A Verdict Owing to Unrest and Hard-Liner Posturing : *China: Wei Jingsheng’s star-chamber trial underlines the Deng succession struggle.

Wei Jingsheng, China’s famous dissident, is a courageous man and a trenchant thinker. He has also had the bad luck of being a convenient pawn for the political purposes of the high barons of Chinese communism. In 1979, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and served more than 14. After six months on parole, he was held for another 20 months in extralegal detention. This week, he was sentenced to a second term of 14 years in prison. His two trials were open only in name, and both sentences were determined in advance.

The first resulted from his writing in 1978 that China cannot truly modernize without also democratizing. This opinion collided with the intentions of the newly emergent Deng Xiaoping, who was already planning to be a dictator. Deng decided to make an example of the impudent young electrician, but could not very well refer to Wei’s actual offense, which had only been to utter a taboo truth. Deng’s people then conjured the bogus charge that Wei had “sold military secrets” to a foreign reporter, and a kangaroo court concurred.

Deng made sure that the lesson of Wei was clear to all of China. Some of Wei’s friends, who had a transcript of Wei’s courtroom rebuttal and were distributing copies on the streets of Beijing, were arrested and themselves criminally charged. It did not matter that the regime itself claimed that the trial had been “open.” One friend, Liu Qing, spent 10 years in prison for distributing Wei’s statement.

Wei’s second trial this week took place only five days after it was announced and lasted a mere six hours. A number of distinguished attorneys from around the world who had volunteered to defend Wei could not arrive in time to help. Zhang Sizhi, who is one of China’s best lawyers and willingly took Wei’s case, still had not met with Wei three days before the trial. Yet it is highly doubtful that more preparation would have made a difference. Four years ago, when Wang Juntao was tried as a “black hand” in the 1989 protests at Tian An Men, Zhang Sizhi and another lawyer, Sun Yachen, prepared a meticulous defense. The results: Wang received a 13-year sentence and barrister Sun, who was stripped of his license to practice, became unemployed and remains so today. The arguments of lawyers at such “trials” serve only to record events for history or for the outside world.

What political agenda is behind the railroading of Wei Jingsheng this time? The official charge that he sought to “overthrow the government” would be comical if its consequences were not so painful. This year, nearly all of China’s known dissidents have been either arrested or put under tight surveillance. The notion that one of them might single-handedly topple the government is cartoon material. True, insecure authoritarian regimes sometimes do act from paranoia, and it is possible that Chinese rulers see Wei as a larger threat than he actually is. But there are more substantial social and political explanations for the move against Wei.

These begin with the problem of the rising unrest that pervades Chinese society. Visions of China’s huge potential market have led Westerners to overlook a more basic fact: None of the great powers of the 20th century, not even the former Soviet Union, ever faced an array of domestic crises and disturbances and loss of control over society to match what the Chinese communists face today.

This makes the leadership nervous. It also causes them to think, and hence to disagree, about how to handle the corruption, inflation, unemployment, commercial fraud and other complex problems that underlie the unrest. Without either a strongman or democratic checks to exercise control, such disagreements aggravate factionalism and lead to political instability.

The effects are even more volatile when a struggle to succeed as paramount leader is under way. Contestants must appear tough--a standard that China’s military hard-liners have been defining in recent months. The sentencing of Wei cannot have had the eager support of the moderates in the Chinese leadership, who just a few months ago were asking U.S. help in averting censure by the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Internationally, the punishing of Wei is bound to bring the regime more costs than benefits. It will only strengthen an already broad effort to nominate Wei for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But no one in the leadership, including fence-sitters like President Jiang Zemin, wants to be on record as opposing the hard-liners’ move. No contender for the mantle of great leader can let himself seem soft. Therefore none will speak against the crushing of citizen Wei Jingsheng.

Since Wei has been supported in the West, the decision to punish him also represents proud defiance of Western “interference” in China’s affairs. It strengthens a jingoistic nationalism that the Deng regime has been deliberately stimulating in recent years, both to fill the void left by the collapse of socialist ideals and to distract popular attention from domestic problems.

The challenge to the U.S. government is especially pointed. In March 1984, during Wei’s brief interlude of freedom, Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck showed direct support for Wei by meeting him publicly. Then followed the Clinton administration’s decision to “de-link” human rights from trade policy, and the status of human rights in China plummeted. Now Shattuck’s meeting with Wei (which Shattuck, not Wei, initiated) appears on the Chinese’s government’s list of evidence for Wei’s sedition.

Since 1993, Chinese hard-liners have been pushing a policy to “unite with Europe and resist America,” meaning to use trade to buy European silence on human rights while isolating and confronting America on this issue. Both materially and symbolically, therefore, the U.S. was more than an ordinary outsider at Wei’s trial.