Fear of Foreigners

By Spencer Davidson

Too many friendships provoke an incident in Peking

The agents of the Public Security Bureau seemed intent on terrorizing their victim, and they succeeded. It was 1 a.m. when they marched into Peking's sprawling Friendship Hotel, where many foreigners working in China live. The police told room clerks to awaken American Teacher Lisa Wichser, 29, and tell her that an urgent telegram had arrived for her. When the petite, sandy-haired and somewhat sleepy Wichser appeared to claim it, she was handcuffed and hustled without explanation into a police car. Technically, at least, the graduate student from Noblesville, Ind., had not been arrested. She was merely being held in a Peking detention center, under investigation for "theft of state secrets," a charge that could have brought a stiff sentence in China.

Wichser's detention was the first such incident involving an American since the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69. Government spokesmen insisted that she had confessed to stealing state secrets and pleaded for leniency. But a U.S. consular official, when he was finally allowed to see her, heard quite a different story. Wichser has lived in China for two years, teaching English at Peking's Foreign Languages Institute and researching Chinese agricultural economics to gain credit toward a doctorate from the University of Denver. The "internal documents" found in her possession, apparently concerning Chinese agriculture, were, said one source close to the case, "pretty innocent and innocuous stuff." But in China, where even some street maps and the government's daily translations of foreign press dispatches are restricted, the papers were official secrets. Wichser's treatment, however, drew a protest from the U.S. State Department over China's "excessively literal" interpretation of the consular convention covering U.S. citizens in China. Shortly thereafter, Wichser was released on the proviso that she depart the country within 48 hours. She did, leaving behind the Chinese economics student she had hoped to marry, as well as the unidentified Chinese who had given her the papers, all of whom were likely to be punished.

The Wichser incident was obviously meant to serve as a warning to foreigners, and any nationals who might befriend them, to chill such contacts. The Chinese xenophobia reached a peak during the Cultural Revolution but eased in 1976 after the death of Mao Tse-tung. Indeed, Mao's successors "rectified" the error of his fear of foreigners by encouraging association with them as a basis for learning. At the time, of course, contact could be controlled: the diplomats lived in compounds, the foreign press was cautious, and the students and teachers who came were mostly believers in the Maoist revolution.

Since then, the guest list has grown larger and less manageable. Increasing numbers of arriving foreigners have been fluent in Chinese and thus able to bypass the guided tour and the official interpreter. The result has been growing alarm in Peking over the depth of personal contact, which could lead to what the Chinese press decries as "spiritual opium," meaning corruption from abroad. Two years ago, officials were stunned and alarmed by the case of Steven Mosher, 34, a Stanford University graduate student who lived for nine months in a commune in Guangdong province. Mosher collected extensive interviews, photographed thousands of documents shown him by village officials and took intimate pictures that provide a detailed and--from what Mosher has published so far outside China--unfavorable look at village life. Chinese authorities claimed that Mosher bribed villagers to get his material, entered restricted areas and violated cus toms regulations. They have threatened that unless Stanford disciplines its doctor al candidate, other scholars may suffer. Stanford is holding an investigation to determine whether Mosher violated professional ethics in his fieldwork, but a university spokesman last week protested what Stanford saw as Chinese attempts to link the Mosher and Wichser cases.

Some scholars are already suffering as a result of Peking's alarm. Foreign students in Chinese universities, for instance, have lately found that once friendly Chinese classmates avoid them. Relations be tween foreign teachers and Chinese stu dents have similarly cooled. At a Peking university, foreign students gained official permission to hold a dance, but their Chinese companions, meanwhile, were quietly warned not to attend. In another school, an American student invited to dinner at the home of a Chinese classmate was asked to "come rather late and wear dark clothing so nobody will notice that a foreigner is coming to our house." The plea was understandable since Chinese who openly consort with foreigners know they will be visited soon afterward by Public Security agents demanding to know what the conversations were about.

Some Chinese have fared far worse. Senior Journalist Li Guangyi, 64, was recently sentenced to five years in prison for "leaking important state secrets." Among them: the time, place and agenda of an upcoming meeting of the plenary session of the Communist Party Central Committee. Last month two European journalists browsing in downtown Peking's stamp mar ket were startled when two plain-clothes policemen emerged from the crowd of shoppers to arrest the dealer who had just sold them a $5 stamp. The dealer had probably defied an earlier warning not to sell to foreign customers.

Ironically, official Chinese proclamations regularly stress the need to build friendship with foreign peoples. Yet some Chinese who become friends with foreigners are not only intimidated by police but penalized at work. One young Shanghai laboratory technician was recently denied a promotion because, he was told, "you have violated the rules governing contact with foreigners." The technician had failed to report associating with a foreign friend to the lab's security department. For foreigners, too, the new restrictions have been noxious and unsettling. "You never know," says one diplomat, "when simply inviting a Chinese over to your house for an innocent lunch could get him into difficulties for the rest of his life."

-- By Spencer Davidson.

Reported by Richard Bernstein/Peking

With reporting by Richard Bernstein

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