October 31, 1997
ON MY MIND
/
By A.M. ROSENTHAL
A Special Foundation
United States-China relations are
built on a special, growing foundation. Before and during the visit of
China's President, President Clinton
and his aides showed how deeply that
foundation determines the Administration's policies, judgments and
moral and political values.
The foundation is a great interwoven construction made of these materials:
False choices presented to the
American people. Rejection of American values going back to the Constitution and Bible. Facts so distorted
that they become lies. Occasional
scoldings, but no penalties for murder, torture and mass imprisonment,
the strangling of religious freedom,
or the half-century genocidal occupation of Tibet. The endangerment of
the security of the United States.
The foundation was manufactured
entirely in America. China simply
did what it wanted to do -- rule a
great people by the political terrorism that is Communism's chief
weapon; no apologies.
China enhanced its military power
and industry meanwhile by getting
Western technology blueprints and
weaponry. The U.S. was rewarded
with a $50 billion annual trade deficit
and a sharp boot in its security.
It was the frantic haste of the U.S.
to do big business with the Communist dictatorship at any moral, political or even security cost that inspired the peculiar foundation.
Here
are a few of the factual and moral
perversions of which this piece of
work is constructed:
"We must engage with China, not
try to isolate or contain her."
Deliberately false choice. Washington knows that no human rights
movement, liberal or conservative,
opposed to U.S. appeasement of Beijing wants to contain or isolate China.
The contrary -- they want more
real engagement with China. They
want to deal with the people not only
their masters. Since Beijing surveillance makes this impossible they
want an engagement that might persuade Chinese leaders to ease the
pain of political and religious prisoners and their one major prisoner, the
Chinese nation.
They would tell Beijing that only
so would China get from the U.S. the
low tariffs it craves, international
loans, high technology and acceptance as a decent civilization.
Mr. Clinton's type of engagement
gives Beijing what it wants without
proven payback. That does isolate
China -- isolates the Politburo from
awareness of unrest and the people
from everybody but their rulers.
"We cannot have our relationship
with China held hostage to any single
issue."
The Secretary of State says that
often about human rights and China.
From Madeleine Albright, who
would not be alive if Britain had not
given her Czech parents the human
right of refuge, it is shocking. So is
her curt putdown of the American
bipartisan movement to penalize,
however mildly, nations like China
that persecute Christians and other
religious worshipers.
Ms. Albright must know that it is
not foreign talk about alleviating the
agony of the political prisoners that
keeps the other issues hostage. It is
China's own human rights policy:
Stay out of this or lose our business.
For decades Beijing has made the
prisoners themselves hostage to international politics. When it suits its
interests Beijing lets out a few. The
West smarms all over them while
thousands of others in China and six
million Tibetans remain captive.
"Engagement with China is important to American security."
China is a major source of nuclear
technology and weapons to third-world countries. Mr. Clinton says
"China has lived up to its pledges"
not to sell nuclear technology. It has
done no such thing.
But on the basis
of one more promise Mr. Clinton will
lift the ban on China getting advanced U.S. nuclear reactors.
An individual perjurer might earn
supervised parole. China gets nuclear reactor blueprints.
"We must also admit that we in
America are not blameless in our
social fabric -- our crime rate is too
high," says the President.
Comparing shortcomings of democracy to the life-stifling cruelty of
the Communist dictatorship is moral
equivalency, a political and intellectual perversion of its own.
Perhaps
the aroma from the foundation of
shame dulls the moral nose.
What a pity -- all this U.S. self-abasement, and for a Government so
corrupt, lawless and fearful of its
people that one day it will collapse,
as have all dictatorships that posed
as superpowers, and were neither.