S.F. activist negotiates for freedom of prisoners - BUSY WEEK OF DIPLOMACY

By KARL SCHOENBERGER
MERCURY NEWS
March 5, 2004

He had been up all night on the phone, so the only thing John Kamm wanted Thursday afternoon was a little sleep.

The San Francisco businessman-turned-human rights activist had been monitoring the release of Chinese political prisoner Wang Youcai, whose freedom he had helped secure. It was the third time in a week that his behind-the-scenes efforts had led to leniency for dissidents imprisoned in China.

Kamm runs the non-profit Dui Hua Foundation and is no stranger to the hair-raising process of negotiating for the release of Chinese political prisoners. He's devoted his life to it.

Still, Wang's early release to the United States for medical treatment was a major coup, Kamm said.

"They convicted him of sedition, which is a very serious charge," Kamm said. "They tend to treat political prisoners much more harshly than ordinary criminals. They think they're more dangerous. So getting 5 1/2 years off his 11-year sentence is really unusual."

Thursday's quiet diplomacy was not without some last-minute drama.

At first, everything went smoothly. Wang's U.S. diplomatic escort boarded the United Airlines flight at Shanghai Airport, followed by Wang.

But then the plane sat on the tarmac -- for three hours, "with no explanation," Kamm said.

He waited frantically.

Finally, he got the call from his Chinese Justice Ministry contact confirming that Wang was in the air, bound for San Francisco.

Kamm had spent the past two weeks of February engaged in the kind of quiet diplomacy that gets results in China, along with less-subtle pressure from the members of Congress with whom Kamm works. Coordinating his efforts with U.S. diplomats in China, Kamm visited officials he has cultivated ties with over the years at the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Justice Department, delicately prodding.

The first result came last week, when Chinese officials commuted the sentence of Tibetan nun Phuntsog Nyidron, who has been languished in prison since her 1989 conviction on charges of "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement." Tuesday, the Chinese government announced that it would reduce by one year the eight-year sentence meted out to Rebiya Kadeer, 57, a member of the Uighur ethnic group in northwestern China's Xingiang province, who was convicted of "supplying state secrets to foreigners."

Kamm said he is turning his attention to the case of Chinese-American businessman Jude Shao, a Stanford Business School graduate he calls a "victim of justice." Shao is serving a 16-year sentence in a Shanghai prison for tax fraud.

Shao has appealed to the Chinese Supreme Court, claiming he was denied the right to introduce evidence proving his innocence. U.S. Ambassador Clark T. Randt has mentioned Shao, along with Wang, on a list of seven prisoners in China whose cases raise human rights concerns. Democratic presidential challenger Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts is one of several members of Congress who have written letters to Chinese officials protesting Shao's imprisonment.