By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 23, 1998; Page A30

BEIJING, April 22 – They are the prisoners without names, at least without internationally famous names. Yet even after the release into exile of China's most famous dissidents – first Wei Jingsheng and now Wang Dan – more than 2,000 people remain in jail in China for political crimes and misdemeanors.

As Wang prepares to speak to the world at a press conference in New York on Thursday, his comrade Zhao Changqing, a democracy activist from China's north-central Shaanxi province, is running the dissident gantlet.

Zhao, who tried to run for office in the local elections that have been widely hailed overseas as signs of political reform in China, was arrested a month ago and charged with endangering national security, human rights groups said.

Zhao, a student demonstrator in the 1989 protests that Wang Dan led, had wanted to enter local elections to represent the nuclear factory he works for, but plant management ruled he was not qualified. He was detained for a month, released in February, laid off from his job, and detained again.

Another prisoner is Liu Nianchun, a principal sponsor of the League for the Protection of the Rights of the Working People. In May 1995, he was detained after he took part in a campaign to petition the National People's Congress to prevent human rights abuses.

More than a year later, on July 4, 1996, he was sentenced without trial to three years of what China calls "reeducation through labor" at a camp in Heilongjiang, a remote northern province.

The journey there from Beijing for his wife to visit with him took five days.

While there, Liu was tortured with electric batons, moved to a small dark punishment cell and denied sufficient water, according to international human rights groups.

The rights groups say his jail term was extended by six days for every month of his sentence – a total of 216 days – because he had not reformed his thought, but Chinese officials have denied that.

Last fall Liu disappeared altogether. When his wife went on her usual monthly visit in mid-October, prison officials told her he had been moved to a labor camp closer to Beijing.

When she arrived there, however, prison officials told her they had never heard of him. All her inquiries since have been in vain, she said.

According to figures released by the Chinese government, at the end of 1996 there were 2,026 people in Justice Ministry prisons for what are called counterrevolutionary crimes.

John Kamm, a California-based business consultant who works in China and campaigns to obtain information about Chinese political prisoners, estimates that human rights groups know the names of less than 10 percent of those people.

In addition, the official New China News Agency said in September 1997 that there were 230,000 people going through reeducation through labor, a 50 percent increase over the number the government gave Kamm at the end of 1993.

While the overwhelming majority of those are ordinary criminals, unknown numbers are also there for political reasons.

The use of reform or reeducation through labor – a punishment meted out by police without having to give the accused a court hearing or trial – has been increasingly common in political cases since a new criminal law took effect in China last October. That law abolished the crime of counterrevolution and bolstered the section on undermining state security. But the state security charge has not been used at all, according to Kamm.

Shen Liangqing, a former public prosecutor from Anhui province, was sentenced to two years of reeducation through labor on April 4. Shen's arrest during preparations for the annual session of the National People's Congress on Feb. 25 was believed to be linked both to letters he had sent to the government criticizing the selection of former premier Li Peng as chairman of the congress and his contacts with overseas human rights organizations and Western journalists. Shen, 35, was also jailed in 1992 for 17 months.

Liu Xiaobo, a renowned literary critic and former professor of Chinese literature who helped negotiate the safe departure of students from Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, is also undergoing reeducation through labor. Arrested on Oct. 7, 1996, he was sentenced the next day to three years in labor camps. His appeal, heard at the Dalian labor camp in March 1997, was rejected.

Liu was arrested after he and Wang Xizhe, a veteran dissident from Guangzhou in southern China, wrote an open letter to the Chinese and Taiwanese governments calling for a peaceful solution to the question of national reunification; asking that the Chinese Communist Party finally deliver on pledges of free speech and party pluralism; and stating that under China's constitution, President Jiang Zemin should be impeached for having said that the People's Liberation Army was under the "absolute leadership of the party" rather than the national legislature.

Some human rights groups say they believe that the recent granting of a marriage license to Liu indicates he might be released early.

Many of the people in jail have been there for years. Human Rights in China, a New York-based group run by Chinese exiles, has issued a list of 158 names of people from Beijing alone who are serving lengthy prison sentences for participation in the 1989 democracy movement. Most were jailed for "counterrevolutionary rebellion," even though in the milder political climate today, Chinese leaders use the phrase "political disturbances" to describe the 1989 protests.

The list was compiled primarily by Li Hai, a former Beijing student, who was arrested in 1995 for making the list public and sentenced to a nine-year prison term.

"The persons on this list and the many other 'nameless' individuals jailed throughout China in connection with the 1989 crackdown might not be as internationally well known as Wang Dan, but their lives and liberty are equally . . . important," the group said this week.

And that list does not include people outside Beijing like Yu Zhijian, a primary school teacher in Hunan, who was one of three men who threw eggs filled with ink and paint at the Tiananmen Square portrait of Mao Zedong during the 1989 demonstrations. Yu was sentenced on Aug. 11, 1989, to a life term for "counterrevolutionary sabotage and incitement."

Religious leaders, Tibetans and journalists are also among those in jail because of their beliefs.

Businessman Kamm said pressing China about prisoners can have results. Of 133 inquiries he made between mid-1991 and early 1995, about one third of the people were released early, one third finished their terms, and about a third are still in prison or labor camps.

"Instead of focusing on a few well-known prisoners, we should find out the names of as many prisoners as possible and ask about them as often as possible," Kamm said.