With Wu Freed, Bigger Issues Are in Focus : U.S.-Chinese relations remain at their lowest point in years

A Chinese court on Wednesday convicted Harry Wu, a Chinese-American human rights activist, of espionage and impersonating a police officer. On Thursday it sentenced him to 15 years in prison and expulsion from China. Within hours Wu was on a San Francisco-bound plane. From the U.S. standpoint and from Wu’s, this result in a case whose outcome was never in doubt was the best that could be had. In fact Wu himself, according to Chinese reports, apparently accepted the verdict and sentence without objection and waived his right to appeal, a response that--as he knew--can be a basis for leniency in the Chinese legal system.

Beijing has every reason to be satisfied with the trial. It allowed the regime to take its retribution against a famous critic of its domestic policies. Wu, even after serving 19 years in the harsh Chinese penal system in the 1960s and ‘70s, boldly returned to his native land in recent years and helped gather highly embarrassing documentation about continuing human rights abuses. It was this effort, with its focus on the illegal export of products made by prison labor and the sale of body organs from executed prisoners, that led to the charges against Wu after he was arrested in June while trying to re-enter the country.

THE LARGER PICTURE: But of course this case has always involved more than just the fate of Harry Wu, who briefly was a highly visible though--as events have shown--an easily removable irritant in U.S.-China relations. The larger and abiding fact is that those relations have been growing steadily more fractious, even abrasive, over issues of far greater complexity than the Wu case. The other day China’s official Xinhua news agency warned that bilateral ties had reached their lowest point in the 16 years since full diplomatic relations were reopened. U.S. press reporting, especially about human rights in China, has become a special focus of Chinese criticism.

China now clearly expects some U.S. gesture in return for giving Washington the leniency it sought in the Wu case. What it wants and almost surely will get is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presence at next month’s U.N. World Conference on Women, which Beijing is hosting. China has blown hot and cold on the conference, bidding for it eagerly five years ago but more recently--as foreign criticism of China’s treatment of women and other human rights abuses has intensified--trying to downplay its importance and prominence. Mrs. Clinton has made no secret of her great interest in attending the conference as a U.S. delegation member. China would very much like her to do so, since the alternative--her absence for what everyone would see as political reasons--would be taken as a slap in the face.

IMPORTANT TALKS: Whatever symbolic significance might be inferred from Mrs. Clinton’s presence or absence, matters of far weightier substance loom. This weekend Peter Tarnoff, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, is due in Beijing for talks intended to ease frictions. Near the top of China’s agenda are Taiwan and the concern of Beijing that, despite the Clinton Administration’s stout denials, the United States might turn to something like a two-Chinas policy. Beijing also is working hard to get the United States to drop its opposition to Chinese membership in the World Trade Organization. And at the top of Washington’s agenda is concern over suspected Chinese sales of intermediate-range missiles to Pakistan, in violation of an international agreement, along with trade and human rights issues.

The resolution of the Wu case should take some of the tension out of the Tarnoff visit. There’s plenty of tension ahead, however, as the big-issue storm clouds on the horizon move steadily closer.