-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/talking_politics/documents/012
82841.htm
> In the 12 years since the first President Bush averted his eyes
> when the Chinese leadership unleashed the legions of the 27th Army
> � jacked up on amphetamines to make them more aggressive � upon
> democracy activists in Tiananmen Square and their model of the
> Statue of Liberty, America�s political relationship with China has
> gone from bad to worse.
}}}>Begin
Get tough
The recent China crisis should teach us what we failed to learn from Tiananmen
Square: You can�t negotiate with people who violate human rights
BY SETH GITELL
America, this is your wake-up call.
China�s 11-day refusal to release the 24 American crew members downed over the
South China Sea after an overeager MiG pilot crashed into their surveillance plane
suggests, if nothing else, that there�s something deeply wrong with America�s policy
of nurturing China�s business interests despite the tendency of that nation�s leaders
to govern their people the way Whitey Bulger ruled in South Boston. In the 12 years
since the first President Bush averted his eyes when the Chinese leadership
unleashed the legions of the 27th Army � jacked up on amphetamines to make
them more aggressive � upon democracy activists in Tiananmen Square and their
model of the Statue of Liberty, America�s political relationship with China has gone
from bad to worse. (The attack is now believed to have taken as many as 2600
lives.) And now, in the wake of Congress�s decision late last year to grant China
Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), Beijing seems to view America the way
a heroin dealer sees an addict � as an easy mark.
No matter how President George W. Bush spins the release of the 24 crew
members, it won�t address the central issue: a country that does not respect its own
people can never be trusted to respect anyone else. And no American administration
has done more than pay lip service to the cause of human rights in the People�s
Republic of China (PRC). After the Tiananmen massacre, former president Bush
dispatched then� secretary of state James Baker to China to ease relations between
the two countries � and though Bush the elder announced some mild sanctions in
the direct wake of Tiananmen, he went out of his way to appease Beijing. For
example, so as not to anger China, he vetoed a measure that would have extended
the visas of Chinese students living in the US. Former president Bill Clinton, despite
his charges during the 1992 campaign that his predecessor �coddled dictators,�
unlinked the causes of trade and human rights in China and pushed to grant Beijing
PNTR. As for George W. Bush, even as he has hinted at selling warships to Taiwan,
he has also indicated a willingness to push for China�s entry into the World Trade
Organization and to back the PRC�s favored �One China� policy. But no country that
represses its own people, bars unions, and permits slave labor by prisoners can be
anything other than a rival to American interests.
The central issue is the human-rights issue,� says Arthur Waldron, a professor of
international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. �If China becomes a freer
country, we�re not going to have as many problems with them. If you have a humane,
democratic regime, they�re not going to be a problem internationally.�
But American foreign policy toward China doesn�t reflect this philosophy. Instead,
policy is shaped by the debate between the business lobby, which looks longingly at
China as a source of cheap labor, and the security hawks, who think Beijing should
be treated as Moscow was during the Cold War. The status of China�s human-rights
activists on the information food chain mirrors that held by bicycling advocates within
regional transportation planning � they�re seen as well-meaning people who aren�t,
uh, exactly at the center of the debate. The movement to free Tibet, for example, is
pigeonholed in foreign-policy circles as a PETA-like boutique issue rather than a
serious fight for freedom.
Charles Kernaghan, the director of the National Labor Committee (NLC),
experienced the sidelining of these issues firsthand when his group released a report
in July 2000 detailing the complicity of American corporations in Chinese human-
rights violations. (Unionizers in China, Kernaghan points out, find themselves fired,
locked in psychiatric hospitals, and fed mind-altering drugs; scholar Robin Monroe�s
article in the February Columbia Journal of Asian Law documents China�s practice of
incarcerating union activists in psychiatric prisons.) �When you�re talking about
human rights and worker rights in China and established US corporations, the world
is a very lonely place,� says Kernaghan, who had trouble getting his report publicized.
�You�re certainly not going to find a lot of support in the foreign-policy
establishment.�
The continued decline of the US labor movement doesn�t help. Last year, the AFL-
CIO strongly opposed Congress�s vote to grant China PNTR. Its position comes
partly, of course, from self-interest: Chinese slave workers take jobs away from
American workers. But there�s another aspect to the labor movement�s interest in
China. Throughout the Cold War, labor stood at the forefront of the struggle against
Communism. At a time when Richard Nixon and American business interests sought
d�tente with the Soviet Union, the AFL-CIO put the spotlight on such human-rights
activists as Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Labor reached out to the
Solidarity movement in Poland and kept the pressure on. But labor�s voice has been
muted amid a corporate stampede to do business in the People�s Republic, a force
that wasn�t present in the earlier debates over the USSR and Poland.
The 11-day diplomatic standoff vindicates what labor activists have been saying for
some time. �Policies come back to bite the people who make them when they are
shallow and they ignore worker rights and human rights and women�s rights,� says
Kernaghan. Adds Thea Lee, the assistant director of public policy for the AFL-CIO,
�There�s no sense in which the process of trade liberalization and economic growth in
China automatically fixes or addresses the workers�-rights or human-rights
problems.�
Regardless of any American saber-rattling toward China, the imperative here is
moral, not military. America needs to inject concern about human rights into all of its
dealings with China, suggests Harry Wu, a pro-democracy activist who spent two
decades as a political prisoner in China. �Tell Chinese authorities no free lunch,� he
says. �We want to see political progress � human rights, not just economic
development.�
Get tough (continued)
A naturalized American citizen, Wu received asylum in the United States in 1985 and
founded the Laoghai Research Foundation (laoghai is the Chinese word for gulag).
When Wu returned to China in 1995 to do research for his group, Chinese authorities
held him for 66 days before sending him back to America. �If [the US] is a country
very concerned about democracy, human rights, our leaders would put this on the
table all the time,� says Wu, who scoffs at the idea that �money can change the
authoritarian status of a repressive government.� Economic ties between the
countries won�t help democratize China, he contends: �The engagement policy is
only engaged with money.�
�With human rights, they say China is different,� Wu says of that policy�s supporters,
noting that some of them ironically are the same people who venerated Ronald
Reagan for his anti-communism. (For proof of the right�s changed tune, look no
further than a May 2000 paper from the conservative Heritage Foundation, titled
�How Trade with China Benefits Americans.� The report notes that Chinese trade
�increase[s] people-to-people contact, help[s] to limit government control of people in
China, and ... empower[s] the Chinese people to take charge of their own destinies.�
Better ask the People�s Liberation Army about that.) If increased investment rather
than direct confrontation leads to democracy, asks Wu, �why did Ronald Reagan call
the Soviet Union the Evil Empire? Why did he say �tear this wall down�?� President
John F. Kennedy also challenged the Soviets in Berlin, Wu points out; he didn�t try to
strike business deals with them.
Wu says his research suggests that American trade actually contributes to China�s
aggressiveness. The funds that China gleans doing business with US corporate
interests � including Lockheed, which is helping China develop satellite rocket
technology � end up financing missile and weapons development. Wu traveled to
the Russian Pacific port of Vladivostok to examine former Soviet warships the
Russian Navy can no longer afford to support. The cash-rich PRC scooped them up.
As for business advocates� contention that economic pressure can�t change China�s
behavior, Wu points out that when American corporations were concerned about
copyright infringement and convinced the US government to sanction China, Beijing
quickly backed down.
As cable-news talking heads blather on about Bush�s performance in handling the
spy- plane crisis, we should re-evaluate the course America has taken since
Tiananmen. For starters, we might want to consider some of the things that worked
in the Cold War. During the early 1970s, the labor movement, neoconservatives, and
human-rights advocates all united to advocate putting more pressure on the Soviet
Union. Senator Henry Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, sponsored one
particularly controversial measure. Jackson�s bill tied the Soviet Union�s treatment of
refuseniks (Soviet citizens, usually Jewish, denied permission to emigrate) to the
sale of American grain. The farm and business lobbies vehemently opposed this
legislation. Eventually it passed, and Jackson-Vanik, as it came to be known,
crystallized the moral element of America�s policy toward the USSR. This pressure
eventually convinced the Soviets to free Anatoly Sharansky, a prisoner of conscience
whose televised release from prison became a symbol of the struggle for freedom.
By focusing on human rights, highlighting the work of Harry Wu and others, and tying
business deals to democratic development, the US can address some of the root
causes of its conflict with China � and avoid the trap of simply militarizing the
problem. Toward this end, says the AFL-CIO�s Lee, human-rights activists will begin
raising shareholder resolutions that curtail corporate work in China. Labor sources
say corporations such as Wal-Mart and Nike may face such actions.
The US House of Representatives took a step in the right direction last week when it
passed Resolution 56 by a vote of 406 to six. The resolution, which urged the United
Nations Human Rights Commission to criticize China�s human-rights record,
mentioned China�s treatment of religious cults, closure of places of worship,
repression of political dissidents, and other outrages � but, interestingly, did not
note
its treatment of workers. Even so, the resolution �signaled a willingness� on
Congress�s part to take a somewhat tougher stance toward China, says Matt
Gobush, a spokesman for Representative Tom Lantos (D-California), who sponsored
the measure. (Lantos, a Hungarian Jew who fought against the Nazis in World War
II, founded the Human Rights Caucus on Capitol Hill.) Lantos is preparing a
campaign to oppose China�s bid for the 2008 Olympics. �We believe that�s a real
litmus test on human rights,� says Gobush. �The Chinese do not deserve the
Olympics.� Lantos, he adds, will not allow Americans to forget the human-rights
aspect of our dealings with China. �Just as we did during the Cold War and our
struggle with the Soviet Union,� Gobush says, �we will let those who are being
persecuted know that here in the United States they have support.�
If anything good comes out of the recent crisis, it will be a shift in American popular
opinion that leads Congress and the administration to re-examine our relationship
with China. The starting point lies with the American-based corporations so
interested in doing business with Beijing. As Waldron says, �The business
community is quite happy to have a place where not only are wages quite low, but if
there�s any business about unions, [the authorities] can go crack heads.� But
eventually �Nike and Reebok will learn that they�ll pay some price from doing
business over there,� says Kernaghan of the NLC, which waged the public anti-
sweatshop campaign that almost put Kathie Lee Gifford out of business several
years ago.
Perhaps a groundswell will rise from the universities, where the civil-rights and anti-
war movements coalesced in the 1960s and the anti-apartheid movement took hold
in the 1980s. But so far things don�t look promising. The Princeton student
newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, reported on the plight of Li Shaomin, a Chinese-
American alumnus of the university�s graduate school who has been arrested by the
Chinese police. When asked whether the university would help try to free Li, a
spokeswoman for Princeton replied that the school did not have �an institutional role
to play.� In the absence of a campus movement, the next stage in US-China relations
may hinge on whether labor activists and public pressure can force American
businesses and other institutions interested in the PRC to factor human rights into
their business.
Seth Gitell can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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