Clinton speaks

Clinton: China Must Tolerate More Dissent

BEIJING (AP) -- China will have to tolerate more dissent as its economy grows and opens up to the rest of the world, former President Clinton said Sunday.

Clinton, who is on a four-day visit to China, also said he would have raised the case of a Chinese journalist imprisoned for allegedly providing state secrets to foreigners when he spoke at a conference on Saturday but he had not been aware of the issue at the time.

Clinton delivered the keynote address at a conference hosted by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc.'s new Chinese partner, Alibaba.com, at the eastern resort city of Hangzhou.

The French media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said Chinese authorities convicted the journalist Shi Tao, who had written an e-mail about media restrictions, using information provided by Yahoo. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the country's vague state security laws.

The group said court papers showed Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd., part of Yahoo's global network, helped Chinese investigators trace the personal e-mail Shi sent containing his notes on the issue.

Human rights activists had sent a letter to Clinton asking that he raise Shi's case with his Chinese hosts. But at the conference on Saturday, the former president did not respond to questions from reporters about the case.

He explained this Sunday by saying he was suffering from a bad cold and "didn't know about that issue until this morning."

"I would've raised it in the speech to the Internet people had I known about it," he said after speaking at a U.S. Embassy service commemorating the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States.

Clinton did, however, challenge the Chinese government's polices on dissent.

"The more China grows and diversifies economically and opens up to the rest of the world, the more there will have to be some room for dissent," he said at the embassy. "I don't think conflicting information and debate weakens a society. I think it strengthens it."

He added: "In the end there'll have to be more freedom of expression here."

Shi, a former journalist for the financial publication Contemporary Business News, was seized in November at his home in the northwestern province of Shanxi.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo has defended its move, saying it is obliged to comply with Chinese laws and regulations.

Two of its biggest rivals, Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, previously have come under attack for censoring online news sites and Web logs, or blogs, featuring content that China's communist government wants to suppress in its struggle to maintain control of information in the burgeoning Internet era.

Clinton also had praise for the Chinese government, saying it did the right thing by releasing more information about its outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, after public demands flooded the Internet.

"I think that's an example of how order and debate go hand in hand because I'm not sure that it would've been handled that well if all those people hadn't rushed to the Internet and write their protests," he said.

He also said that the United States and China should "work together in years ahead" to stop terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

At the embassy ceremony, Clinton bowed his head in prayer and later placed his right hand over his heart as the American flag was raised to half-mast.

"I think it should be a cautionary tale for Americans, for Chinese, for people all across the world to remember what really caused this horrible act is that these people became gripped with the madness of believing that they were so right and the rest of us were so wrong that they could kill totally innocent people in pursuit of their political objectives," Clinton said.

Also Sunday, Clinton participated in the World Celebrity Golf 2005 charity tournament.

Earlier, Clinton met Chinese doctors selected to step up China's fight against AIDS in rural hotspots.

The doctors will go to the United States for monthlong training on how to treat the disease. China says 840,000 people in the country are HIV-positive and 80,000 have developed AIDS. The United Nations has warned that 10 million people could be infected in China by 2010 without better prevention.

"These local leaders set a standard, that everyone deserves treatment, every life is precious, and we can save many of them," Clinton said.

- AsiaOne, 11 Sep 2005