Yongyi Song, the Dickinson College librarian whose plight was recounted on this page last week, was released by Beijing on Friday. Song had been imprisoned since a trumped-up arrest last August for "smuggling" research material on the Cultural Revolution. Does this mean there's a thaw in Beijing? Hardly. Consider the rest of what was a typically busy week at the office for Communist despots in China -- and for their cringing supplicants in the Clinton administration.
On Sunday, Jan. 23, came word that authorities in Hebei province had arrested, on charges of subversive religious practice, five members of China's underground Roman Catholic church. Among the detained were Han Dingxiang, bishop of Yongnian, who has already spent a total of 20 years in jail, and lay leader Wang Chengqun, who is partially paralyzed as a result of his last incarceration in a labor camp.
On Monday, Jan. 24, news reached the West that an "Intermediate People's Court" in Eastern Turkestan had imposed death sentences on five members of the persecuted Uighur Muslim ethnic minority. According to the state-controlled Xinjiang Daily, all five were guilty of engaging in "separatist activities through illegal religious propaganda."
On Tuesday, Jan. 25, staff writers at the Nanfang Zhoumou newspaper in Guangdong province reported that their editor, Jiang Yiping, had been sacked by local Communist party officials -- for "political errors" that included publication of a feature story on the "decadent" Hong Kong action movie star Jackie Chan.
On Wednesday, Jan. 26, the Beijing People's Daily published new rules promulgated by China's State Press and Publication Administration granting the Communist party monitoring and censorship authority over all Internet websites in the country -- and banning the employment of journalists by those sites.
Also on Wednesday, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China released details of two Chinese Falun Gong adherents' murders by police. Gao Xianmin was arrested on Dec. 31 for participating in an illegal picnic lunch. He was forced to drink salt water and severely beaten. He died of heart failure. On Jan. 10, coal miner Liu Zhilan attempted to submit a petition to Beijing authorities protesting such abuses. She was forced to clean the offices of the Zhoukoudian police substation -- and died from breathing poison gas "while resting in the station's furnace room."
As the week drew to a close, new U.S. ambassador Joseph Prueher told reporters in Beijing that he had had "very good" and "very dense" meetings with China's president, Jiang Zemin, and premier, Zhu Rongji. Human rights came up in both meetings, Prueher said. "I've committed to our hosts not to lecture on this subject."