CHINA-UNITED STATES: Ties Take a Deeper Dive over Wu Arrest

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Yojana Sharma

HONG KONG, Jul 11 1995 (IPS) - China’s arrest of Chinese-American human rights activist Harry Wu on charges of espionage and selling state secrets threatens to worsen already-strained relations between Washington and Beijing.

Sino-U.S. ties took a dive after Washington last month granted Taiwanese President Lee Teng Hui a visa, ostensibly to visit his alma mater Cornell University in New York.

The incident seems to have confirmed China’s worst fears that Washington is employing a ‘policy of containment’ toward China. As Beijing sees it, the Lee visit was only the latest in a string of unfriendly acts.

Among these have been Washington’s opposition to the Chinese membership application to the World Trade Organisation in a developing-country category.

That Washington is also about to establish full diplomatic ties with Vietnam, which Beijing has historically been unable to see eye to eye with, is also being seen as a U.S. move to establish a counterweight to China.

The China-born Wu was reported ‘missing’ three weeks ago but his arrest was confirmed by Beijing only a few days after the Chinese charge d’affaires in Washington received a stern warning about the incident from Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord.

(China had recalled its ambassador to the United States after Lee visited the United States.)

Wu is now in the central city of Wuhan where a U.S. consular official was allowed to meet him on Monday, but in the presence of five Chinese officials.

Says Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post: “This is not the act of some local public security officials in central China, as Chinese reports would have us believe. A move of this magnitude can only have been made at the highest levels … and with the full knowledge of its consequences for Sino-U.S. relations.”

“That may explain why there was a delay of nearly three weeks in announcing Mr Wu’s arrest, allowing time for President Jiang Zemin and other senior leaders to be consulted,” it adds. “They would have been warned of how Washington is likely to react and, in allowing the arrest they are sending a signal that they do not care.”

Wu spent 19 years in Chinese labour camps before emigrating to the United States in 1985. But he continued his activist work abroad, and has even managed to secretly enter China.

During one trip, Wu apparently videotaped the country’s alleged sales of human organs taken from executed prisoners and clips from his work were included in a British documentary that was broadcast last year.

Wu has also done extensive research on China’s gulags in particular on the export trade conducted by the labour camps.

Last month, Wu took another trip to his homeland, entering China through Xinjiang province but with a valid U.S. passport and Chinese visa.

Analysts are now debating over why China decided to grant Wu a visa at all and then arrest him, risking a major confrontation with the United States, when all they had to do was refuse him a visa.

Some say Wu’s arrest is a clever Chinese manoeuvre to gain the upper hand in its disputes with the United States and force Washington to follow its own agenda — one in which Beijing can call the shots.

Diplomats note that China’s leaders had been worried about the way in which the White House had resurrected the issue missile sales to Pakistan, threatening sanctions if sales were proved, putting diplomatic pressure on Beijing.

But one diplomat in the Chinese capital has also pointed out that Beijing’s anger with Washington is matched only by its determination to stamp our continued dissident activities in China, in particular Wu’s embarrassing revelations of the insides of prison camps.

With senior leader Deng Xiaoping considered to be on his deathbed, says the diplomat, the desire of officials in Beijing to ensure stability in China during the sensitive succession period has also meant a renewed crackdown on dissidents.

The arrest of Wu is thus being held up as an example that China is serious in its bid to get tough on dissidents, he argues.

According to Hong Kong-based China analyst Willy Lam, China’s Ministry of State Security has over recent years collected a thick dossier on Wu’s investigative activities.

“The evidence would be used to show ordinary Chinese that he was a ‘traitor’ and an ‘American agent’ who had perpetrated anti- government activities,” Lam said, thereby showing those who oppose the Chinese government as foreign agents.

On the week-end, the state-run New China News Agency said Wu had “engaged in espionage and bought secret information and stole secret documents,” since June 1991. “He carried these secrets abroad and provided them to foreign organisations and institutions.”

In a sign that Beijing is tightening up on dissident activity, Chinese authorities last month revoked the medical parole of Chen Ziming, a dissident activist from the 1989 student-led pro- democracy movement. He has been returned to prison to serve out the rest of his 13 year sentence.

Another leading dissident, Liu Gang, last week said he had been given a ten-day sentence for failing to report to the police following his release from another sentence in mid-June.

But some analysts note that dissidents have also been used as a bargaining chip with the United States in the past, such as the well-timed release of certain well-known activists in advance of important debates related to China’s trade privileges with the United States.

Many of the released dissidents were rearrested later when contentious issues in the Sino-U.S. relationship had died down.

But the Wu saga may well be in danger of backfiring on Beijing. It has already fuelled calls in Washington for retaliation against China, indicating that relations will take a turn for the worse.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich this week-end said Washington should recognise Taiwan once and for all.

Beijing’s suspicions over Washington’s sudden friendliness with Hanoi also seems to have been confirmed with statements from John MacCain, the key advocate of normalised U.S. ties with Hanoi, who now says a strong Vietnam is a counterweight to a “disturbing pattern of behaviour” by China.

Analysts say China, for its part, is unlikely to back down over Wu. Having publicly announced the activist’s arrest, it would now have to try and sentence him — further aggravating relations with the United States for whom the treatment of its citizens abroad is a major populist issue.