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By CHRISTOPHER OGDEN
NOVEMBER 23, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 20
Considering he's a soft-spoken monk and not the head of a major nation, the lineup of officials eager to talk with him was remarkable: President Bill Clinton, the First Lady, Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Yet last week's White House welcome was more than a reflection of the respect and affection Americans have long had for the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. It was the latest step in a noble, though perhaps futile effort to reach accord with China over the future of Tibet, from which he fled nearly 40 years ago during a failed revolt against Beijing's occupation of his homeland.
The very visibility of last week's meeting guaranteed three short-term results: first, that nothing would happen in Washington because China would resent the overly public U.S. involvement in what Beijing considers an internal affair; next, that Clinton would bring up Tibet again with Chinese President Jiang Zemin at this week's Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Malaysia; and last, that there would be another phase of the dialogue, which all three parties would approach more quietly.
So there is motion if not movement underway, as has been the case since Clinton visited China in June and, in a news conference, urged Jiang to begin a dialogue with the Dalai Lama "in return for the recognition that Tibet is part of China." Jiang replied that he'd talk if the Dalai Lama publicly acknowledged that not only Tibet was "an inalienable part of China" but also Taiwan, where he had visited to the annoyance of Beijing. He has done neither, and while there have been back-channel contacts between the Tibetan and Jiang, no negotiations have begun. That's where the matter stood when the Dalai Lama arrived in Washington. The ball was in his court, and Clinton hoped to move it along. Why was a separate matter.
The U.S. President, who has already made clear that he sees China, not Japan, as Asia's future power, has devoted more effort to Tibet than any of his predecessors. He is not a Buddhist follower, as are some of his Hollywood backers, but he has been enormously impressed by the Dalai Lama, who is impossible to dislike and whose cause seems to many Americans a moral imperative. Other presidents have felt similarly, but Clinton senses the timing is more auspicious now. He believes that in Jiang China has an increasingly confident and pragmatic leader, a potential agent of enlightened change. Resolving Tibet could earn China's trust, stabilize its relations with nervous neighbors like India, possibly open the way to peaceful reunification with Taiwan and strengthen ties with the West.
The administration has no intention of being party to any Jiang-Dalai Lama dialogue. That truly would be an unacceptable intrusion. Nor does it support Tibetan independence. But officials, including the President, see no better time than now, when U.S.-China relations are strong, to advance the issue of Tibetan autonomy. The problem, as always, is getting the balance right. Tibet is a minor, but volatile issue, and so many important items--trade, non-proliferation, maintaining a normal relationship--are on the Washington-Beijing agenda that pushing too hard on Tibet could prove dangerously counter-productive.
After all, from Beijing's vantage point, the potential long-term benefits of accommodation are ephemeral while the more immediate risks look all too real. Why let the Dalai Lama go home where, despite his pledge to play no active political role, he would inevitably stir up passions in followers who after four decades have largely despaired of seeing him again? Also, if Tibet gets autonomy, even if limited to maintaining its unique Buddhist culture, would not other Chinese regions seek similar arrangements? Could that lead to special administrative regions like Hong Kong sprouting up all over the motherland? That would not be an attractive option to Chinese leaders, who remember too well what happened the last time they let a hundred flowers bloom.
Despite the White House session, designed to show Beijing that the U.S. intends to pursue the matter this week, the last thing the administration wants is confrontation. It has been reluctant, for example, to fill the currently vacant State Department post of special coordinator for Tibet, which China objected to when it was created in 1997. And even Clinton's meeting with the Dalai Lama was a semi-hypocritical "drop by" in which he did not formally receive the spiritual leader but instead joined a meeting he was having with Hillary Clinton. Spokesmen said only that the U.S. supported dialogue but took no stance on their "modalities or substance." That's the way to be an effective interlocutor.
The Dalai Lama left town saying he had too wide a gulf with China and wanted to build trust before negotiating. "Sometimes more silence is useful," was his exit line. That's the way to start a dialogue.
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By JAIME A. FLORCRUZ Beijing
NOVEMBER 16, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 19
Yu Tielong was confident that he would win last week's election for chief of Wangshanding village in eastern Zhejiang province. What followed was less expected. Local officials abruptly annulled the poll, ostensibly because some of the candidates weren't present for the voting. The real reason, according to Yu's supporters: he is a member of the China Democracy Party, a new and not yet officially recognized opposition group. And there, in a nutshell, is the story of political reform in China. That Yu was allowed to stand for election is a sure sign of progress. But the annulment of his victory suggests that the ruling Communist Party is not ready to give up its 49-year monopoly on power--not even in small quantities. Says Tianjian Shi, a Sinologist at North Carolina's Duke University: "There is progress in village elections, but it's a long way from a multi-party system."
Yu, a traditional-medicine practitioner, is one of a small group of activists pushing the margins of political dissent in China. Emboldened by Beijing's relatively relaxed attitude these days, they have set up political bodies like the cdp to test the government's sincerity. "They clearly believe this is an opportune time to agitate for further gains," says an Asian diplomat in Beijing. That same optimism allows some intellectuals to call openly for human rights in public forums. Books that deviate from the official line--like Political China, a recent compendium of essays advocating reform--are allowed to be published and sold. And Beijing appears to have increased its threshhold of tolerance with its signing last month of the United Nations' Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. "To realize human rights is the aspiration of all humanity," said Qin Huasun, China's envoy to the U.N. "It is also a goal that the Chinese government has long been striving for."
But actions, not promises, are the true test. And no one should forget that the Communist Party is still the boss. With the economy sagging and sections of the population showing signs of restiveness, Beijing simultaneously is stepping up efforts to stifle organized dissent through intimidation, imprisonment, house arrest or exile. Even those released from prison are kept under tight surveillance. Just ask Xu Wenli, 52, who has survived two decades of repression. One of the leaders of the "Democracy Wall" movement--a campaign against Maoist dogma in the late '70s--Xu was arrested in 1979 and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment for "attempting to overthrow the government." Now wan and thin, he is still seeking complete freedom. Since his release in 1993, he has been constantly shadowed by plainclothes policemen who eavesdrop on his conversations and videotape his meetings. Two weeks ago, Xu was briefly detained after urging China's legislature to allow independent trade unions and challenging the government to live up to the human-rights covenant.
But even Xu sees faint signs of hope. Although his harassment persists, he says his police handlers have become more subtle and relaxed. They call him "Old Xu" and sometimes take him out to dinner. They were "polite," he says, on the two times they ransacked his home this year and confiscated his computer and fax machines. "Sometimes I feel sorry for them," says Xu, noting that the men staking out his home have to endure mosquito bites in the summer and the stinging frost in the winter. "They too are human."
Harsh repression, Chinese officials seem now to acknowledge, only makes icons out of otherwise obscure rabble-rousers. They apparently don't want to make a martyr of Peng Ming, 42, an outspoken dissident. Through his Beijing think-tank, China Development New Strategy Institute, Peng has written books and research papers, organized forums on sensitive political and economic issues and helped retrain (and organize) laid-off workers. He and his followers were poised to set up a self-styled Green Party last month when the authorities cracked down. When the police raided his office, Peng was mentally prepared for prison. "But they only took away my passport," he says. "This should be regarded as progress. It's like a husband who used to beat his wife. Now he just curses her."
For activists like Peng, Beijing's signing of the human-rights covenant is a positive development--even if the spirit of the document isn't always followed. "Many people doubt that the government will follow through," Peng concedes, "but the government should be encouraged, even if it is only pretending." Beijing, for its part, can afford to be lenient. After all, none of the dissident groups poses a serious threat to Communist Party rule. "Periodic crackdowns are necessary because we can't allow public protests to jeopardize stability and economic growth," explains a senior Beijing official. "But as long as they don't threaten stability and the Communist Party's leadership, we will tolerate divergent opinions."
If national elections were held today, Xu concedes, the communists would be voted back into office. "Few people know who I am," he says. "The China Democracy Party will have to prove itself before it can win a national election." He believes it will be at the grassroots level, as in Wangshanding village, where nascent groups like the cdp have the best chance of winning--providing, of course, that they are allowed to do so.
With reporting by Mia Turner/Beijing
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By JAIME A. FLORCRUZ Beijing
NOVEMBER 9, 1998 VOL. 152 NO. 18
When U.S. President Bill Clinton toured Shanghai last June, he stopped by an Internet cafe to mingle with young people surfing the Web. It was no random photo-op: Clinton was giving a thumbs-up to the liberating role of the Internet. Little did he realize that, not very far from the cafe, a local computer engineer was languishing in jail for tapping the power of the Net.
Shanghai police in March arrested Lin Hai, 30, manager of a local software firm, and charged him with "inciting to overthrow the government." Now awaiting trial, Lin is the first Internet-related political prisoner in China. His offense: passing 30,000 Chinese e-mail addresses on to Da Can Kao (Big Reference), an overseas dissident webzine, which then "spammed" the addresses with forbidden information. Shanghai authorities claim the tide of e-mail paralyzed the city's computer network.
Since China four years ago plugged into the yingtewang, as the Internet is known, communist apparatchiks have gingerly widened access to the Net, even as they built firewalls to block sites considered subversive (CNN, TIME) or degenerate (Playboy, Penthouse Live). Today, 1.2 million Chinese have access to the Net, a number that is projected to grow to 5 million by 2000. Typically, the Net-surfers are young, highly educated, influential and affluent.
Just the sort of person who might be inclined to question authority or become involved in dissident activities, which China has long sought to curb. Indeed, it has been the government's continuing crackdown on subversive tendencies that has spawned a new band of "hacktivists"--activists who are shifting to the relatively unpatrolled world of cyberspace to campaign on behalf of democracy. Says Eddie Leung, editor of the Hong Kong Voice of Democracy website, (www.democracy.org.hk), which monitors freedom in China and the former British colony: "There is a significant trend toward using the Internet as a means of bypassing government censorship on the mainland."
Last week, only two days after a state-run organization launched a human rights Web page (www.humanrights-china.org) to promote the official line, a U.S.-based group calling itself Legions of the Underground cracked the site's security and replaced the page with a new one labeled "Boycott China!" The hackers also added links to two sites--Amnesty International and Human Rights in China--usually blocked by state firewalls.
Pro-democracy activists, as well as Taiwan and Tibet independence advocates, have set up mailing lists and websites on servers outside the mainland. A Chinese-language webzine called Tunnel (www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/5598), which bills itself as "the underground magazine of mainland China," claims it has received nearly 200,000 visitors since June 1997. Tunnel is said to be surreptitiously edited in China and sent by e-mail to an address in the U.S., where it is posted on the Internet and bounced back to Chinese readers. Its creators supposedly have a system that guarantees anonymous messaging from the mainland, where e-mail users are required to register with the police. Da Can Kao (www.ifcss.org), the webzine to which Lin Hai sent e-mail addresses, is a compendium of banned reports and commentaries compiled by exiled activists. Like Tunnel, the site invites those "who care about human rights in China" to send its editors messages, which it promises cannot be traced.
The Hong Kong Blondes, an enigmatic group of Chinese hackers, claim to have more than 40 people working both within and outside of the country to infiltrate mainland police and security networks in order to warn political targets of imminent arrests. In a recent online interview the group's mainland-born leader, a man who uses the name Blondie Wong, warns that other hackers plan to target computer systems and websites of U.S. companies doing business with China. Says Oxblood Ruffin, the online pseudonym of a Toronto hacker who serves as the Blondes' spokesman: "The Internet cannot be censored." He helps operate a separate organization, the Cult of the Dead Cow, which he says is "committed to assisting whoever wants to latch on to the democratic experience."
Such threats only reinforce Beijing's worst fears about cyberspace. The government is grooming a team of "Internet police" to patrol its networks and is upgrading technology to filter sites. New laws require severe punishment--including a five-year jail term--for using the Internet to "harm state interests," "spread rumors," or "publicly insult others."
Lin Hai committed none of those offenses, insists his wife Xu Hong. His exchange of e-mail addresses with Da Can Kao, she argues, was merely a normal business deal. Says Xu: "E-mail addresses are public information, just like telephone books, which can be exchanged or purchased at will by companies or individuals." If spamming the local network were a crime, she avers, the police should go after Da Can Kao, not Lin Hai: "If someone committed murder with a knife, why arrest the knife manufacturer instead of the murderer?" Lin's legal tangle underscores the need for China to define online crime more precisely, lest legitimate businesses be stifled. As the information highway expands, the country will have to prepare itself for life in a borderless, transparent world.
With reporting by Lori Reese/Hong Kong
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