HANOI (nyt) Vietnam – Despite China’s release of three Chinese scholars with U.S. ties who had been charged with spying, Secretary of State Colin Powell said human rights issues would remain high on his agenda with senior officials when he visits Beijing this weekend.
Mr. Powell said he would focus on the Chinese system that repressed individual rights and forbade Chinese citizens access to the full protection of law.
“It is not so much individual cases that should be our principal focus and concern, but the system, the system that occasionally might go after people who perhaps should not be gone after, or who are not being given the full protection of law, and their universal human rights might be trampled upon,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at the conclusion of the Association of South East Asian Nations conference in Hanoi, Mr. Powell said one of the two scholars released this week by the Chinese had decided to stay in China.
Officials said that Qin Guangguang, a U.S. permanent resident with Chinese citizenship, worked for an American pharmaceutical group in Beijing and had chosen to remain there.
Gao Zhan, a scholar at the American University in Washington, who is also a U.S. resident, arrived in Detroit from Beijing shortly after Mr. Powell spoke in Hanoi. A third scholar, who was charged with espionage, U.S. citizen Li Shaomin, was expelled Monday from China after being released from prison this month.
Accompanying Mr. Powell on his trip will be the new assistant secretary for human rights, Lorne Craner, who will be discussing a range of human rights issues with Chinese authorities, officials said.
The Bush administration placed considerable pressure on Beijing to resolve the cases involving Chinese scholars who were either U.S. citizens or permanent residents of the United States. It would have been difficult for Mr. Powell to have held serious talks in Beijing with the scholars still in prison, and almost impossible for President Bush to travel to China, as he is scheduled to do in October, without a resolution.
Although human rights have been at the forefront this week, Mr. Powell stressed that his mission to China was broad.
“I’m a great believer in looking at the whole agenda – from human rights to proliferation to economics to regional security issues,” he said, adding that he would be looking for a way to “move the agenda forward in a way that benefits both sides.”
