China Dissident’s Wife Lists Abuses : Human rights: But her willingness to speak out demonstrates that the nation is gradually becoming less repressive.

BEIJING — Qin Yongmin, one of China’s beaten and bruised political prisoners, is a stubborn man.

His story, related by his wife, Li Jinfang, offers insights into repression and change in China, the hopes of its most hardy dissidents, and the dilemmas facing the Clinton Administration as it shifts rapidly from confrontation with China over human rights to a policy of commercial engagement.

The imprisonment and apparent torture of Qin, 41, reflect the continuing brutality of the Chinese system, as stressed by human rights advocates who are fiercely critical of the change in U.S. policy represented by Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown’s just-completed six-day sales mission to China.

Brown’s trip focused on signings of $6 billion worth of agreements between U.S. companies and their Chinese counterparts. He avoided public criticism on human rights issues.

But Qin’s experiences, and his wife’s willingness to risk speaking openly about them, also illustrate a point made by many advocates of closer U.S.-China commercial ties: Fitfully, with some setbacks, China is gradually becoming a less repressive society.

Qin is now serving a two-year “labor reform” prison sentence for actions he took last fall--conducting a one-man campaign in opposition to China’s bid to host the 2000 Olympics and signing a “Peace Charter” with eight other dissidents calling on the government to allow a national dialogue on political change.

Qin is imprisoned in the central China city of Wuhan. Li, 29, was allowed brief, monitored monthly visits until May. Since then, other relatives have seen him, but Li has been banned.

Twice during his imprisonment Qin has been badly beaten, Li said. The first incident occurred June 8, before a meal in the dining hall, when another prisoner attacked him, kicking him in the testicles and beating him until he lost consciousness, she said.

Authorities in Chinese prisons often exercise control through selected prisoners who serve as enforcers against others. It was one of these prisoners, Li said, who beat her husband. After Qin recovered consciousness, he was inspected at the prison clinic but given no treatment, Li said.

On July 20, a prison warden came to Qin’s cell and told him he must work, Li said. Qin replied that he wanted to see a doctor first. The warden left, saying authorities would discuss his request, “then a criminal rushed in and beat him severely,” Li said. “He rushed out to the courtyard. Wardens dragged him back into the cell, and he was beaten until he became unconscious.”

Four or five days later, Qin was finally taken to a hospital. “The hospital told him that treatment had been delayed for too long,” she said. “His testicles were shrunk and broken, and there was no way for them to heal. There was no way to treat him.”

When Qin first arrived at the prison, he had been ordered by authorities not to let other prisoners know that he was incarcerated for political reasons, Li said.

“They insisted that he not tell other prisoners the reason for his imprisonment but that he say he was there for fighting,” she said. “He refused. He said, ‘I cannot deny my identity.’ He always insisted on his rights. That’s why they treat him so badly.”

Asked why Qin remained uncowed, Li said it was because of his eight years as a political prisoner from 1981 to 1989.

Qin is among the less famous of the “Democracy Wall” activists of 1977-1979 who published unauthorized magazines calling for democracy and hung posters on a wall in downtown Beijing during the first temporary wave of liberalization after the 1976 death of Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

After the democracy movement had helped Deng Xiaoping consolidate supreme power, he turned against the activists and ordered their arrests. Qin was arrested in November, 1979, for selling magazines, then later released but was arrested again in April, 1981, in the government’s final crackdown on the Democracy Wall activists.

Qin was released in April, 1989, just as that year’s Tian An Men Square pro-democracy demonstrations were rising toward a confrontation that ended in a bloody army crackdown.

Li met Qin four months later, and they soon fell in love and married. They now have a 3-year-old daughter.

“He said: ‘I’m someone who works for democracy, and I can’t put all my efforts into a family. Someone who is with me has to be prepared to suffer, financially and spiritually,’ ” Li recalled.

Li said that, while police have threatened that at any time they could take her away too, she is unafraid. “Everything I’m doing is within the limits of legality,” she said. “China isn’t just an iron fist anymore. The country is moving toward the use of law. They don’t just use violence.”

Qin, she said, feels much the same way:

“My husband said, ‘If all this were happening during the Cultural Revolution (of 1966-1976), I wouldn’t be alive anymore.’ ”