China Displays Prison Not Prisoner
(US News & World Report | March 9, 1994)
The propaganda official in charge of the tour invited the American journalists to take a good look at the prison they were visiting, the one the Chinese government calls the Lingyuan Reform Through Labor Camp. But it would not be a good idea, Xin Tingquan added, to see the prison's most famous inmate. "He distorts the truth. He says things that do not accord with the truth. So we don't let him speak to anyone."
The reporters who last week were granted a rare glimpse of the notorious prison had asked to meet Liu Gang, now in the fourth year of a six-year prison sentence for helping lead the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration, but Xin ruled out any face-to-face meeting even if no words were spoken. No one in the prison leadership, it seemed, trusted the 32-year-old inmate to behave himself among outsiders for even a moment. The authorities' attitude demonstrates again how far China is from meeting the standards of transparency and accountability the United States has pressed China to adopt in its handling of political prisoners. Yet it is also a telling admission of the system's failure, after years of trying to curb the jailed dissident's independent spirit. Indeed, with every attempt to find a substitute for a face-to-face meeting with Liu, the authorities drove that point home even harder.
Part of the way through an introductory video about the prison, officials abruptly turned off their VCR and hurried the journalists to a window overlooking a large courtyard. Liu, the officials said, was about to pass beneath the window with a guard by his side. Liu appeared in a line of inmates. He walked slowly, dressed in a navy blue padded jacket, apparently unaware of the journalists behind the tinted glass a floor above him.
A few minutes later, the video was interrupted again. The officials announced that a guard had brought Liu into a room and was talking to him. For a brief minute, the building's closed-circuit television showed live footage of a pensive Liu smoking a cigarette. If the journalists wanted photographs of the prisoner, the officials said, they could hand their cameras to prison photographers, who would take pictures for them.
Officials in Beijing often complain that America lets concerns about a handful of Chinese dissidents dominate what should be a multifaceted relationship between the two nations. Yet in the effort to stifle those dissident voices, the Chinese authorities give them their very prominence. On the same day that the journalists visited Lingyuan, officials in Beijing detained Wei Jingsheng, a dissident who had refused during nearly 15 years of imprisonment to buckle under pressure and repent his "crimes."
Since his release last September, Wei has openly - and often - criticized his government. Yet his detention only a week before Secretary of State Warren Christopher's Beijing visit will damage China's international image far more than anything he could have said as a free man.
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