LONDON–All the dons sitting around the tea table with China’s most famous dissident, Wei Jingsheng, seemed decidedly nervous and unusually quiet by the everyday standards of Britain’s most revered university. It took me a few minutes to figure out why and then I guessed if your brain is telling you that this may be the Nelson Mandela of China, future ruler of one third of the world, then a little awe and a roomful of silence are to be expected.
After the tea there was the speech to students. Direct, eloquent, his 18 years in jail on a wind-swept, bitterly cold, 10,000 feet high plateau, behind him, he tore into the Chinese communist regime and to the western governments who give it so much comfort and assistance. With almost serene self-confidence he appeared to predict that his cause will triumph sooner rather than later–“every ordinary Chinese now recognises the need for a complete change in the dictatorship inside China.”

This is a bold claim, but even if exaggerated one can see already manifestations of the democratic impulse: the village level elections just completed, aided by poll watchers from Jimmy Carter’s Centre in Atlanta working under an official contract; the dissident votes on quite important issues in the National People’s Congress; the tolerance of an underground press in Shanghai; and the personal and often political empowerment that has been the inevitable bi-product of growing economic freedom.

But it is in choosing the tactics of how to best develop these signs of incipient democracy that Wei Jingsheng and the most powerful western governments diverge. It was with a sigh of great relief that Washington joined its European Union friends in announcing on Sunday that it was dropping American sponsorship of a resolution condemning China’s record on human rights. The annual resolution, first introduced at the UN Human Rights Commission in 1990 after the massacre of unarmed students in Tiananamen Square the year before, has always infuriated China. The commission opens its meeting in Geneva next week.

The Europeans got themselves off the hook a few weeks ago. In the words of British prime minister Tony Blair, current president of the EU, “it was not the right way to proceed.” In Washington, at least, the decision making seemed to be more measured, an apparent response to Beijing’s announcement last week that it was going to sign the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which lays down precepts on freedom of expression, religion and movement. A senior administration figure was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the decision not to vote against China “is being done as a calculation. It is being done because we believe it is the way to make progress in the future.”

But is it? Wei Jingsheng’s own belief is that “when Beijing’s relations with the West improve conditions get worse for the dissidents inside China’s jails.” This, of course, begs the question why Mr Wei was eventually released. It was surely a sweetener to follow up President Jiang Zemin’s visit to Washington last autumn and pave the way for Bill Clinton’s China summit, now moved up to June.

China’s dissident policy doesn’t have the clear-cut pattern that Wei Jingsheng suggests. It is both sweet and sour, almost unpredictably so, and the art of dealing with China is knowing how to bring out the sweet and how to protest the sour.

There IS an argument for getting closer to China. Diplomatic recognition by Richard Nixon was the first and necessary step. Trade on the most favourable terms, the Clinton policy, another major step. There is no good to be had in treating China as a pariah and everything to be said for binding it closer to the West both economically and politically. There is no reward for wilfully undermining Beijing’s self-esteem.

But the West must also stick to its principles and the most important at issue is China’s disrespect for human rights.

Standing up for human rights should not normally involve economic penalties–though the “go-slow” after Tiananmen Square was a necessary punishment for an outrageous event. But it should involve regular diplomatic pressure, plain public speaking and certainly voting the right way when these issues come up in public fora, as they will at the UN next week.

Democracy feelings are bubbling up from beneath as Wei Jingsheng so lucidly argues. Outsiders need to keep the steady pressure on, just as was done with Soviet Union. Perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly the dam will break, as it did in eastern Europe. Wei Jingsheng, doubtless, will be ready and prepared. Will we be?