September 18, 1999
ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL
Partying in China
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Riding with the waves, Fortune
magazine in New York has come up
with a terrific, with-it, win-win idea.
For Oct. 1 the Chinese Communist
Politburo has organized a national
celebration of the 50th anniversary
of the People's Republic following
the military triumph of Mao Zedong.
Everybody knows where office and
factory workers will stand, precisely
what slogans to shout, and which
Chinese with a dissident political or
religious record the police will take
off the streets during the celebration.
But every big party needs celebrities. Not very many would have
shown up on their own just for the
Communist Party's victory banquets. So Fortune invited the kind of
celebrities the Politburo loves most
-- top foreign business executives
from America and other countries to
go to Shanghai Sept. 27 to 29 for an
economic forum and then to Beijing,
where their private planes are guaranteed red-runway treatment. Only
multinational business, please, and
only chairmen, presidents and
C.E.O.'s.
The enticement was knowing they
would get the chance to meet Chinese who interest them most, those
who approve business contracts.
Fortune said President Jiang Zemin had "graciously" agreed to give
the keynote speech in Shanghai. You
learn to talk real humble if you do
business with the Chinese Communists.
More than 200 C.E.O.'s have signed
up already; a real A-list. About a
dozen of the world's communication
chiefs whose employees are supposed to report on China are listed --
including Time Warner, Fortune's
owner, CNN and NBC.
Top folk from American industry,
finance and commerce will be there,
from Boeing to Calvin Klein. The
Boeing man will be Philip M. Condit,
chairman, forever a historical footnote for saying that his attitude toward human rights violations in China was the same as his attitude toward them in America -- after all,
people have been beaten and shot in
the U.S. civil rights struggle, haven't
they?
I think that for any member of the
press to organize a party for a government dictatorship is damaging to
the publication and the rest of us.
But the basic problem is what goes
on in the minds of the Condits: The
pretense of American business, and
the legislators its money helps elect,
that it cannot see the obligation of
American corporations to use their
economic power to help the viciously
oppressed; the sardonic stand that
American faults can be equated with
Beijing's use of terror as the instrument of government; the philosophy
that money comes über alles, even
über Americans' principles, and
what their own religions teach.
So, of course, über God.
Everything having to do with business and profits and how to get more
of both is on the Shanghai agenda --
everything except the human rights
of the Chinese who are buying our
products and providing our cheap
labor.
Human Rights Watch in China is
not questioning, as I am, the very
idea of businessmen getting together
to worship the money idol in China.
But it pleads with business people to
read the accounts of the independent-minded Chinese sentenced to labor
camps and how they were tortured,
sometimes forced to exist in their
own feces. And then please -- stand
up in China, and use the safety of
foreign passports to dare to speak
up.
People often ask me -- Don't you
get a feeling of defeat, writing so
much about human rights in China
and other dictatorships, all the while
knowing that leaders of America,
particularly the President and the
business community, grovel to the
Chinese?
Often. But then I think of the former Chinese prisoner Harry Wu,
who secretly went back to the labor
camps to track the fate of those still
there. And I think of Representative
Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who has
not weakened on Chinese human
rights for a moment. She represents
San Francisco, so I asked her what
she would say this time. She thinks
about it and then sends me this message:
"The spectacle of the U.S. C.E.O.'s
kowtowing to the Chinese Communist leaders is grotesque but not new.
This time, however, when the
C.E.O.'s stand in Tiananmen Square
with the Beijing regime to 'celebrate' 50 years of killing and repression, they will have blood on the soles
of their shoes."