A Look at China Through Dissidents’ Eyes Might Change Feinstein’s View

WASHINGTON — Over the past few months, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been preaching to anyone and everyone the message that the Chinese government is getting a bum rap. She claims that the situation in China is becoming more open and less repressive.

But if Feinstein, on her next trip to China, would try to meet with Bao Tong, she might gain a perspective different from the one Chinese leaders give her.

Or perhaps when he visits China next month, President Clinton’s national security advisor, Anthony Lake--who came into the White House calling for the “enlargement” of democracy around the world--can look into Bao Tong’s case.

Who is Bao Tong?

He has been, for the past seven years, by far China’s top-ranking political prisoner. But Bao is not your typical dissident. He is not a kid, not a street orator. Rather, the 62-year-old was once one of China’s top young leaders. He had been the top aide to Communist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang, the political secretary to the Politburo Standing Committee and a member of the Communist Party Central Committee.

An excellent book by UCLA professor Richard Baum, “Burying Mao,” depicts Bao as one of the leading reformers within the Communist Party in the decade after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1979. But in 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square upheavals, Bao was locked up on charges of “counterrevolutionary propaganda” and leaking state secrets after he opposed the decision to impose martial law in Beijing.

Imprisoning Bao was roughly the equivalent of sending Lake or White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, or some longtime advisor to Republican presidents, such as former Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney, to jail in this country.

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You can learn a lot about a government not just by seeing who is jailed, but also by looking at the manner in which they are set free.

In this country, those who were convicted of Watergate crimes--like President Nixon’s aides John D. Ehrlichman and John W. Dean III--served brief jail terms and then, after their releases, were able to write books, appear on television and otherwise get on with their lives.

Not so Bao. Just four weeks ago, he was released from China’s Qincheng Prison after serving seven years. But it was not a release in the usual meaning of the word.

Chinese authorities did not permit Bao to go home. Instead, they set up a special guarded compound for him in the Western Hills on the outskirts of Beijing. His entire family has been told that it should move out of its home in downtown Beijing and into the guarded compound with him.

According to a letter Bao sent out two weeks ago, he has been informed he cannot leave the Western Hills area and must obtain permission to meet any visitors. He must submit to monitoring by security officials and must report his “thought” on a monthly basis. He cannot hold any government job, cannot own or run a business, has no rights to freedom of expression and cannot publish anything abroad that would damage China’s image. He has no lawyer, no doctor and no telephone.

In other words, after serving his full sentence, Bao has been released from jail into a kind of house arrest.

Looking at the case of Bao gives one a less benign view of China than the one being put forward in this country by friends of the Chinese leadership such as Feinstein. This spring, Feinstein emerged as the leading defender and explainer of the Chinese regime on Capitol Hill, around Washington and in California.

The California Democrat relies heavily on her relationship with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, whom she first met in 1985 when she was mayor of San Francisco and he was mayor of Shanghai. He became China’s leader after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Over the past decade, Feinstein has visited Jiang in China on several occasions and has met with other Chinese leaders. She has been accompanied on many of these visits by her husband, San Francisco businessman Richard C. Blum, who has extensive business and real estate interests in China. According to Business Week magazine, he and a partner have raised $105 million for a fund to invest in China. Feinstein said recently that her husband’s business interests in China have no connection to her work as a senator.

In Washington, Feinstein’s principal cause is to preserve China’s most-favored-nation trade benefits. She maintains that revoking the benefits would be counterproductive and would harm American business. In these beliefs, Feinstein is no doubt sincere and hardly unique.

What is troubling is that Feinstein goes several steps further. In her zeal to preserve the favored trade status, she makes assertions about China that are, at best, questionable.

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Some of these claims go to the fundamental nature of the Chinese political system itself, which is undergoing “significant changes,” Feinstein has said. “Chinese society continues to open up with looser ideological controls, freer access to outside sources of information and increased media reporting,” she wrote in an op-ed piece for The Times last month.

Is China really opening up? Ask Bao.

Or listen to the words of one of America’s leading China scholars, David Shambaugh, editor of the China Quarterly, probably the leading academic journal on Chinese affairs.

“Let us not deceive ourselves--China’s political system remains authoritarian and repressive. In fact, it has become significantly more so in recent years,” Shambaugh wrote in a paper delivered in April to an Army War College conference in Pennsylvania.

“The Chinese regime is one of the world’s worst abusers of human rights and basic freedoms,” Shambaugh said. “It maintains itself in power in large part through intimidation and coercion of the population. It tolerates no opposition.”

Earlier this month, at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Feinstein confronted two representatives of the AFL-CIO who were testifying in opposition to China’s most-favored-nation benefits. She claimed that Wei Jingsheng, China’s top dissident and leading advocate for democracy, said in 1994 that he was not in favor of withdrawing China’s trade benefits.

Yet Feinstein’s evidence was shaky. She cited some vague words Wei uttered to a U.S. official, suggesting that he did not favor an outright revocation of the most-favored-nation status. But Wei also did not endorse an unconditional extension of the trade benefits. Rather, his position appears to have been the same as that of, say, former Sen. George J. Mitchell: that the United States should extend China’s trade privileges as long as China meets some human rights conditions.

“Dissidents say they’re proof that linking trade to human rights works,” reported the Associated Press on Jan. 27, 1994. The article quoted Wei and another dissident as saying American human rights pressure had won them their freedom from prison. In an interview, Wei said the United States should be willing to withdraw China’s trade benefits if the regime failed to improve the human rights climate.

In a sense, this is now history. The Clinton administration has abandoned its efforts to link China’s trade benefits to improvements in human rights.

And Wei, who had been freed in 1993 after serving 14 years for “counterrevolutionary” offenses, was imprisoned again the following year, this time to serve another 14-year sentence for “conspiring to subvert the government.” If Feinstein is interested in Wei’s views on American policy, perhaps she could ask to visit him too, on her next trip to China.

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In one recent speech, Feinstein called her friend Jiang “a moderate, pro-Western leader.” Perhaps it looks that way over dinner inside the Chinese leadership compound. Outside, around the rest of China, the reality seems to be a lot messier.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.