July 3, 1998
ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL
Judgment in Beijing
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he President stood to speak to
about 100 dissidents gathered in the
U.S. Embassy. He said this to them:
"While we press for human rights
through diplomatic channels you
press with your very lives, day in,
day out, year after year, risking your
jobs, your homes, your all."
And then this: "Coming here, being with you, looking into your faces,
I have to believe the history of this
troubled century will indeed be redeemed in the eyes of God and man."
President Reagan said many
things during his visit to Moscow
that May of 1988, but those passages
will be remembered by fighters for
freedom willing to risk their own --
and by those privileged by their own
liberty to help them.
A decade later, President Clinton,
in Beijing, could make no such statements. This President, born and
raised under liberty, elected in liberty, had no meetings with dissidents, spoke no words about political
prisoners by the thousands existing
on gruel and beatings, and workers
by the million slaving in "re-education" prison-factories.
This President, who proclaims
love for children and women's rights,
did not mention what confronts every Chinese woman -- the need for
official approval to deliver a child.
He did not mention the punishment
for carrying to birth more than the
allotted one, or sometimes two:
forced abortion. It may take a village
to raise a child, as Mrs. Clinton
wrote, but in the China they admire it
takes only one official to order the
child extinguished in the womb; no
choice.
Beijing gave Clinton air time
before censoring replays.
When he
called his friends in the U.S. to ask
howmIdoin' back there, they said he
was a smash. He was; the U.S. press
has been spun so often that now it
sometimes just spins itself. The Clinton "openness" we heard and read
about was to candor as Torquemada
to tolerance.
He arrived bearing payoff to China.
He offered the chance to make Tibet
disappear forever into China, without
any Beijing concessions. President
Jiang Zemin of China said he would
talk with the Dalai Lama, maybe. The
Dalai Lama praised both men. He
fears that if the Chinese never allow
him to return to Tibet, when he dies
Beijing will choose and rear the next
Dalai Lama or simply eliminate Tibetan Buddhism completely.
In Tibet, dreams of national and
religious freedom will not long survive any Clinton-Jiang deal, nor will
Tibet's international support groups.
But perhaps at least the honored
memory of the half-century struggle
by Tibetans and the Dalai Lama
against genocide will endure despite
decisions that China and the U.S.
force upon them.
In the "debate" heard by Chinese,
it was President Jiang who openly
laid down realities to them and the
world. The Communist justification
for the Tiananmen slaughter stands;
objecting Chinese can go to jail. On
foreign complaints about human
rights: None of your business. And
nothing, particularly not the presence of this U.S. President, can save
a Chinese dissident from arrest
when the police choose.
Clinton -- he concentrated on
concealment. When he had the
chance to use public time to speak up
against the arrests of Roman Catholic and Protestant clergymen and
congregants who do not accept the
official "patriotic" churches or Beijing's dictates about liturgy, sermons, clerical appointments and disavowal by Catholics of papal authority and appointments, the President
was mute.
Nor did he speak of the
millions who attend underground
"house churches" rather than accept
Beijing's rule over God.
And in all those public meetings
Clinton kept his mouth shut
about Chinese sales of nuclear weaponry, and Beijing's thefts of American missile technology.
On the Chinese economy, he said
nothing about the various special efficiencies that so smartly increase
production, profits and exports: 17-cent-an-hour labor, no unions, iron
factory discipline, forced labor, the
waiting cell -- all now handsomely
financed by Western investment, and
imports.
A smash. The Beijing-U.S. axis
was forged, based on Politburo concepts about the role of human rights
and political democracy: zero.
And then -- then, Clinton announced that China's economic and
"freedom" course was "morally
right." He said that. The President
will go home. On Sundays he will go
to church. The Bible will be in his
hand, and on his soul will be that
judgment.