China’s Thin Line Between Opinion and Subversion

Three dissidents seeking to establish an opposition party have been convicted and given harsh prison sentences in trials that drew a clear line separating acceptable discourse about political reform from what the Communist leadership regards as subversion.

At its essence, the distinction appears to be between talking and doing. The former, which has been flowering for months in academic journals, books and informal discussion groups critical of the government, lies within the bounds of what the Beijing leadership has allowed--and even encouraged, in some cases. The latter can still land you in prison, as Xu Wenli, Wang Youcai and Qin Yongmin discovered.

Xu and Wang were sentenced Monday to 13 and 11 years in prison, respectively, on charges of subversion. The two high-profile dissidents helped lead an abortive drive to set up the fledgling China Democracy Party as a counter to the 49-year rule of the Communist Party in the world’s most populous nation.

Qin was convicted today and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Where the would-be opposition party members crossed the line, some experts say, was in their coordinated effort to challenge Communist supremacy openly and directly. With wide publicity by foreign media--which always raises suspicions among Chinese authorities--the men attempted to register their party in locales from coastal Zhejiang province to the inland industrial center of Wuhan.

“The Chinese government has always been worried about any movement that might tie people in one province with people in another,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at USC. “Once you get cross-province [organization], then you have the potential for a national movement, beyond a local movement, and that’s a threat to the central leadership.”

Fear of concerted opposition is partly what led the Beijing regime to send in tanks in 1989 to crush pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Their campaign had triggered, then linked up with, similar protests across the country.

On Friday, President Jiang Zemin vowed that the government would “nip in the bud” all “subversive activities” that threatened the political system. “The Western mode of political systems must never be copied,” he warned.

“If Jiang wanted to demonstrate what he said the other day, what better way to do it than with this quick and dirty show trial?” said Jonathan Pollack, a senior analyst at the Rand Corp. think tank. “When a decision is made to put somebody like Xu on trial, it’s made at a high political level.”

State Department Denounces Sentences

In Washington, the Clinton administration denounced the sentences, saying they violated international human rights conventions that China has signed.

State Department spokesman James Foley said the men “appear to have been involved in nothing more than efforts to form a new political party, which is, after all, a form of peaceful political expression.”

“We are deeply disturbed by the long sentences imposed and the lack of due process,” Foley said.

“China’s obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the obligations it will assume when it ratifies the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it has already signed, require it to protect peaceful political expression and association,” Foley added.

Xu, 55, a well-known dissident, was tried, convicted and sentenced in just three hours Monday morning in a trial whose outcome was never in doubt. Wang, 32, a onetime leader in the 1989 protests, was tried separately in the coastal city of Hangzhou on Thursday. The verdict and sentence were announced hours after the results of Xu’s swift trial. Qin was tried in Wuhan in central China.

More than 30 people have been detained or questioned in connection with the China Democracy Party in the past few weeks.

In contrast to the abortive attempt to establish an opposition party, debate over such sensitive topics as political reform has bloomed, albeit tentatively, in the past few years on university campuses, in scholarly publications and in Internet chat rooms.

China Tolerant of Academic Discussions

Although the dissident trials have put a chill on speculation about a “Beijing spring,” there is little doubt that a more tolerant atmosphere than at almost any time within the last 10 years is reigning in China. Bookstores are brimming with volumes in which academicians and other authors openly discuss shortcomings of Chinese policies and ways to improve them. Earlier this year, a series of books bearing the imprimatur of one of Jiang’s own advisors cautiously advocated bringing greater democratization to China’s single-party political system.

And in one of the most talked-about books of the year, author He Qinglian delivers a scathing critique of China’s economic reforms, alleging that their effect has been to allow an elite class of Communist cadres and high-ranking families to enrich themselves through corruption and practices tantamount to highway robbery. The result: not condemnation, but near-official adulation of He’s book, which became mandatory reading in government circles.

“There are issues that are clearly within the domain of acceptable difference and offering of opinions, but then there’s a domain in which political correctness with Chinese characteristics carries the day,” Pollack said. “Just beneath the radar there’s a fair amount of ferment, a fair amount of debate, but there seems to be an effort to enforce the basics,” which includes undisputed Communist Party rule.

Rosen added: “You basically have a distinction between the established intellectuals who have the opportunity to get their views aired and published and so on, people who do have some ‘legitimacy’ in the eyes of the regime, and those who are more marginalized, whose only chance to be heard is through the foreign press.”

It is the latter and their organized dissent against which the government is now mounting its crackdown.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.