Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, one week after his release from detention, is urging governments and rights groups everwhere to keep the pressure on Beijing until all political prisoners are freed in China.

“I have waited decades for this chance to exercise my right to free speech, but the Chinese people have been waiting for centuries,” Wei told reporters Friday, at a news conference held in the New York Public Library.

“Right now there are several thousand political prisoners still suffering in Chinese Communist Party jails for exercising their freedom of speech,” Wei argued. “Our conscience as human beings will not allow us to forget them, not even for a single moment.

“If you look aside when gangsters abuse your neighbours, then your own home will not be safe.”

Wei’s release last week, after spending most of the years since 1979 in jail, has emboldened human rights activists, who noted that Wi’s freedom on health grounds came only after pressure by U.S. President Bill Clinton on his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin.

“We in the human rights community have been critical of the Clinton administration for its China policy, but the administration deserves credit for pushing Wei’s case farther than any other government pushed it, and for doing the necessary to ensure his release and safe arrival here,” said Sidney Jones, executive director of Human Rights Watch/Asia (HRW).

Yet Wei described his release only as “one small victory” for the cause of democracy, since neither he nor his pro-democracy colleagues are free to criticise the ruling Communist Party within China itself.

The dissident, who was most recently convicted by Beijing of trying to overthrow the government in a widely-criticised 1995 ‘show trial’, declared he still intended to return to China, as long as he could speak his mind freely while there.

“I certainly plan to go back – in fact, I never intended to leave,” Wei said of his Nov. 16 release on medical parole, after which he was allowed to leave for the United States and treatment in Detroit. “I’d be willing to go to China under almost any circumstances, but no-one would like to return (only) to go to jail.”

Xiao Qiang, another exiled dissident who is executive director of the New York-based group Human Rights in China, added that “sending one more dissident into exile does not represent an improvement in China’s human rights situation. It is in fact another form of human rights persecution.”

Xiao on Friday presented a list of 21 other leading political prisoners, including Wang Dan and Li Hai, two of the leaders of the 1989 democracy movement, and Liu Jingsheng, a leading labour activist, who have been jailed on counter-revolutionary charges or sentenced to re-education at labour camps.

The cases of those prisoners should be brought up before Clinton makes his planned visit to Beijing next year, he said. While they remain in detention, “none of the 1.2 billion citizens of China can be truly free to express themselves without fear.”

At the same time, human rights activists believe that the strategy of prodding industrialised governments to champion the cause of human rights in China has begun to pay dividends.

Wei’s release last week, Jones said, occurred in a different climate than his first 15-year imprisonment, from 1979 until 1993. During the earlier detention, she argued, the human rights movement was weaker, and Western attitudes towards China’s rights record much less critical.

“When Wei Jingsheng was first imprisoned, the dominant symbol of China was the panda bear,” she said. “The second time around, it was (the site of the 1989 massacre at) Tiananmen Square – and that made all the difference.”

In recent years, the Clinton administration has continued to trade with China after backing down from earlier efforts to tie Beijing’s Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trade status to human rights improvements.

Yet after continued prodding on rights concerns like the treatment of political prisoners and the destruction of Buddhist culture in Tibet, Clinton has also tried to stake out a critical position against Jiang’s government while dealing with it. In one revealing moment, Clinton told the Chinese president last month that Beijing was “on the wrong side of history” — just days after Washington agreed to allow the transfer of nuclear technology to China.

Wei himself has been optimistic about the change in circumstances, although the China he depicts is one where basic rights, from free speech to organising for better labour conditions, are not honoured.

“You should not pay attention to the immediate low tide, because after the low tide, there is a high tide that follows,” he said.