The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, said yesterday that China had a major human rights problem but that she detected a willingness among the Chinese leadership to admit the problem and to address it.
"The psychological barrier is broken," she told a press conference in Beijing at the end of a tour of China which took in Beijing, Tibet and Shanghai. She would return in a year to monitor progress, she said.
The most important point was that China had accepted that the UN Human Rights Commission had a role in the country. As evidence she cited an agreement by Beijing to begin technical co-operation with the UN commission on the investigation of human rights abuses.
Speaking with marked diplomatic tact in contrast to earlier trips around the world as commissioner, Mrs Robinson also noted the fact that on the first-ever visit by a UN human rights commissioner she had been able to meet President Jiang Zemin and the Chinese Vice-Premier, Mr Chen Qichen.
Mr Chen had informed her that China would sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights next month. China has been promising all year to sign the covenant, which guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, and free participation in elections. Mr Jiang told President Clinton in June it would sign the accord in the autumn but did not identify the month.
"It was significant that yesterday the Vice-Premier indicated that China would sign next month," Mrs Robinson said. Beijing signed a similar covenant on economic, social and cultural rights last October, but has yet to ratify it.
The trip to China was successful, Mrs Robinson claimed, but it had been marked by some frustrations. "Discussion about human rights must not just be words," she said. The UN Commissioner said she raised the detention and beating of a prisoner's wife who tried to hand her a letter. She had telephoned the Assistant Foreign Minister, Mr Wang, and was assured she would be released. "I said she must be released immediately."
She also raised the events of 1989 when hundreds were killed in a crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations, but got nowhere. "I asked for a review of those who had been arrested and detained following the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989," Mrs Robinson said. "It is a way of signifying an openness and change, and I pressed that point a number of times, and it is not a point on which I received a positive answer."
A Chinese activist, Mr Xu Wenli, called Mrs Robinson's first trip to China a failure, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China said. Mr Xu cited the detentions of two Chinese journalists in the run-up to Mrs Robinson's arrival, the detention of the prisoner's wife and harassment of dissidents across China as proof she had failed to make an impact.
Mrs Robinson said: "I have raised very serious, direct issues of human rights and individual cases, and I've been very concerned about those cases." One concerned a Tibetan boy who vanished from public view in 1995 after being named by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama.
"I've been very conscious that I am not a comfortable presence for China, and so it should be because as High Commissioner my concern is to raise issues of human rights, and my concern is to broaden the awareness of what human rights means," Mrs Robinson said.