China must release Harry Wu

In a cruel miscalculation, China has seized an American citizen and human rights activist, Harry Wu, and made him a victim of deteriorating relations with Washington. Over the weekend, they charged Wu with offenses that could bring his execution. The Clinton administration rightly warns Beijing that it risks gravely damaging relations should it persist.

That is strong diplomatic language. But the administration's reaction is moderate compared to that in Congress, where Wu has frequently testified in recent years and has made many friends. China will not be able to bully and bluster its way past this issue as it has with too many human rights issues in the past. Beijing must release Harry Wu.

Wu was detained by Chinese authorities on June 19, as he entered China from Central Asia. In violation of a treaty that guarantees diplomatic access to American citizens within 48 hours of detention, consular officials were kept from seeing Wu until Monday, two days after he was formally charged with espionage, a capital offense.

Wu knows the Chinese prison system too well. As a young man in the late 1950s, he took at face value Chairman Mao Tse-tung's invitation to let a hundred flowers of criticism bloom. That brought him 19 years imprisonment in forced-labor camps. After his release in 1979, he emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming an American citizen. Committed to expose the labor camp horrors he had experienced, Wu began returning to China in the early 1990s and secretly filming abusive practices inside Chinese prisons.

When Chinese authorities recognized Wu at a border crossing last month, they could have barred his entry, though his travel documents were apparently in order. Instead, Beijing grabbed him to register its anger over the American decision to give a visa to Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, for a private visit last month. But if Beijing imagines that its persecution of Wu will lead to diplomatic concessions from Washington, it had best think again. On Sunday, House Speaker Newt Gingrich provocatively suggested that the administration retaliate for Wu's arrest by resuming diplomatic ties with Taiwan. The status of Taiwan will have to be addressed someday in the future, but this is not the time or circumstance.

The issue today is Harry Wu. If Beijing persists in its mistreatment of him, it will alienate American opinion and draw renewed attention to the most repellent, least reformed aspects of communist rule.

-- The New York Times