Wang, lawyer and great escaper

WANG Jiaqi has a message for China's prime minister, Li Peng: ''If Li needs help when he falls from power, I as a lawyer will be ready to act for him.'' This is an offer that might surprise Mr Li, coming as it does from a man who would still be lost in a secret prison in Hebei at the Chinese leader's pleasure, had he not managed to escape last March. But the magnanimity is part of a political strategy which Mr Li may in the long run find more threatening, and harder to deal with than the head-on confrontations he has faced with earlier generations of Chinese dissidents.

For Mr Wang represents that new generation of dissidents who work within the law and eschew violence. It is not easy to brand with any conviction such law-abiding citizens as enemies of the state. ''We try to do everything possible to ensure that the government behaves within the constitution,'' Mr Wang said. ''We work for change through the legal system. Even if only one per cent of China's laws seem reasonable, we will not give up pursuing change through the law.'' Mr Wang and his colleagues have another advantage: as lawyers they know a lot, probably much more than Mr Li, about the Chinese legal system. Mr Wang was a post-graduate student of criminal procedure law at Beijing University; his mentor, Yuan Hongbing, was a law lecturer of ''extraordinary brilliance'', according to his pupil.

One hesitates to call these men campaigners, since they insist they were merely lawyers giving free advice on the law to those who asked. Mr Wang speaks softly without hint of zeal or ambition in his voice: if you didn't know that he had just escaped from prison, or that Mr Yuan has not been seen since his arrest 31/2 months ago, you could be lulled into thinking you were listening to a Western lawyer of exceptional idealism.

Only the incessant chain of cigarettes reminds you that more is at stake for a Chinese lawyer than mere idealism and that China considers him, like Mr Yuan and his colleagues, to be a threat to the survival of the world's most populous state.

Beijing may well be right. Behind the soft words is a powerful mind, and it is that disarming sense of charm which may well be Mr Wang's most dangerous weapon. It was certainly the skill that lulled his prison guard into letting him escape.

''I looked into his face and asked him what he would do if I tried to escape,'' Mr Wang said boyishly of that decisive moment in his life in his home town of Tangshan three months ago.