Thursday, March 29, 2001

LAST WEEK President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear that the case of Gao Zhan, the Washington-based scholar who was arrested in Beijing in February along with her husband and 5-year-old son, was a matter of serious concern to the new administration. So China's response on Tuesday was remarkable: A Foreign Ministry spokesman accused Ms. Gao of spying for foreign intelligence agencies and dismissed U.S. protests about the treatment of her son, an American citizen who was held apart from his parents for 26 days without notification to the U.S. embassy.

This brazen declaration evidently was intended to convey the message that President Jiang Zemin's government will not accept the Bush administration's interest in human rights in China, even when the case involves an American citizen. It comes just a few weeks after an equally brazen Foreign Ministry statement that denied and dismissed U.S. concerns about the involvement of a Chinese company in upgrading Iraqi air defenses. Meanwhile, Mr. Jiang and other senior officials continue to issue threats about what will happen if the administration agrees to sell new defensive weapons to Taiwan.

Perhaps the Chinese leadership believes that public intimidation is the best approach to a new U.S. administration. If so, that is all the more reason for the Bush administration to redouble its efforts on Ms. Gao's behalf. This is not just a matter of a diplomatic staredown, though the Chinese may see it that way. Ms. Gao, her husband and her son all also happen to be real victims of a state security apparatus whose abuses have grown steadily worse in the past several years.

China has not backed up the spying charges against Ms. Gao with any evidence, and it is extremely doubtful that any exists. An unpaid fellow with American University, Ms. Gao studies women's issues; she has taken a couple of trips to Taiwan and serves as treasurer of an innocuous academic organization. Her detention would be completely baffling if it were not part of a trend: China has arrested two other U.S.-based Chinese academic emigrants in the past couple of years, and recently sentenced one to 10 years in prison; the security services appear to regard all such researchers as security threats.

Ms. Gao's arrest and continued detention are wrong; the detention of her child apart from his parents and the failure to respect a bilateral accord requiring notification of the U.S. Embassy were, as Mr. Powell has said, "outrageous." The Bush administration should not allow this case to pass. Gao Zhan and her family are already the victims of China's brutish police; they should not also become the victims of its brutish diplomacy.