China Sends Ailing Labor Activist Into Exile

China released an ailing labor rights campaigner from a prison work camp today and immediately sent him into exile in the United States, a human rights group reported.

Liu Nianchun’s release contrasted with a relentless 3-week-old crackdown against dissidents trying to form an opposition political party. A leading organizer of the China Democracy Party, Xu Wenli, is scheduled to go on trial for subversion Monday.

Liu was taken from the Tuanhe labor camp on the outskirts of Beijing, driven to the capital’s airport and put on a Northwest Airlines flight, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China reported. It added that he was ultimately headed for New York.

Authorities released Liu six months before the end of his prison term, but they made his freedom conditional on his going into exile, the Hong Kong-based group said.

Liu was one of the most respected figures in China’s fractured, persecuted dissident community. His more than 3 1/2 years in prisons and labor camps illustrated the way China’s ruling Communist Party punishes people it deems a threat.

Liu was imprisoned three times during the past 17 years and was never put on trial. His last arrest came after he signed a petition in May 1995 calling for labor rights. Fourteen months passed before his wife learned of his whereabouts: a labor camp in the frigid northeast.

Police have the power to send criminal suspects to labor camps for up to three years without trial. The Information Center for Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China reported Saturday that Xu Wangping, 36--another activist for the China Democracy Party--was detained Oct. 14 and sent earlier this month to the Xishanping labor camp outside Chongqing, in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

The center also said that Liu Xianbing, another democracy campaigner in Sichuan, was detained Saturday. Liu had been working on an article calling for the release of opposition organizers.

On Friday, in an address marking the anniversary of the nation’s 20 years of economic reforms, President Jiang Zemin said that China would spurn Western-style democracy and crush threats to Communist Party rule.