U.S. Responds to Arrest in China With Restraint : Asia: Beijing-based diplomat will try to see American charged with spying. Official says further comment will follow visit.

The Clinton Administration reacted with restraint Saturday to China’s disclosure that it has arrested Harry Wu, an American citizen who once was a Chinese dissident, and charged him with espionage, a crime punishable by death.

The State Department said it has dispatched the U.S. consul general in Beijing, Arturo Macias, to visit Wu in the city of Wuhan, where according to a Chinese announcement he was formally arrested and charged Saturday. He had been in Chinese custody since June 19.

“We very much regret the detention of Mr. Wu and the accusations made against him,” the State Department said in a carefully prepared statement issued about 12 hours after news of Wu’s arrest was made public. “We will be commenting further once we have had a chance to visit with Mr. Wu.”

State Department spokeswoman Sharon Bowman said, “We will take every possible step to ensure that Mr. Wu’s rights under the U.S.-China Consular Convention are protected.” She was referring to an agreement covering the rights of Americans arrested in China and of Chinese citizens arrested in the United States.

President Clinton, who was at the White House on Saturday morning before heading to Camp David for the weekend, had no public comment on the matter. He and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were informed of Wu’s arrest, officials said.

Wu’s whereabouts had been a mystery for weeks, straining U.S.-Chinese ties already made raw by a U.S. visit last month by President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan, which Beijing considers Chinese territory, as well as a range of other issues, including U.S. objections to China’s suspected sale of missiles to Pakistan and other countries.

But the formal charges against Wu, and their serious nature, make it unlikely that Beijing and Washington will be able to quickly ease the tensions between them.

“It’s quite serious,” said Orville Schell, a longtime China watcher who is about to take a post as a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum at Columbia University in New York. “It would be one thing for them to have held him a while and then, after negotiations, released him. The espionage charge makes his case much more intractable. It makes it much less likely he’ll be released soon.

“I can think of no comparable case: An American citizen who knows the dark side of China better than many Chinese officials is arrested in China. It puts a unique burden on the U.S. government,” Schell said.

The incident occurs at a difficult time for both countries. In China, the precarious nature of its leadership leaves little room for senior officials, awaiting the death of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, to step away from a hard-line foreign policy. In the United States, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to visit China later this year for a U.N.-sponsored international women’s conference.

Wu was being held thousands of miles from where he was seized nearly three weeks ago in the border town of Horgas, in the far west Xinjiang Autonomous Region. According to the State Department, Wu has been accused of “repeatedly entering China under false names, stealing Chinese state secrets and disseminating those secrets to institutions and organizations outside China.”

Wu, 58, who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps, immigrated to the United States in 1985. A Milpitas, Calif., resident who is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, he has testified frequently before Congress, opening a window onto abuses inflicted on prisoners in China.

Wu’s wife, Ching Lee Wu, said the State Department told her of her husband’s arrest late Friday night.

“The Chinese government charges clearly reveal that my husband, a U.S. citizen, is now a political prisoner in China,” she said in a statement. “He has been a political prisoner before--for 19 cruel years. The Chinese Communists are holding him hostage because he dared tell the truth about the Chinese gulag and the government’s immoral use of executed prisoners’ organs for transplants.”

Wu recently appeared before a Senate panel to testify about the sale of prisoner organs to rich Asians needing transplants, and he has made a series of trips inside China as part of a prison reform campaign.

Accusing Beijing of trying again “to destroy my husband,” his wife called on the Clinton Administration to act: “The Chinese government has made its decision on how they intend to handle my husband. It is now time for the U.S. government to make its decisions.”

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Administration wants to visit Wu in Wuhan before deciding what additional response to make to his arrest.

“We’re leaving ourselves open to more comment,” the official said, adding that, for the moment, the Administration is not making any effort to connect the Wu case to other issues in the U.S.-Chinese relationship.

As Wu’s detention heightened concern last week, sources on Capitol Hill began suggesting that it could weaken the likelihood that the Administration will continue to offer China the prized most-favored-nation status, under which Chinese products are sold in the United States under the same low import taxes that apply to goods from most other countries.

Schell, in a telephone interview, said the visibility Wu is giving to China’s treatment of prisoners “may help catalyze some new definition of America’s China policy.”

“One can ignore anything if it is faceless. But Harry Wu is not faceless. He is very well-connected with the Congress and the media, and he is very well-connected in Europe. Harry Wu is a one-man band,” Schell said. “Whereas diplomats may find ways to sand the edges of moral dilemmas, not so Harry Wu. For him, the Chinese penal system is undeniably evil.

“The real question mark is Clinton. It seems he must do something.”