Can a "quiet dissident" accomplish more to improve prison conditions in his homeland than militants who target the country and its government as a whole? Fan Shidong thinks so -- and has dedicated his life to informing the public in both the United States and China about prison conditions without entering into what he described as "extremism." PNS correspondent A. A. Quong is a freelance journalist.

Unlike high-profile Chinese dissidents who have generated extraordinary media attention in the United States, Fan Shidong has spent a year in the United States unnoticed except in the Chinese language media.

Yet contact with U. S. consular officials in Shanghai was an important reason for his arrest in May 1983 on charges of counterrevolutionary activities and giving political intelligence to the U. S. He spent 11 years as a prisoner, mostly in laogai labor camps in the remote Xinjiang region of northwestern China. Cheng Liping, a classmate at Shanghai Finance and Economics College arrested with him, was released after serving three years.

Fan takes care to distinguish "extremist" dissidents who offer unrelentingly harsh criticisms of the Chinese government from those, like himself, who "seek truth from facts." This is not because he shrinks from confronting authority. When he managed to slip into Hong Kong a year after his release, Fan staged protests in front of the official Chinese government news agency and the U.S. embassy to demand that he be cleared on charges of spying for the U.S. This drew the attention of Hong Kong media, but two full years passed before the United States granted Fan a visa in May of 1997 -- on the eve of Hong Kong's return to the People's Republic of China.

Now living in Seattle with his wife, Beatrice, Fan is gaining an audience among Chinese Americans not only for his depiction of prison conditions in China but also for his skepticism about "extremist" dissidents -- some of whom, he says, are "working for (their) own personal reputation and benefit by demonizing China."

In late June, the Sing Tao Daily, an international Chinese language newspaper headquartered in Hong Kong, published Fan's six-part series, "Shattering Harry Wu's Western Fun House Mirror," which takes on America's best known Chinese dissident.

Harry Wu, who has opposed World Bank loans for irrigation projects in Xinjiang, flew to Hong Kong in 1996 to meet with Fan. Wu himself was arrested in 1995 when he illegally entered Xinjiang to investigate prison conditions.

Fan says, "In the end, I refused to cooperate with him," on the grounds that Wu's approach would not help the many labor camp prisoners who still did not have enough to eat.

"If I wanted to become as famous as possible, the way it would work would be to demonize China," Fan said through an interpreter. "So when I see someone who's taking an extreme stance, saying that everything is bad about China, I think maybe that's why they're doing it."

"We have only one goal," he told an audience at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley -- his first public appearance in the United States, "and that is to improve the conditions in the labor camps."

U.C. Berkeley professor Wang Lingchi sees Fan as a rare counterpoint to the Chinese dissident exiles whose views receive wide play in the media and the political arena. "Fan's views represent the vast majority of the Chinese intellectuals who are concerned with the need for political reform. His views are not interesting to the western media because they do not conform with what the media imagine a Chinese dissident to be."

In contrast, Wang says, "celebrity" dissidents "know how to say things the media want to hear--their constituencies are in the media and in Congress, not in China."

Fan is also unusual in his willingness to acknowledge improvements in the prison labor system. "If I'd been sent to the labor camps in the '60's and '70's, I wouldn't have spent time in prison," Fan says, "I would have been executed."

"On the other hand, if the Chinese government had conformed to standards of legality, I wouldn't have been sent to prison at all."

Fan believes that prisons became less repressive during the 1980s in part because of changes from above, particularly the establishment of a legal infrastructure, as well as from below, in gradual changes in attitude.

"The (labor) camp administrators and the prisoners have in common the fact that they no longer take the idea of political indoctrination seriously," he explains, which makes relations between prisoners and guards as "more relaxed, much more moderate."

On the other hand, Fan acknowledges that laws protecting prisoners' rights are not always enforced. He says bribery is increasingly common among political prisoners of means.

Fan estimates there are 2,000 political prisoners in China today, a number that corresponds to Chinese government figures, but is strongly disputed by some critics.

Fan is "level-headed, a keen observer, and objective," according to James Seymour, co-author of "New Ghosts, Old Ghosts -- Prison and Labor Reform Camps in China," published last year.

"The problem is that you can define 'political prisoners' in a number of ways," says Seymour, a research scholar at Columbia University's East Asian Institute. "For example, human rights organizations often use the term 'prisoners of conscience' to denote those political prisoners who don't use or advocate violence." Seymour notes that, overall, 166 of every 100,000 people in China are imprisoned -- compared to 440 per 100,000 in the United States.

Fan believes that if former political prisoners "can combine forces, there will be a greater potential to develop democracy in China." Fan plans to research the laogai prison labor camps and to write about Chinese politics in the hope that "someday China will allow dissident activity and opinion and that there will be a durable basis for democracy that's in China, not here."

In the meantime, Mr. Fan is learning the language of his new homeland and working a day job in the bakery section of his neighborhood Safeway.