China Justice in a Hurry

By Guy Garcia

A court officer visited the Beijing home of Chen Ziming's elderly parents late last month and presented them with an official notice. A branch of the Beijing procuratorate court, the document said, has approved the formal arrest of Chen Ziming on charges of "inciting counterrevolutionary propaganda" and "subversion." A trial could take place as early as this month.

The official's visit was ominous, since Chen Ziming, 38, the former head of a private think tank, had been accused of being a key organizer of the Tiananmen Square protests that the government brutally crushed in June 1989. After the crackdown, Chen went underground with his wife and several friends, including Wang Juntao, 32, a former editor of the defunct Economic Studies Weekly. Late last year the pair topped a secret government wanted list of pro- democracy leaders. Arrested a few months later while trying to escape abroad, Chen and Wang are detained in Qincheng, a maximum-security prison outside Beijing.

Wang, like Chen, was formally charged last month with the same accusations. Charges of inciting counterrevolutionary agitation and propaganda have reportedly been -- or will soon be -- brought against at least nine other Tiananmen Square activists, including Wang Dan, 25, the Peking University student who helped set up the student forum known as the Democracy Salon, and Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic and lecturer at Beijing Normal University. A guilty verdict for counterrevolutionary activity carries a sentence of at least five years in jail; subversion carries a minimum penalty of 15 years in jail, but could also mean life imprisonment or death.

Why did Beijing choose this particular moment to step up its prosecutions? One theory holds that Beijing's embattled leaders would like to close the book on the Tiananmen episode and turn their attention to more pressing domestic problems, such as the ailing Chinese economy and improvement of relations with the West.

Another possibility is that Beijing wants to avoid the embarrassment that would result if some of the dissidents were nominated as write-in candidates in the local People's Congress elections now under way. Yet another theory contends that recent diplomatic overtures from the West and the international preoccupation with the gulf crisis have convinced the Chinese that the trials will provoke only a muted outcry from abroad.

The authorities may have also simply decided that enough time has passed since the Tiananmen crackdown so the risk of rousing large-scale protests is minimal. Except for a few notices posted outside the Beijing Intermediate People's Court, the prosecutions have so far proceeded with little official fanfare. The government may be calculating that concern for the detainees will eventually fade, as it did for Wei Jingsheng, 40, an activist during the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79, who is marking his 12th year behind bars.

Despite official assurances to the contrary, the chances of the students' getting a fair trial are considered remote. While the Chinese constitution guarantees a defendant's right to a public trial and a lawyer, the reality can be quite different. Often a verdict is reached before a case goes to court, and access to courtrooms is restricted to those holding government-issued tickets. Hou Xiaotian, 27, Wang's wife, expresses the hopelessness shared by the detainees' friends and families when she says, "I feel tiny and weak, as insignificant as a droplet of water in the sea. When I call out on behalf of my husband, I hear not a sound in response."

But some voices are being raised. Amnesty International has asked for permission to send a team of observers to monitor future trials; Beijing has ! warned that outside attempts to influence China's judicial system "will get nowhere." And last week, Congressman Robert Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat and a member of the House subcommittee on Asian affairs, who was visiting Beijing, took up the issue of the detainees in discussions with Vice Foreign Minister Liu Huaqiu and other Chinese officials. Torricelli said he urged the government to grant amnesty to the detainees and explained that assuming the West no longer cared about the fate of the dissidents would be "a tragic mistake."

After initially evading discussion on the status of the detainees, the Foreign Ministry spokesman last week changed tack and denied that any prosecution or sentencing of dissidents had taken place. At the same time, he rejected foreign inquiries on the prosecution of state criminals as meddling in China's internal affairs. He decried speculation that the Communists were taking advantage of the gulf crisis to crack down on dissidents as "an act of rumormongering and mudslinging with ulterior motives."

The spokesman neither confirmed nor denied whether some of the key democracy leaders had been formally charged, or whether they might be brought to trial at a later date. It is possible that Beijing is still betting on what dissident Fang Lizhi has called the "Chinese amnesia," the tendency of the country's people to forget past repression. That wager has paid off before. China's leaders seem to be hoping that the rest of the world will be equally forgetful.

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing