Clinton Urged To Meet Dissident

Chinese dissidents appealed to President Clinton Friday to push for greater freedoms during his visit to China next week and to meet with a veteran pro-democracy activist.

A group of 57 dissidents, in a fax to foreign news agencies, urged Mr. Clinton to meet their Beijing-based representative, Xu Wenli, after a summit with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

CBS.com reports on President Clinton's trip to China

The government is unlikely to allow Xu to meet Mr. Clinton during the carefully scripted week-long visit, which begins Thursday.

Xu was imprisoned from 1981 to 1993, mostly in solitary confinement, for campaigning for democracy during the late 1970s. He recently has reported being harassed by police for trying to set up a human rights monitoring group.

In a separate appeal, dissident Xu Wanping wrote to Mr. Clinton urging him to press President Jiang to reassess the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989 that the government violently crushed and labeled as "counterrevolutionary turmoil," a Hong Kong-based rights group said.

Xu Wanping, from the southwestern industrial city of Chongqing, was imprisoned for eight years for participating in the movement. He also called for the release of those jailed after the protests, an end to suppression of public dissent, and enforcement of constitutional guarantees of free speech and other civil liberties, according to the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China.

The center also said Liu Lianjun, a dissident from eastern Shandong province, was filing charges against Beijing police alleging that he was beaten and tortured during a six-day illegal detention that began May 29.

Liu said police took him to a deserted area in the city's outskirts and threatened to kill and bury him if he did not cooperate. A police spokesman, Liu Wei, said he had not heard of the case.

Meanwhile, a U.S.-based group of rights activists and scholars urged Clinton to speak out "forcefully" in support of academic and political freedoms, particularly during a speech at Beijing University.

"If you are silent, you will send a message of tacit endorsement for the Chinese authorities' repressive policies," said an open letter signed on behalf of the New York-based Human Rights Watch Academic Freedom Committee. Chinese astrophysicist Fang Lizhi and Jonathan Fanton, president of the New School for Social Research, signed the letter.

Fang, who teaches at the University of Arizona, was ne of China's leading democracy advocates in 1989. After the Tiananmen Square protests, he and his wife spent 13 months in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing before fleeing into exile.

By ELAINE KURTENBACH