WASHINGTON (AP) – China’s decision to ease up on political prisoners and religious practices was worked out quietly last week with American diplomats in exchange for the Bush administration agreeing to sidetrack a resolution criticizing China’s human rights record, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

As part of the agreement reached last week, Chinese authorities released Rebiya Kadeera, a businesswoman and a member of China’s Muslim minority, who was arrested in 1999 for sending newspapers to her husband. He is a U.S.-based activist for independence for the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang.

Other steps taken by China cited by the State Department as reasons for shelving the resolution were promises of leniency for some prisoners of conscience, the opening of a Red Cross office in Beijing this summer, willingness to talk with U.N. officials on torture allegations and making clear that religious education of children was not a crime, the official said.

The resolution was to have been submitted to a 53-nation U.N. human rights conference in Geneva, Switzerland. The official, speaking on condition that his name and title be withheld, said prospects for adoption were bleak in the first place.

All past U.S. resolutions critical of China have failed.

Meanwhile, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli rejected any suggestion that the Bush administration was going soft on China’s human rights practices.

“We are being very determined and consistent in actively seeking improvement and change and movement,” Ereli said. “Our policy and our engagement is producing results.”

The administration intends to introduce a resolution at the conference criticizing Cuba on human rights grounds and to join with European nations on resolutions aimed at the records of Belarus, Burma and North Korea.

And in the course of the Geneva conference, American delegates will raise their concern about the human rights situation in China, the senior U.S. official said.

Three weeks ago, in an annual report to Congress on human rights violations worldwide, the State Department faulted China on several fronts. And on Thursday, a few hours after the announcement that it would not introduce an anti-China resolution at the Geneva conference, Assistant Secretary of State Michael Kozak told Congress: “We remain deeply concerned about China’s poor human rights situation.”

The report Feb. 28 described China as an authoritarian state that denies its citizens freedom to oppose the political system. The government used war on terror as a pretext for cracking down on peaceful Uighur separatists and does not permit outsiders to monitor the human rights situation in the country, the report said.

China fired back by denouncing the United States for crime and poverty and for abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

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On the Net:

U.N. Commission on Human Rights: http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/index.htm

State Department: http://www.state.gov