THE ARRIVAL OF CHINESE DISSIDENT Wang Dan in Detroit last week marked the end of a phase in the sordid collusion between Beijing and Western capitals on human rights. With the exit from China of the last big-name political prisoner linked to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the diplomats have run out of chips for the game in which the West pretends to demand liberalization and China pretends to deliver it.
In this game, pioneered years ago by the Soviet Union, the celebrated prisoner is fattened up for a few days by his captors, then released -- "for medical reasons" only -- and bundled onto a plane. Thus does the regime relieve itself of a potential dissident leader as well as an irritant in its relations with the West. Western statesmen, meanwhile, claim the release demonstrates that "quiet diplomacy," not "confrontation," brings progress in human rights.
This, of course, is cant, on a par with British prime minister Tony Blair's recent praise for the visiting Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji: A spokesman for Downing Street said Blair had found Zhu "fascinating," "practical," and " witty" -- a "fellow modernizer." What is so shameful about such exchanges is that all the participants know what is really going on. Blair and his fellow heads of state know perfectly well that Zhu, when mayor of Shanghai in 1989, met mass demonstrations with relative restraint -- then ordered imprisonments and executions little noticed in the West. All the parties know, too, that the Communist system has kept China backward and oppressed.
China's vaunted economic reforms have changed the landscape and widened the gap between rich and poor. At least 100 million farmers wander the country seeking work, producing offspring outside the one-child regulations and contributing to rising crime. Peasants who still have work regularly riot against local officials who rip them off. Many of the 70 million workers in state factories, which are either bankrupt or failing, receive no, or partial, pay. Because sackings would spark social disaster, however, hundreds of industries, many of them utterly useless, have been declared "key" and therefore exempt from the brutal hand of "the market." The major banks, ridden with cronyism, are insolvent, and 35 percent of their loans are said to be unsecured. Chinese tell pollsters the most pressing national problem is official corruption.
China, in short, far from being an economic bulwark against the widening Asian crisis, as some in London claimed during Zhu's visit, is a core component of that crisis. And the crisis extends well beyond economics. In the regions that are Chinese only by Beijing's fiat, Muslims and Buddhists seethe. In Xinjiang, Muslims murder Chinese occupiers, while the Buddhists heed the Dalai Lama's injunction to remain non-violent. Christian believers are harried unless they belong to one of the party's tame "Patriotic Churches. " President Clinton's recent delegation comprising a rabbi, a priest, and an evangelical pastor disgraced themselves by skating right past the religious realities in China and Tibet.
Tens or hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, meanwhile, suffer in the Laogai, the Chinese gulag, and other detention facilities, undergoing " reform through labor." More people are executed without a nod at judicial formalities in China, according to Amnesty International, than in all the rest of the world combined. Legal proceedings are pro forma -- "verdict first, trial second," as the Chinese say. The occasional release of a well-known prisoner in no way deters the arrest of others not famous.
This is an incomplete tour d'horizon of the scene over which Zhu Rongji presides. Although they know this, Western leaders have acceded to Beijing's insistence that China's leaders are uniquely averse to public criticism and that what achieves results is discreet, private mention of problems "behind the screen."
Recently, Wei Jingsheng, the famous political prisoner expelled in November 1997, asked British foreign secretary Robin Cook for an example of a human- rights victory arising from a private chat. Cook couldn't give one. He had previously cited Wei's own release as the prime example, but Wei rejected this, observing that a deal -- his release in exchange for President Jiang Zemin's White House welcome last year, say, or Wang Dan's release in exchange for lenient treatment of China by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights -- is merely a deal, not a sign of reform.
British and U.S. officials also cite as evidence of progress Beijing's agreement to abide by various U.N. conventions, the admission of a European team to a Beijing prison (where inmates lived in individual cells featuring fish tanks), and the upcoming visit to China of Mary Robinson, U.N. commissioner for human rights. How many such "steps" will it take before the international community is willing to raise meaningful systemic issues such as freedom of the press and association, repression of minorities and religious groups, the absence of free trade unions, and the vast number of executions (from which stems the barbarous practice of selling human organs to wealthy buyers, including some in the United States)?
For that matter, are the Chinese ever actually put on notice, even privately? In fact, what goes on in the famous exchanges "behind the screen" is shameful. According to experienced diplomats, here is how it works: The principals discuss. Near the end of their encounter, the senior Western negotiator states that a junior official will hand to his Chinese opposite number a list of human-rights concerns and that this will be deemed "part of the meeting." Afterwards the Western leader holds a press conference, where he emphasizes how forcefully he raised human rights with the Chinese.
Wei told me that during his brief release from prison in 1993 (which failed to persuade the International Olympic Committee to award China the 2000 Olympics) a security official said to him privately, "Wei, you are wasting your time hurling yourself against the rock of human rights. Some of us want to help you. But your friends from Western countries, when they come to Beijing, leave this to their junior secretaries. It's not serious. We laugh at them."
When the West gets serious, though, the Chinese don't laugh. They didn't laugh when sanctions were placed on them after Tiananmen; they released prisoners. When two U.S. carrier groups sailed near Taiwan in the spring of 1996, they stopped firing missiles into the straits and halted their invasion drills. And when Chinese swimmers, caught repeatedly taking drugs, were either disqualified or deprived of their medals at international meets, they stopped participating or began competing drug-free.
Pressure works. So why the Western pussy-footing? Trade has been a factor. But investment in China has become increasingly unappetizing for foreigners; Britain does more business with the Czech Republic than with China. And trade may no longer be the reason for the pussy-footing. When Wei Jingsheng visited Western capitals in March, foreign ministers assured him that China had to be handled very gently because it could disintegrate in a welter of rural and urban violence directed at an unresponsive government. They hoped that by persuading Beijing to accept Western training for judges, lawyers, and jailers (training jailers is a Swedish specialty), the West could avert a blowup and create a kinder, gentler China. Wei maintains the opposite. The end of international pressure, he said in Copenhagen, "may lead a large number of Chinese to believe the only way of bringing about change inside China is through violent measures." China needs Western business, he says. If Western sanctions were selectively imposed, "the Chinese government would have almost no choice but to make concessions."
The system itself, then, remains the essential issue. Of the top leaders in Beijing, only Zhu Rongji has personally suffered from it. He was sentenced to reeducation through labor in 1957, then purged again in the Cultural Revolution and not wholly rehabilitated until 1979. Asked recently about those wasted years, Zhu replied, "That experience was profoundly educational. It was, however, also very unpleasant. I don't want to discuss the matter now.
So we come to the final irony: China's prime minister knows the system inside out. He knows that millions suffered as he did and that many still do. Yet not only can he not bear to speak of the brutality of the regime he heads -- tragically, he and his colleagues have persuaded their international interlocutors to keep silent too.
Jonathan Mirsky is the former East Asia editor of the London Times.