By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 29, 1998; Page A12

BEIJING, June 28—China has published, for the first time, statistics on the number of people who have been tortured to death by police, in an unusual series of books designed to improve police practices and further China's legal reform efforts.

The acknowledgment by the Chinese office that published the books, which is roughly equivalent to the U.S. Attorney General's office, that people have died or been seriously injured in police custody is seen as another sign of China's increasing willingness to take on long-taboo issues that used to be dealt with only in internal reports and secret circulars of the Communist Party.

One book, "The Law Against Extorting a Confession by Torture," said that torture is a systemic problem in China. It includes 64 case studies of people tortured to death while in police custody; 35 cases of people being seriously injured while in custody and many other cases of people who admitted crimes that they did not commit in order to stop being tortured.

The unprecedented publication of these case studies and the fledgling attempts within the criminal justice system to rein in China's once all-powerful police and other security services are among many legal developments lending encouragement to those American legal experts who argue that systemic changes in China are more important to the improvement of rights than lobbying over the fate of individual prisoners.

The Clinton administration has adopted legal reform as a major objective in U.S.-Chinese relations. President Clinton is to address the necessity of legal reform and announce a series of initiatives designed to strengthen China's legal system in a speech Monday morning at Beijing University. So far the bulk of the cooperation has been in business-related issues, such as bankruptcy law, contracts, securities law and intellectual property rights. One of Clinton's legal initiatives involves human rights: a symposium of Chinese and American lawyers on criminal procedures and the protection of human rights planned in Washington this autumn.

"These are issues that are in play with the Chinese and that create the opportunity to make our perspective heard," said Paul Gewirtz, the special representative for the presidential rule-of-law initiative. "It is an important new channel with the Chinese."

Many human rights organizations worry, however, that the legal initiatives are being backed by the Clinton administration as a substitute for more vigorous, and potentially rancorous, protests against China's human rights record.

"U.S. efforts to promote legal reform in China must be designed to foster greater compliance with international human rights law so China's citizens can enjoy their basic freedoms, and be protected from the injustices that are now rampant in the criminal justice system," said Michael Posner, executive director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

China's human rights record remains one of the most troublesome issues in U.S.-Chinese relations. Amnesty International estimates that 2,000 people are in Chinese jails for political crimes, 250 of them because of their participation in the student-led protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989 that were crushed by the army. Some 230,000 people are being held in labor camps and police still have power to sentence people, without trial, to three years of labor reform.

Torture occurs routinely in China even though as of 1987 the country signed the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In 1990, the Communist Party lifted an informal ban on research and publication in China about human rights questions. Since then a flood of literature has emerged.

According to the "The Law Against Extorting a Confession by Torture," 126 people were killed by police during interrogation in 1993 and 115 in 1994, and 64 others were seriously injured during those two years. The book was published in July 1997 along with two companion volumes, on illegal arrests and illegal entry by police into homes and offices. The series has not previously been mentioned in the Western press.

The books catalogue a series of violent crimes committed by police against suspects. Suspects have been tortured to death with electric cattle prods, placed on burning stoves, drowned in buckets, hanged, and have died from a heart attack after being beaten by police.

Murray Scot Tanner, an American expert on Chinese legal reforms, said it is not so much the numbers that matter, but the fact that China is willing to acknowledge that such abuses are happening. "This is a significant move on China's part to deal with torture," he said. "They are doing it very quietly because the issue is so sensitive."

One of the people at the forefront of legal reform is Chen Guangzhong, who was jailed without trial in anti-rightist purges in 1957.

"Torture is a serious problem here," said Chen, who as the chairman of the China Procedural Law Research Society has headed efforts to reform the criminal code. "It was part of ancient Chinese culture. It used to be legal during imperial Chinese times. Even in the recent past it has been a problem. These are not isolated incidents and they continue to happen. Sometimes there are serious consequences such as death and injury."

The books were published following the passage in 1996 of an amended version of China's Criminal Procedure Law that Chen helped write. Like its parent, the 1979 law on criminal procedure, the new law prohibits torture and its use to extort a confession. However, both laws are silent on whether forced confessions can be used as evidence in court.

The 1996 law also took some steps to limit police power by ending a form of detention called "shelter and investigation" -- which police routinely used to incarcerate people for months. The reforms opened the way for legal aid by specifying that economic reasons could prompt the court to appoint a defender for a suspect. They broadened the category of those who could have a lawyer to include people who might be sentenced to death. The reforms also mandated that suspects have the right to legal counsel after the first time they come into contact with police, although they do not have the right to remain silent.

Chen said the reforms were only a beginning. "We took a big step in passing the law for the reforms of criminal procedure, but we just can't stop there," he said. "There is a need to make more reforms."