China Knows Complaints Just For Show

When Wei Jingsheng first stood in a court dock, pictures of the democracy campaigner’s gaunt face and shaved head shocked a world China was starting to woo.

A little more than 16 years later, Wei was back in court. But China and the world are no longer strangers. So close is the relationship, in fact, that China will rack up at least $290 billion in two-way trade this year, about 12 times the 1979 level.

Despite international protests over the periodic arrests of dissidents and the army’s shooting of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, Chinese leaders have learned they have little to fear from Western recriminations on human rights.

Reaction to Wei’s conviction Wednesday for sedition and his 14-year prison sentence is unlikely to change their minds.

“The Chinese government has measured the West’s bottom line on human rights and found there’s no there there,” said Andrew Nathan, a political science professor at Columbia University in New York.

From Wei’s detention in April 1994 through his trial, not one Western government has threatened China with economic reprisals to gain fair treatment for him.

“The Australian government strongly regrets the heavy sentence given to prominent Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng,” Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans said Wednesday in a response typical of those made by Western governments over the past weeks.

Beyond such anodyne statements, expressions of concern for Wei and other jailed dissidents seem confined to a ritualistic issuing of lists bearing their names.

President Clinton handed one to Chinese President Jiang Zemin in New York in October. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl did the same thing last month before going off to visit a People’s Liberation Army infantry unit.

“This is just for show and the Chinese government realizes it too,” said Guo Luoji, a longtime dissident who is currently a senior research fellow at Harvard University.

“Western countries all want to do business with China, so they have decreased their human rights pressure,” said Guo.

Guo and other dissidents believe Clinton strengthened the Chinese leadership’s grip on the dissent in 1994. That spring, he removed improvement on human rights as a condition for renewing China’s preferential trade status.