Sino-American ties to worsen further

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): China is in danger of further damaging and deteriorating Sino-American relations, as it detains a leading dissident in the most distant northwestern corner of China, and breaks its consular agreement with the United States.

The trouble is that the detained dissident is a naturalized American citizen with a valid American passport and a valid Chinese visa. Additionally the dissident is the man who, more than anyone else, has exposed the inequities and the enormity of the vast gulag of "labor reform camps" in which millions of Chinese are detained, often without trial, throughout China.

The detained American is Harry Wu who himself was incarcerated in the Chinese gulag without charge, trial or conviction being held against him, from 1960 to 1979. Once freed, Wu emigrated to America.

He is an unusual and uncommonly conscientious man. Once he obtained his U.S.passport he did not try to forget about his personal ordeal. Instead he tried to help the world know, and remember what he saw as a massive injustice.

"I never want to go back to hell" Harry Wu told the San Diego Union-Tribune recently in an interview "I want to destroy hell". While many China "experts" believe that China can progress through reform, Wu is one of the few who believe that China can only be reformed once the communist system is overthrown.

A few days later Wu and his American research assistant attempted to enter China from Kazakhstan in the remote northwest of Sinkiang province. He was detained on June 19th, while his assistant was expelled.

The Sino-American Consular Access Agreement provides for either nation to inform the other within four days of detaining or arresting a citizen of the other country, and that anyone so arrested should have consular access within 48 hours of the notification.

China technically abided by the first provision by informing the U.S. that Wu was being "investigated" on June 23, but studiously ignored the second, as a U.S. consular official waited in the Sinkiang capital city, Urumchi.

Ten days after Wu was detained, the Chinese have not yet belatedly informed the Americans of Wu's whereabouts. The Americans believe that Wu is in a hotel in Horgas, 570 kilometers to the west of Urumchi.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns has questioned the Chinese official contention that Wu is merely being investigated. "His passport has been taken away. He has not been allowed to leave Horgas. He has not been allowed to see American government officials. He is being detained" Burns says.

Meanwhile, the slow Chinese response has had the inevitable result of stimulating the concern of the U.S. Congress. In the last two days first the House of Representatives, and yesterday the U.S. Senate, both passed resolutions calling upon China to free Wu, and urging the Clinton Administration to do everything possible to secure his release.

Both the Chinese desire for an "investigation" and the deep American concern over Harry Wu's fate are politically understandable.

Despite his distaste for the labor reform camp "hell", Wu has been back to it at least three times previously.

On one occasion he used his connections with his former prison guards to visit and film the gulag.

He helped the CBS television network program "Sixty Minutes" do a story on Chinese prison labor exports.

Last year he helped the BBC to similarly do a documentary on aspects of the gulag.

Naturally Wu's determination to reveal an aspect of Chinese communism which the outside world too often ignores has infuriated China's communist rulers. By the very same token, he has obtained a far stronger, more positive image in the United States than have most Chinese dissidents. Wu has actually experienced the harsh reality of the system he attacks.

He has testified before various Congressional committees. Last year he co-authored a memoir of his years in the gulag, "Bitter Winds", a deeply moving book which should do for all those falsely and cruelly imprisoned in China what Alexander Solzhenitsyn earlier did for those who similarly suffered in the Soviet Union.

Additionally, in the U.S. he has set up, and heads, a Research Institute into the Laogai (reform through labor) issue.

In "Bitter Winds", Wu describes what drives him to seemingly tempt fate by returning time and again to China:

"Even though I have found safety in the United States, I have never found rest. Always I recalled the faces I had left behind.

"Always I worried that while I had escaped, the labor-reform system continued to operate, day by day, year by year,largely unnoticed, unchallenged, and therefore unchanged.

"I felt urgent the responsibility not just to disclose but to publicize the truth about the Communist Party's mechanisms of control, whatever the risk to me, whatever the discomfort of telling my story".

Wu is also a very different person from most of the dissidents who demonstrated across China in the spring of 1989, particularly in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, many of whom were the privileged products of, and still believed in, the communist system.

As he told the San Diego Union-Tribune, "I tell (China's dissidents) you guys were expelled from heaven, I was expelled from hell...your side is very few, my side is many".

While China's exiled dissidents often squabble over political and personal differences, Wu believes that "the really important thing for exiles is to try and go back. You have to do something in China". But Wu never told the newspaper's reporter how quickly he intended to -- once again -- take his own advice.

Clearly, Wu, having once again taken a great risk and now facing dire discomfort also poses an acute dilemma for the Chinese government, at a time when Beijing is still simulating anger of the U.S. granting a visit visa to Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, and demanding that the U.S. make amends for that transgression. China has canceled several Sino-American exchanges, withdrawn its ambassador in Washington, and has declined an American offer for higher-level discussions to resolve differences, which would have involved a visit by the number three man in the State Department, Peter Tarnoff.

Hard-liners within the Chinese Communist Party are almost certainly arguing that Wu be dealt with harshly. But if the Chinese government makes any such decision, it risks downgrading Sino-American relations to their lowest point since ties were first normalized in 1979.