China’s leadership hasn’t changed, either. Xu’s parole and a flurry of similar gestures had a certain ritual quality. Once again, it was time for a U.S. president to decide whether to grant China most-favored-nation status-the privilege accorded most of America’s trading partners. Once again, China made token accommodations. Ever since troops blasted their way into Tiananmen Square four years ago, human-rights activists and their congressional allies have urged the White House to attach conditions to trade concessions. When George Bush vetoed a bill linking trade with China to progress on human rights, Bill Clinton criticized the president’s softness. Calling for “an America that will not coddle tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing,” the candidate promised to make economic opportunity and human rights pillars of his foreign policy.

Clinton the president has since discovered it isn’t so easy. This year, business interests lobbied intensively for China: its booming economy-now the world’s third largest-could offer U.S. firms an unprecedented bonanza. China is an important political force as well. The United States needs its vote in the U.N. Security Council and its help in restraining North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Washington also wants the Chinese to stick to the terms governing their takeover of Hong Kong in 1997. Faced with a June 3 deadline, Clinton last week extended China’s trade privileges for a year, requiring only that China live up to existing agreements on trade and nuclear proliferation and show progress on human rights. “What we’re doing is trying to strike a balance between firm, credible goals and what the Chinese should be able to achieve in the course of the year, not create conditions China can’t fulfill,” said Winston Lord, the State Department’s top Asia hand. The executive order is far weaker than the legislation Bush vetoed.

By Chinese standards, the victory didn’t come cheap. Beijing sent buying missions to the United States to scoop up $2 billion worth of cars and aircraft as a gesture of their willingness to reduce its $18 billion trade surplus. It released dozens of Roman Catholic priests and dissidents, including Xu and Wang Dan, a student who led the 1989 protests. And when demonstrations in Tibet turned violent last week, security police stormed in with tear gas, not bullets. Says a Western diplomat in Hong Kong: “Maybe they’re learning that you can’t just shoot and get away with it.”

But out of season, the Chinese barely bother. The prisoner releases seem arbitrary; at least three colleagues of Xu’s remain behind bars. Most official talks between the United States and China over such prisoners go nowhere. Last fall Chinese officials refused even to acknowledge a list of prisoners delivered by Ambassador Stapleton Roy. When Roy delivered a 14-point schedule for concessions China could make to ensure favorable trade terms, China responded to seven. Some demands, including one giving international organizations the right to visit prisons, have gone unanswered. China won’t account for political detainees, insisting there are none.

It’s no mystery why Beijing routinely stonewalls the embassy. Like other Asian countries, China insists that it has its own view of human rights. And it remains a country where the party’s word is law. Just last month, activist Qin Yongmin was jailed for peacefully protesting China’s bid to host the 2000 Olympics. In spite of the release of political prisoners, 3,501 “counter revolutionaries” are under lock and key in Justice Ministry jails alone, government officials told a visiting American delegation. More than 1,200 Chinese are held under the administrative detention rule, which allows police to imprison anyone without charge for up to six months. Some 1.2 million people languish in the Chinese gulag, known as “re-education through labor.” The arm of the Chinese extended as far as New York last week, when the U.N. secretary-general refused to allow exiled dissident Shen Tong to hold a press conference inside. “This is a totalitarian state,” says a European development expert. “They have a tendency to crack down and then they lie about it.”

But economic development is making centralized repression more difficult. Indeed, local governments have already begun allowing workers to move freely to find jobs. Talk radio, on which listeners complain about everything from adultery to housing, local officials and shoddy products, has taken off in Shanghai and Beijing. Newspapers are beginning to experiment with political stories. But there also is a dark side to economic progress and political decentralization. Child labor is on the rise. Police brutality is so bad and so blatant-that a show on it recently opened in the Shanghai Art Museum featuring graphic scenes of torture. Human-rights groups blame overzealous local officials for a surge in forced sterilizations, part of an official government policy of “punishing criminals [found] in violation of the family-planning policy.”

So far, America has been unable to coax much change. Congressional Democrats are unlikely to challenge Clinton on his tariff decision: the last thing he needs is another revolt. Some China critics argue Washington should address abuses that Beijing itself says it would like to correct-like torture in prisons-rather than complaining broadly about rights infractions. Giving Beijing endless lists, they say, guarantees token responses. The United States might better apply its leverage to the question of whether China should host the Olympics-an honor it covets. But if America wants to break the cycle of confrontation, it needs a more consistent China policy. Otherwise, prisoners like Xu Wenli are likely to remain chips in an annual game.

CASE FOR CASE AGAINST China’s stategic China’s human- importance rights abuses, including alleged exports of Preventing retalia- prison-made goods tion against U.S. ex- ports, which could Sale of nuclear and jeopardize at least missile technology 150,000 jobs Protectionist trade Maintaining flow of barriers that impede low-cost Chinese foreign access to Chi- imports nese markets