Dissident: Peking's most fearless critic set free after 18 years

China's best-known dissident arrived in the United States yesterday after being freed from jail on health grounds and sent into exile. Teresa Poole in Peking says the Chinese government is cynically using its political prisoners as diplomatic bartering counters.

Wei Jingsheng, who since March 1979 has spent only six months outside prison, arrived in Detroit on the first airplane flight of his life. He was freed from a salt works labour camp near Peking on Saturday night, and allowed to spend five hours with his family before boarding the plane and flying off into reluctant exile. Chinese officials told him that if he returned to China, he would go back to jail.

Wei's health - like that of many other Chinese political prisoners - has been ruined by prison. He suffers from neck pains, heart problems and high blood pressure, and he needs to supplement his breathing with oxygen. "He used to need one tank of oxygen each week, but now it's one tank every three days," said his brother, Wei Xiaotao. Since last year, the dissident had been kept under 24-hour watch in a cell with two glass walls and a light which was never switched off, said his sister, Wei Ling.

Most of his years in prison have been spent in solitary confinement. When he was paroled in 1993, he emerged much thinner and with only half his teeth. Photographs taken yesterday by the Wei family showed him looking chubbier.

Wei has become the most prominent international symbol of repression in China. A former electrician at Peking Zoo, he helped launch the 1978 Democracy Wall campaign, and was one of the founders of the modern dissident movement in China, although he remains relatively obscure within his own country.

After nearly two decades incarcerated in Chinese labour camps and jails, the 47-year-old pro-democracy activist's spirit does not seem to have been broken. "He is firm and unshakeable. No situation would make him give up his pursuit and ideals," Wei Ling said. "He thinks the sacrifices he has made for a just cause are worthwhile." His brother described him as being "in high spirits". He was in prison from March 1979 until his parole four years ago, and then detained again in April 1994 and subsequently sentenced for 14 years for trying to "subvert" the government.

Human rights groups in the West welcomed the release, but stressed it did not represent any easing on political freedoms inside China. A spokesman for Amnesty International said: "On the one hand he is free, on the other he is forced into exile. This fits the pattern of China getting rid of its dissidents without allowing the internal space for dissent."

Wei, who has been nominated repeatedly for a Nobel prize, owes his freedom to last month's state visit by President Jiang Zemin to the United States. The Americans were disappointed that Peking had offered no human rights gestures in the run-up to the presidential summit. The state visit passed off relatively smoothly but by the time Mr Jiang left the US he was aware something might be necessary to cement Washington's policy of "constructive engagement" and ensure no delays in the promised return visit next year of Mr Clinton to Peking. The release of Wei is the opening gambit.

It is not the first time Wei has been used as a pawn in international relations. In September 1993, after serving all but six months of a 15- year sentence for "counter-revolutionary" crimes, Wei was paroled in the hope that his early release might swing votes in favour of Peking's bid to host the 2000 Olympics. Other dissidents have been released in recent years as Peking lobbied for renewal of its Most Favoured Nation trading status by Washington.

US diplomats now hope other dissidents may be released as preparations are made for Mr Clinton's return visit. The most high-profile detainee still in prison is now Wang Dan, the 28-year-old former leader of the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989. He spent four years in prison for that "crime" and continued to campaign for political change on his release. Last year he was jailed for 11 years for subversion. The New York-based Human Rights in China urged Mr Clinton to make the release of a group of 27 Chinese and Tibetan dissidents a condition of his visiting China next year.