Monday, December 2, 1996
CHINA:
Clinton’s policy targets trade, neglects human rightsBy A.M.
Rosenthal
New York Times
With determined concentration, President Clinton has worked a
historic change in American foreign policy. Foreign policy amounts
to a nation’s political, moral and military stance in the world,
its role and values. For America, the change will affect all these,
and for ill.
Clinton has made trade the foundation of his foreign policy, far
surpassing other traditional American goals and values, like
democracy and human rights, and often overriding security
interests.
Central to this change is China, with whose president he has
decided to exchange state visits to further his suddenly proclaimed
"partnership" between the world’s largest democracy and its largest
tyranny. The message he sent to all who hoped the United States
would help them attain some relief from political oppression and
religious persecution is: Don’t.
Today China and occupied Tibet, tomorrow Cuba, Burma, Indonesia,
Africa, the Mideast  who can know this inconstant heart?
Clinton worked long to achieve the turnaround. Diligently he
broke his promises of help to China’s victims and instead tied his
administration to the overarching trade value. Consistently, he and
the people with the stomach to carry out his policy underrated
Chinese violations of agreements against sales of missiles or
nuclear-warfare material.
And in tireless duplicity, they told America the issue was to
"isolate" China or not. False: Human rights supporters cheered when
Nixon-Kissinger "opened" China. They wanted it opened not for the
weird so-called realpolitik of building Chinese power, but
precisely to bring China’s people out of the isolation of
despotism.
Once, conservatives could be expected to oppose strengthening
Communist power. No longer; as the left abandoned anti-communism,
the right has abandoned human rights. On this  nothing to
choose, between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton.
Once liberals opposed dictatorships that conservatives found
congenial. No longer; Democrats grub money from the Indonesian
dictatorship and rationalize the Chinese.
Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., says China did not make much progress in
our definition of human rights, but made a lot in a "broader"
definition  economic betterment.
This is the classic rationalization by dictators and for
dictators. Now it allocates different human values to Asians. It
says that America was able to rise economically from its revolution
while expanding freedoms, but Asians are not.
Also corruptive of democratic values is the position that the
business of the world is now business, so if the right to talk
without risk of arrest and torture has any lingering interest, let
American businesses in China handle it.
It was never the business of business to take over from the
American people and government the responsibility for human rights
or even workers’ rights. That protected America from the corporate
government so dear to totalitarians.
At home, the rights to collective bargaining, Social Security
and defined working conditions were not granted by business but
came through the appropriate mixture of public opinion, legislation
and business needs. Abroad, that mix created embargoes against
South Africa and Cuba, and refusal to obey rules of the Arab
boycott of Israel.
In China, U.S. businesses grow in numbers but not in inclination
to walk up to one of Clinton’s Chinese partners for a stern chat
about the Chinese gulag. The idea that U.S. business would do that
now because its own government was abdicating on human rights may
ease the conscience but is self-deceiving.
Clinton did not even get a decent bid for his change of policy.
Economically, China promised him only huge American trade deficits.
Now China blackmails U.S. companies with demands for technology
that would put more Americans out of work. The Clintonians failed
with limp attempts to persuade China not to keep selling missile
and nuclear technology to terrorist nations.
So, we must understand. Those human rights promises he made in
the 1992 campaign  he never intended to keep them. So be it.
The human rights cause had been sold out before Clinton came cozily
along. It rose, and will again.