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Split-Screen Dictators: Bombs For One, Champagne For The Other
Filed April 12, 1999The consensus on Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, who has been on a week-long visit here, is that he is charming, shrewd and, in the president's words, "humorous and clever." So forgive me if I did not see the humor in Zhu's quip to the assembled press that "today is my first time to experience such a press conference so my heart is now beating." All I could think of was some poor dissident in a Chinese prison camp whose heart was racing as he experienced for the first time torture with an electric baton.
To get the full picture of the Chinese premier's visit, you had to be watching two split-screens at once. The first was the juxtaposition between the president eagerly toasting one of the Butchers of Beijing while mercilessly bombing the Butcher of the Balkans. Please, can someone explain to me why the Chinese atrocities in Tibet -- where more than a million people have died from torture, starvation or execution -- are more acceptable than Milosevic's atrocities in Kosovo? Could it be that if Milosevic had 1.3 billion potential consumers and a self-deprecating sense of humor we might now be sending him laser printers instead of laser-guided missiles?
Ten years later the Chinese dictators still justify their bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square as necessary to suppress an anti-government rebellion by "thugs" pretty much the way Milosevic has justified his crackdown on Kosovo. Like Milosevic, the Chinese have also refused to release official figures on how many have been killed, imprisoned or tortured to protect the existing order.
"All the internal matters should be left for the country itself to resolve," Zhu has said. In keeping with this view, he has vigorously opposed NATO's air campaign against Serbia and consistently deflected questions about China's human rights record. "In China," he said last month, "we have 1.25 billion people. Every day criminal offenses are committed. Every day we arrest criminals."
At the press conference he took his doublespeak even further, asserting that "the Chinese people today enjoy unprecedentedly extensive democratic and political rights." This was perhaps the funniest thing Zhu said, but no one laughed. On the other hand, the Chinese press roared at every one of Zhu's jokes as if their lives depended on it, which, come to think of it, maybe they did. But what excuse do the American media have for their embarrassingly softball coverage? The worst thing Time Magazine could pin on Zhu was that he "is obsessed with micromanaging everything that comes across his desk." On the plus side, Time credited the "sharp," "no-nonsense" premier with possessing "charm, shrewdness and a disarming sense of humor," and praised him for such reforms as downsizing official banquets from 12 dishes to four.
Reinventing dictatorship, anyone? The president and members of the media seem to believe that that nice Mr. Zhu can actually turn China into a kinder, gentler dictatorship. So they go on swallowing whole the Chinese rulers' official line and asking for second helpings, which they got at the press conference when Zhu announced that China's policy on Taiwan would be modeled after Abraham Lincoln: "He had resorted to the use of force and fought a war for that, for maintaining the unity of the United States." So China's stepping up the number of missiles targeted at Taiwan is really Zhu's way of ensuring that its house divided becomes all slave rather than all free. More Jefferson Davis than Lincoln.
The hypnotized acquiescence to such nonsense was just as pronounced during the second split-screen juxtaposition. This one was between the official celebration of our "strategic partnership" with China on one screen and the revelation on the other that our partner had stolen secret neutron bomb technology from the United States as recently as 1995. This was, of course, on top of stealing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory, and on top of the revelation that China's chief military intelligence officer had funneled through Johnny Chung $300,000 to influence American elections.
When Zhu was asked about the spying charges, he reassured us that "it is not the policy of China to steal so-called military secrets." He went further: "I think it's entirely impossible for China to steal any nuclear technology or military secrets from the United States." We expect Zhu to lie. What was more surprising was the president's willingness to join in this slow dance of deception: "You know, China is a big country with a big government. And I can only say that America is a big country with a big government, and occasionally, things happen in this government that I don't know about."
It is this corruption of the language that makes it possible for Zhu to warn that if pro-democracy activists "return to China, then there would be no legal system, no democracy, no rule of law in China." But the dark side of the Chinese leader was kept under wraps during his visit. Meanwhile, as the champagne glasses clinked and the flashbulbs popped, the bombs kept falling on another dictator whose dark side leads the news every night.
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