BEIJING -- Her husband sentenced without a court hearing to three years in prison for printing seditious T-shirts, the young woman from the provinces came to the capital to appeal.
Wang Hui spent five days in Beijing, running from one faceless committee to another, only to be rebuffed each time. Depressed and worn out, she returned two weeks ago to her hometown in central China, where she finally got someone's attention: She was tailed on the way home from the airport and disappeared into the nether world of interrogation rooms and prisons run by China's security apparatus.
Ms. Wang is one of the latest victims of a brutal crackdown on China's dissidents. The authorities' six-month wave of arrests, expulsions and detentions has been so thorough that China's modern dissident movement is going through some of the darkest days of its 20-year history.
Government critics put a brave face on their situation, but their network is virtually shattered. And in contrast with earlier times of repression, the dissidents feel they are now without the support of Western countries that once took their side.
Since the summer, when the United States decided that it would not make improved human rights a condition for normal trading links with China, prominent dissidents have been rounded up one after another until virtually none remain.
Labor activists like Ms. Wang's husband, Zhou Guoqiang, are serving time. Student leader Wang Dan is in hiding. The founders of China's modern human rights movement are immobilized: Wei Jingsheng, the leader of the 1978 Democracy Wall movement, is back in confinement a year after being freed from 14 years in prison camps; veteran activist Chen Ziming is under house arrest in Beijing, allowed out only to undergo radiation therapy for cancer.
And most other dissidents of note have been thrown out of the country. Now they live as exiles or slowly fade into irrelevance back home.
A protest that leads to arrest can be as simple as Mr. Zhou's T-shirts, which read "Labor is Sacred" or "Don't Trick Me."
Other people have been arrested for sophisticated attempts to create underground organizations or to incite peasants to oppose corruption.
Even out of prison, dissidents no longer have much effectiveness.
Chen Ziming, a consistent force in China's dissident community since 1976, can be visited in his Beijing apartment only by relatives. Except for his mother, sister and wife, even his relatives must fill out a request form.
Mr. Chen is proof that economic prosperity does not quickly lead to the sort of tolerant society that U.S. policy seeks to promote.
After the 1978 Democracy Wall movement -- which began when dissidents pasted complaints and political analyses on a wall in downtown Beijing -- Mr. Chen decided to work outside the government.
He set up a think tank, a correspondence school and a book company that made him wealthy and allowed him to support democratic causes, such as the 1989 Tiananmen protests, which he supplied with a dozen vehicles.
When the 1989 protests were crushed and Mr. Chen was arrested, his business empire was confiscated. His family lives now in extremely cramped conditions, and relies on savings and his parents' pensions.
"Ziming feels that the dissident force is quite strong overseas but in China it's weak," said Mr. Chen's sister, Chen Zihua.
"That's why he won't go, and that's why the government is monitoring him so tightly."
Life has always been harsh for China's dissidents, but it has rarely been so devoid of hope or support.
As recently as last summer, Mr. Chen, Mr. Wang and Mr. Wei were free, albeit closely watched.
Dozens of other dissidents across the country -- many of them now in prison -- were organizing trade unions and discussion groups.
But their activity coincided with the West's growing fascination with China's economic potential and a conscious decision by the West to play down human rights objections in favor of business ties.
The United States had warned China in 1993, for example, that it could secure normal trading status -- called most-favored-nation status (MFN) -- only if it improved its human rights record.
But China stood firm and released only a few prisoners, such as Mr. Chen.
Despite the limited progress, the Clinton administration renewed China's MFN trading status and said it would drop future demands for improved human rights.
Not all dissidents criticize the U.S. decision. Some say the U.S. policy hurt them because it took away the last leverage that the West had to force concessions on human rights from China.
But others believe that severing normal trading links with China would not in any case have helped the dissidents, but would have harmed China's economic reforms, which in the long run might help create a more pluralistic society.
Regardless of its long-term merits, the U.S. decision on trade and human rights, coupled with other factors, encouraged the roundup. China's leaders were convinced that they had challenged the United States and won, confirming their view that the West wasn't willing to risk its economic interests for the sake of a few dissidents.
China gained a "sense of international invincibility," said an Asian diplomat in Beijing, a sense "that it can now get anything it wants because the world needs China so much."
The situation echoes the mid-1980s; Western countries were virtually silent in the mid-1980s and are nearly silent now.
Last year, Canada, Germany and the United States sent top-level business delegations that scored huge business contracts but sidestepped human rights. Over the past six months, the Clinton administration has sent several other high-level envoys to Beijing, but all came to tackle economic or military problems, not human rights questions.
U.S. officials call their new approach to China "commercial engagement," a policy that banks on long-term business contacts eventually changing China for the better. Trade between the two countries is worth more than $40 billion a year -- with the U.S. already buying far more than it sells in return.
Clinton administration officials said on Dec. 31 that "commercial engagement" is not meant to have immediate effect, but will make China more pluralistic in decades to come.
Even these limited goals, however, seem to be foundering. Minimal Chinese commitments made last summer to allow Red Cross inspections of the conditions of imprisoned dissidents have not been met.
Some of these issues will be discussed this week when U.S. Assistant Secretary for Human Rights John Shattuck arrives in Beijing for three days of talks.
Besides the West's actions, other factors have contributed to the continuing roundup. Senior leader Deng Xiaoping's failing health, high inflation and worker unrest combine to make Chinese officials nervous about trouble-making dissidents.
The explosive social situation has made them especially nervous about labor agitators, such as Ms. Wang's husband, Mr. Zhou.
The husband and wife were arrested on March 2, 1994, in Beijing. Ms. Wang was held without charges for three months and then released. She made her way back to her hometown of Changsha, where she tried to restart her medical sales business.
From her experience in prison she knew that her 40-year-old husband was being held in appalling conditions: four prisoners in one room that doubled as a toilet. No exercise. Poor food.
Although advised to stay out of Beijing, she went back often, meeting with prison officials to pass on food packets and about $30 a month -- which her husband needed to buy edible food in prison.
By September Mr. Zhou should have legally obtained his "panjueshu," a document confirming arrest and stating his sentence. But the document didn't arrive.
On Dec. 20, she received a letter from Mr. Zhou through a friend with Mr. Zhou's "panjueshu" copied by hand. He could see the document and send her a copy, but, as she found out during her trip to Beijing in December, the authorities wouldn't give her the official copy required for filing an appeal on his behalf.
Before her detention, which was confirmed by human rights monitoring groups Monday, Ms. Wang said she realized that the appeals and lawsuits would be rebuffed.
"I know I'm playing their game, but I'm willing to fight to the highest level," Ms. Wang said. "Many people know him, and by appealing I can raise people's consciousness.
"And I love my husband so much; I just want to see him again."
CHINA'S PROMINENT DISSIDENTS
Wei Jingsheng, 44, leader of 1978 Democracy Wall Movement. Sentenced to 15 years in 1979. Released six months early, in 1993, during China's unsuccessful bid to host 2000 Olympics. Re-arrested after failing to heed warnings to stop publishing abroad and meeting with foreigners. Held at undisclosed location.