Dissidents China

Adidas-Salomon was accused in a $1.2-billion lawsuit filed by Chinese political dissidents of using slave labor in China to make World Cup '98 soccer balls. The lawsuit on behalf of current and former prisoners of Chinese work camps comes as the German company is trying to determine who was responsible for what it called possible unauthorized soccer ball production by political prisoners in China.

As millions of fans cheered the kickoff of the World Cup, one man was crying foul. Bao Ge, a Chinese dissident who was released from prison a year ago, alleges that he was forced to stitch together Adidas World Cup '98 soccer balls while in a labor education camp. Bao filed a lawsuit against Adidas last week claiming that the company was liable for the prisoners' suffering. Adidas denies that the balls were theirs.

Only a day after President Clinton's news conference with his Chinese counterpart seemed to point to a new era of openness here, security officials Sunday came to the home of a former senior Communist Party official jailed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and sternly warned him to keep his mouth shut.

Nine years after the Chinese government crushed pro-democracy protests around Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the country's leaders would like people to forget what happened there on June 4, 1989. But there is one moment people still can't forget: the heart-stopping seconds when a lone man stood in the path of a column of tanks and forced them to stop. He was the face of moral strength against martial power; for an instant, his side prevailed.

Ending a nationwide manhunt, Chinese police arrested an exiled pro-democracy activist who had slipped back into the country to form an opposition party to the Communists, fellow dissidents said Saturday. Wang Bingzhang was caught in the eastern city of Bengbu about noon Friday, shortly after he arrived there by train, dissidents in Hong Kong and the U.S. said.

China has freed and expelled a U.S.-based Chinese dissident who sneaked into the country to try to set up an opposition party, ridding itself abruptly of an international human rights embarrassment. Wang Bingzhang, 50, was released from detention and put aboard a flight to Los Angeles from Shanghai on Monday. He had been seized in Anhui province Friday. "I wasn't surprised by my release," he said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he was resting at the home of a friend.

Chinese exile Wang Dan, happy "to breathe free again," albeit in a country other than his own, urged President Clinton on Thursday to press China to unshackle perhaps the largest population of political prisoners in the world. Wang, forced into exile as the price for his freedom from prison, said he hoped that Clinton will make the thousands of less-prominent political prisoners his major human rights priority when he visits China in June.

Wang Dan, the Chinese dissident released Sunday from prison for "medical parole," didn't want to go. He had refused earlier offers to leave his country, saying it was better to be imprisoned in China than to live free elsewhere with less power to push for political reform. He feared, he said, losing his "spiritual sustenance."

Less than 24 hours after his release from a Chinese prison, prominent political dissident Wang Dan was admitted to a Detroit hospital Sunday for a thorough medical evaluation whose initial tests were positive but left a question mark over the democracy activist's health. President Clinton, attending the Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, was described as "enormously pleased" by Wang's release.

Major Chinese dissidents who have been freed during the 1990s, their dates of release, their destinations upon release, and subsequent actions by the United States that were apparently linked to their being let go: Fang Lizhi Astrophysicist June 25, 1990 Britain (Cambridge University) U.S. drops objections to resumption of Japanese loans to China. *** Han Dongfang Founder of China's independent labor movement May 8, 1992 United States President Bush extends China's MFN status.