In the week after the visit to China by UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, dissidents have stepped up their campaign for an opposition party in China and seven have been detained by security police.
This increased activity has presented Beijing with a dilemma over whether to allow the activists to continue campaigning openly to register the Chinese Democratic Party (CDP).
If allowed to organise it could challenge the 49-year-old leading role of the Chinese Communist Party. If it is suppressed, Beijing's assurances to the West that human rights will improve through dialogue would be undermined, along with President Jiang Zemin's new international image.
President Jiang has reportedly favoured a "cool response", ostracising the new party and harassing activists by detaining them for short periods, but hardliners are said to favour a "hot response" involving outright oppression, on the grounds that an alliance between a new party and laid-off workers could destabilise the country.
With seven EU prime ministers due to visit Beijing this autumn - the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, was the first last week - the question is going to come up with embarrassing regularity for the Chinese leaders in top level meetings.
Yesterday, the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, arrived for a three-day visit and dissidents asked him to demand the release of a detained activist, Mr Tang Yuanjuan, which he has apparently agreed to do.
Sixteen dissidents in two provinces asked Mr Jospin in an open letter not to "forget he came from the birthplace of the Declaration of Human Rights". Mr Tang was arrested last Friday in the latest wave of official action against pro-democracy activists. He was picked up by Beijing public security authorities after he travelled from the city of Xian to Beijing to visit Mr Xu Wenli, a well-known democracy advocate.
Mr Tang's family was informed by the authorities that he had been detained on charges of "making contact with members of an illegal organisation". The French were the first EU country last year to break ranks and opt for dialogue rather than confrontation with China on the grounds that this would yield better results on human rights.
Asked yesterday how the arrest of Mr Tang squared with China's promise to Mrs Robinson that it would sign the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a Foreign Ministry spokesman replied that "the relevant departments of China enforce the law in accordance with the law. I think this is common practice throughout the world".
Dissidents are reported to be preparing to launch the CDP in five provinces, including Beijing and Shanghai, and dissident sources told Reuters Tang had done nothing illegal but was merely using his constitutional rights.
They said the CDP was "more legal" than the ruling Communist Party and the eight other "flower vase", or decorative, political parties, which had never registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs as the law required.