From Cells, Dissidents Haunt China : Protests: Five pro-democracy leaders are in solitary confinement in Beijing. But their voices aren’t stilled.

BEIJING —  Twelve years ago, underground newspaper editor Wei Jingsheng, the most famous pro-democracy activist in China, was arrested and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.

Wei disappeared into China’s secretive prison and labor-camp system. Over the intervening years, only the sketchiest of reports have surfaced about his whereabouts and physical condition.

Human rights organizations protested the treatment of Wei, but he was largely forgotten in the West. China’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, reportedly noted the world’s inattention with a mocking comment to other Chinese officials: “We put Wei Jingsheng behind bars, didn’t we? Did that damage China’s reputation?”

It did not. When former President Jimmy Carter, who was in office at the time of Wei’s arrest, visited Beijing in 1987, he was asked about Wei at a press conference.

“I’m not familiar with the case you describe,” replied Carter, who had made support for human rights a central theme of his presidency.

Today, after the bloody 1989 crackdown on the Tian An Men Square pro-democracy demonstrations and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, things are different.

At Beijing’s No. 2 prison, five leaders of the 1989 protests are held in solitary confinement and are granted no more than minimal contact with relatives. But through their own actions, the courage of family members and a new domestic and international political climate, these men now haunt Deng and his colleagues like ghosts from a bad dream who will not go away.

Heading up the prisoners’ resistance are journalist Wang Juntao, 33, and social scientist Chen Ziming, 39, both serving 13-year terms, the longest of any leaders of the 1989 protests.

They have refused to admit any guilt, and in mid-August they got word out of prison that they had started a hunger strike to protest the wretched conditions in which they and other political prisoners are held. Their actions--and the willingness of relatives and friends to leak word about them despite the threat of punishment--have helped keep their fate in the public eye.

For as long as they are imprisoned, these men will be a “grating irritation” in relations between China and the West, predicted a Western diplomat in Beijing who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Held separately at the same prison, according to reports that have leaked out in recent months, are three other key dissidents:

* Ren Wanding, 46, who spent 1979-1983 in jail for writing human rights essays during the late-1970s “democracy wall” movement, a brief period when citizens’ posters urging greater freedom were allowed at one particular wall in Beijing. Knowing the risks he faced, Ren spoke out again at Tian An Men Square in 1989. Ren is serving a seven-year sentence.

* Wang Dan, 24, a Beijing University student who was one of the most prominent leaders of the 1989 protests. Wang was sentenced to four years.

* Historian Bao Zunxin, in his early 50s, a protest organizer who was sentenced to five years.

It is not clear whether Wang Juntao, reportedly suffering from hepatitis B, and Chen are still on a hunger strike.

On Saturday, China acknowledged for the first time that the two men had started such a strike on Aug. 14. The deputy director of the prison, Li Jinghai, was quoted by the official New China News Agency as claiming that Chen had already ended his hunger strike and that Wang was eating “irregularly.”

Members of the two dissidents’ families, however, apparently have been unable to see the two men since they began the hunger strike. Chinese close to the families, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said the relatives therefore remain uncertain whether the men have really ended their hunger strikes.

Prison authorities also acknowledged that Wang shows “signs of a relapse of hepatitis” but claimed that he is basically in good health, according to the official news agency report. Relatives have said they fear his hepatitis is much more serious.

Human rights organizations and overseas Chinese around the world are lobbying Western governments on behalf of these prisoners. Members of the U.S. Congress have raised the issue during visits to Beijing.

Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Ben Jones (D-Ga.) and John Miller (R-Wash.) are due to arrive in Beijing today as part of an American group whose members have indicated they will ask to visit Wang Juntao, Wang Dan, Chen, Ren and Bao. It is a request unlikely to be granted.

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing, responding to queries from journalists about the hunger strike by Chen and Wang Juntao, recently issued a public statement of “strong concern” about the “unhealthy conditions in which they are reportedly being held.” The statement urged China to grant amnesty to all political detainees.

It is not clear why China keeps such high-profile prisoners in Beijing, rather than shipping them off to oblivion in the labor camps of western China’s Qinghai province, the fate that apparently befell Wei years ago.

China has sought to portray its treatment of protest leaders as lenient. Keeping the most famous dissidents in Beijing, and allowing them some family contact, may fit with this strategy.

It could be that the Chinese government, split between different factions, is stalemated between those who would crush such prisoners, and those who would rather see them released. Or it may be that Chinese authorities realize that in today’s world, dropping such men into a black hole would only further damage China’s prestige.