Huang Yongxing, shot dead by New York police on March 20.

Burns said the two cases would be examined but that they were “not at all analogous” with the Wu case.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.