China Frees a Leading Activist

After years of lobbying by the U.S. and other governments, Chinese authorities freed one of the nation’s most famous dissidents from prison Tuesday and sent the democracy activist into de facto exile in the United States.

The release of Xu Wenli highlights Beijing’s desire for stable ties with Washington and the growing influence of Chinese diplomats who see such paroles as instrumental in achieving that goal, analysts said.

Xu, once known to his jailers as Special Prisoner No. 1, spent 16 of the last 21 years in prison. One of the key activists in the late-1970s democracy movement in China, he was convicted in 1982 of being a counterrevolutionary and was sentenced to 12 years. He was returned to prison in 1998 after being convicted of subversion and sentenced to 13 years for trying to set up an opposition political party.

Xu was freed Tuesday and joined his wife at Beijing’s airport, where they were escorted by a U.S. diplomat onto a United Airlines flight to Chicago.

Hours later, at O’Hare International Airport, the couple were reunited with their daughter, Xu Jin, a high school teacher in Rhode Island.

“It was just beautiful. It was just one of the most emotional moments you’ve ever seen. They just enfolded each other,” Mickey Spiegel of Human Rights Watch told Associated Press. Xu Wenli declined to be interviewed at the airport.

“It’s been a long journey.... “ Xu Jin said before her parents’ arrival. “I just hope my dad’s health will hold up.”

In 1999, Xu Wenli was found to have hepatitis B.

Xu’s release came a week after U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Lorne Craner held talks in Beijing on human rights issues. Craner told reporters then that he had appealed for Xu’s release.

“We are pleased that China released him from prison on medical parole,” the State Department said Tuesday.

Xu is the fourth person to be released by China from a list of 13 political prisoners and jailed U.S. residents and citizens that was delivered to Chinese officials during President Bush’s visit to Beijing in February.

Bei Ling, a dissident freed by China in 2000 and sent to the U.S., described Xu in a Times article last year as “the most important Chinese dissident leader of the last 20 years” and the longest-held prisoner of the 1979 Democracy Wall movement, the first outpouring of political protests after the death of Mao Tse-tung in 1976.

Since Beijing struck the crime of “counterrevolution” from its books in 1997, authorities have arrested about 3,500 people on charges of subversion, now known as “endangering state security.” More than 90% of those arrested have been convicted and jailed. Xu’s is the first known parole among such cases.

John Kamm, a San Francisco-based human rights campaigner who worked on Xu’s case for many years, said Xu’s release established a precedent. “It is no longer out of the question for people convicted of endangering state security to be released early,” he said.

Human Rights Watch also hailed Xu’s release but urged China to free more dissidents.

“We are thrilled that Xu Wenli is free. But no one should mistake his release as a sign of improvement in China’s human rights record,” said Brad Adams, executive director of the group’s Asia division. “This was a token gesture to the Bush administration and a cynical move by Beijing to head off international criticism.”

Chinese officials had informed the U.S. ahead of an Oct. 25 summit between Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Texas that Xu would be released by year’s end, Kamm said. Details of the release were finalized Dec. 16-17, when Craner visited Beijing.

“There were some misgivings and reluctance among elements of the Chinese government, and it took a couple of months to get a consensus” on Xu’s release, Kamm said. Chinese officials “said it was important for our future cooperation that a consensus be won,” he added.

Although Xu’s release was seen as a positive step, it continues Beijing’s policy of trying to minimize freed dissidents’ political effectiveness by sending them overseas. In recent years, dissidents such as Wei Jingsheng and student leader Wang Dan have been sent into de facto exile in the U.S. Exiled dissidents are on a list of people denied reentry into China.

“I don’t think anyone should have to choose to be exiled, and he won’t be free until he can go back to China freely and openly,” Xu Jin said of her father.

In a statement, Xu Jin called for the release of Wang Youcai and Qin Yongmin, who with Xu Wenli tried to establish the China Democracy Party in 1998. The two, sentenced the same week as Xu, are serving 11 and 12 years on the same charges.

Xu Jin and her parents later arrived in New York, where, she said, they would head to Chinatown for dinner. “First I’m getting some food for them, because my dad doesn’t have much teeth left, so he can only eat soft food,” she said.

Xu Wenli, born in 1943, was one of the most prominent activists in China’s Democracy Wall movement, advocating electoral reforms, independent trade unions and the release of political prisoners. He was a founder of an underground journal, the April Fifth Forum, which commemorated the April 1976 protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Beijing to demonstrate against the Gang of Four, the radical clique that carried out Mao’s orders at the time.

For his activities, Xu was convicted of counterrevolution and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was interrogated about 200 times and kept in solitary confinement for 11 years, sometimes in a small, windowless cell, according to “My Defense Statement,” Xu’s account of his experience, which he had smuggled out of prison in 1985.

Xu’s incarceration left him frail but unrepentant. In 1993, authorities paroled Xu as then-President Clinton debated extending preferential trading status to China. Determined to stay politically active, Xu rejected official offers to leave China.

Xu joined other activists who tried to capitalize on the brief political thaw around the time of Clinton’s June 1998 state visit to China. Xu worked to set up the Beijing branch of the China Democracy Party, but authorities quickly quashed the group and meted out stiff prison sentences to its organizers. Except for Xu, they remain in prison.

Known among Chinese dissidents as a skilled organizer, Xu has described himself as a moderate Marxist and “a small electrician who puts out fires.”

“I think that China’s political reform should be a gradual process,” he wrote in 1998. “In modern Chinese history, there have been many radical, revolutionary storms inflicting much pain on people but achieving little in terms of people’s political rights.”

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Staff writer Edwin Chen in Washington contributed to this report.