Chinese follow own agenda in freeing dissident Wang Dan

China won positive praise as yet another leading dissident Wang Dan was let out of prison last Sunday. But our Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin reports that the Chinese communist leadership has served its own domestic interests by letting Wang go.

HONG KONG (JP): Seeking to please the United States, China released its best known imprisoned dissident, Wang Dan, on Sunday April 19. But it did this in such a way that the Chinese Communist Party also pleased itself, as Wang was put aboard a commercial jet bound for Detroit.

While the Chinese move has been expected sometime prior to President Bill Clinton's visit to China in June, and was immediately welcomed as a positive sign by the U.S., the hard fact remains that Wang's exile is yet another setback for the relatively small Chinese dissident community -- and for any foreign or Chinese hopes that the Middle Kingdom will become a more free and open society.

The first news of Wang's release came Sunday morning from Xinhua, the new China news agency, which in a brief report said that "Chinese judicial authorities recently allowed Wang Dan to be released on bail for medical treatment in accordance with law".

Quoting a spokesman of the Chinese Ministry of Justice, Xinhua reported that "Wang Dan, who is ill, has already gone abroad for medical treatment".

What this almost certainly means is that Wang Dan, like another famous Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng last November, has been nominally released on medical parole, but has in fact been sent into exile on the understanding that he will be imprisoned again if he returns to China.

His choice would have been stark -- stay in prison indefinitely with his health deteriorating, or leave the country of his birth and commitment. The indications are that Wang needed some persuading by his parents as to which was the only course he should take.

The Chinese communist government thus achieves two aims with one release. On the one hand, it pleases the Clinton administration, which is far more concerned with increasing two- way Sino-American trade, but which must maintain pressure over human rights in order to placate Congress and U.S. public opinion.

Confirming that this aim had been fulfilled, Clinton's spokesman, traveling with the president faraway in the Chilean capital Santiago, lost no time noting that "This is something we have been urging the Chinese to do for quite some time, and it is a positive sign".

Later the same day National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was even more effusive about Clintonian success, though he did manage to mention the basic U.S. motive. "The release of Wang Dan suggests that our continuing drumbeat on the subject of human rights does have an impact" Berger claimed,"both the president and others who have been engaged in this are enormously pleased by Wang Dan's release."

Berger explained "It is part of a long-term effort that we've been engaged in to try to make progress on human rights in China, which has produced some concrete results".

These sentiments obscure the fact that, on the other hand, the Chinese authorities now know that they can use exile as a way to further reduce the already declining strength and influence of the dissident movement within China itself. This, in turn, apparently suits the perceived interests of the mainstream faction of the Chinese Communist Party as it recoils from any meaningful political reform, and tries to suppress all opposition.

Put another way, exile further diminishes the already remote threat of real pressure arising within China for radical political reform. As Berger admitted, "there is still a very long way to go in terms of China abiding by universal human rights principles, particularly in the area of political dissent and freedom of expression." While the U.S. may be "seeking systemic change", the Chinese leaders know that such change does not come any nearer, as leading dissidents disappear over the horizon in U.S.-bound jets.

Wang Dan, then a 20-years-old history student, together with Chai Ling and Wuer Kaixi, became famous as the three most visible leaders of the Chinese student movement, as it filled Tiananmen Square with demonstrators in the spring of 1989, prior to the June 4 Beijing massacre.

While Ms. Chai Ling and Wuer Kaixi both managed to escape to exile in the United States through Hong Kong, Wang Dan hesitated, failed to make the right contacts in southern China, and was arrested after he failed to escape through the dissident underground movement organized at that time.

He was sentenced to four years in prison for espousing counter-revolution, but was paroled six months early in 1993, also for a political motive: at that time China was seeking to win support for hosting the Olympic Games in the year 2000.

After resuming his studies, Wang Dan was arrested and detained again in May 1995. In flagrant violation of China's ostensible pursuit of the rule of law, seventeen months elapsed before charges of subversion were laid against Wang and he was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment. Part of the charge against Wang lay in his contacts with a foreign university -- when what Wang was actually doing was pursuing a correspondence course with a foreign institution.

His mother, Wang Lingyun, who has bravely continued to give interviews to the Hong Kong media throughout her son's imprisonments, says that Wang was coughing badly as he was brought from prison to the Beijing international airport last night. Wang was flown straight to Detroit, where he will undergo medical tests at the same hospital that looked after Wei Jingsheng when he was sent into exile last November.

While the Chinese communist authorities may be hoping that the exile of Wei and Wang will lessen foreign, and particularly Clinton administration pressure concerning dissidents, the fact remains that U.S. human rights organizations list some 2,000 prisoners of conscience in the Chinese gulag.

Many, perhaps most, are incarcerated for the crime of counter- revolution, a charge now removed from the Chinese statute book. The 2,000 figure excludes many who are imprisoned for acts which would not be considered crimes in most countries. As Wang Dan is freed, other lesser-known dissidents have recently been arrested and sentenced to terms of "reform-through-labor".

Wang, now 29 years old, told his mother that he hopes to return to China some day. Exile is likely to be a severe punishment for him for, as he once told a Hong Kong television station, "This (China) is my country. What I want to achieve is here".