The welcome release of the Chinese dissident, Mr Wei Jingsheng, is very much a part of the development of US-China relations over recent months. Freed on health grounds, he was immediately despatched into exile there, where he has become a celebrated figure for the burgeoning movement of protest against President Clinton's policy of close engagement with Beijing. During President Jiang Zemin's successful recent visit to the US there was much speculation that such a gesture would be made; it has been all the more easy for the Chinese government precisely because they had not been explicitly asked to do so by Mr Clinton.
The gesture therefore fulfils one of the cardinal rules laid down in the engagement policy - that it is counter-productive to put open pressure on China in such a way as to provoke its traditional response based on non-interference with its internal policies. If this is merely a matter of negotiating tactics it is understandable and prudent. But such considerations must not obscure the genuine concern, internationally and within China itself, that its human rights record concerning political dissidents should be addressed squarely and directly.
Wei Jingsheng has lived most of his adult life in prison because of his opposition to successive policies pursued by Deng Xiaoping. His first 15-year term in jail was served out almost completely because of his involvement in the 1978-9 Democracy Wall agitation, during which he advocated a "fifth modernisation" - democracy - to accompany the four primarily economic reforms put forward by Deng. He was jailed again in 1994 for his thoroughgoing advocacy of a democratic China. Although his writings do not aspire to theoretical or philosophical sophistication they have courageously explored the contradictions between economic and political development in the vast country. He has been one of thousands of political prisoners to have done so.
Their incarceration in labour camps is a standing reproof to China's claims to be achieving genuine modernity. Its political development and stability would be better served by a much more open and tolerant approach towards political disagreement, as can, indeed, be seen in the greater leeway allowed to many regional media and a more open style of discussion in some Communist Party debates.
Political reforms under consideration to bring a much more law-based process to many aspects of Chinese life point in the same direction. The argument that they would lead to instability by threatening the country's integrity is a throw-back to older thinking that does not sit at all well with its pace of economic development. Nor does the fact that so many of China's political prisoners have been jailed for trade union and labour activism sit well with the conventional response of its government that economic and social rights are as important as political ones. These issues will not go away. They are at the heart of China's engagement with its own development and with the international community.