By Lindsay Beck
BEIJING, October 21 – China commonly frees political prisoners before major state visits, but a human rights activist said on Friday changing attitudes meant there may be no releases ahead of U.S. President George W. Bush’s November trip.
The releases are seen as giving Beijing bargaining power before visits as a gesture of goodwill, but John Kamm, whose Dui Hua Foundation works to free Chinese political prisoners, said that thinking may be changing.
“There has been a change since the new leadership started,” he said, referring to Hu Jintao becoming president in 2003.
“There is a new thinking and I have heard that the new leadership is less inclined to do it,” Kamm told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
The human rights record in China, where everything from critical Internet postings to publishing underground newspapers to religious worship can come with a stiff jail term, is a perpetual source of friction between Beijing and Washington.
But in a departure from the pattern set by former leader Jiang Zemin , there were no publicised releases before Hu visited the United States in September.
One major release in the past year, that of Rebiya Kadeer, an ethnic Uighur businesswoman from the far northwestern region of Xinjiang, did come days before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited China in March.
But Kamm said Kadeer’s role in exile might have made a leadership analysts say has tightened the climate for intellectuals in the country even more wary of prison diplomacy.
“The conventional wisdom is that when someone is released from prison … especially if they go overseas, they quickly become irrelevant,” he said.
“Rebiya Kadeer is not irrelevant. She has rapidly become the voice of a people that is voiceless, and I think that too has had a certain impact,” he said.
Kadeer had been sentenced to eight years in prison for “illegally providing state intelligence abroad” after she sent newspaper clippings to her husband in the United States.
Kamm, who describes himself as being “in the prisoner list business,” scours newspapers and official records for names of prisoners whom he presents to the Chinese government with requests for information.
In the late 1990s, with his first grant to look for names, he estimated he could find 100. To date, his list of those imprisoned for political crimes tops 2,500, but he said that likely represents only about 10 percent of the total.
“It’s moving forward and backward at the same time in different rates and different places. It’s hard to conclude it’s getting better and better.”
Kadeer’s native region of Xinjiang, where ethnic Muslim Uighurs have been campaigning for more autonomy, is home to as many as one-third of the prisoners on his lists, Kamm said.
By contrast, the situation for prisoners in Tibet, another border region where China fears separatist sentiment, has been improving since a tentative dialogue began between Beijing and the Dalai Lama three years ago.
A death sentenced imposed on Tibetan monk Tenzin Delek Rinpoche was commuted to a life term in January, and another monk, Tashi Phuntsog, was released after three years in prison.
The most likely candidate for any release ahead of Bush’s visit, which will follow the APEC meeting in South Korea in November, is thought to be Yang Jianli, a Boston-based democracy campaigner arrested in 2002.
