Red-carpet treatment - U.S.-China trade relations, human rights - Column

Progressive, The, Dec, 1997

When President Bill Clinton rolled out the red carpet for President Jiang Zemin in October, it marked the triumph of commerce over human rights.

Clinton did scold Jiang over Tiananmen Square, but he didn't let the continued suppression of freedom in China, the slave labor, or the subjugation of Tibet get in the way of the main chance: big profits for U.S. companies.

"China is the fastest-growing market in the world for our goods and services," Clinton said at the joint press conference, and urged China to open its economy up even further. If it does so, Clinton pledged to pressure the World Trade Organization to admit China as a member.

He celebrated the signing of a Boeing contract with China worth $3 billion in commercial jets. And he opened the door for Westinghouse and GE to bid on some $60 billion in commercial nuclear-power plants, which could up China's reliance on nuclear energy ten-fold. Little wonder, then, that the CEOs of Boeing, Westinghouse, and GE received White House invitations to sup with Jiang. But they weren't alone. The invite list was a Who's Who of the international manufacturing and entertainment industries. In attendance were the CEOs from Apple, Atlantic Richfield, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Cargill, CNN, Eastman Kodak, GM, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Miramax, Mobil, Motorola, Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, Time Warner, United Technologies, Walt Disney. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Viacom, and Xerox.

Somehow, actor Richard Gere, who's been speaking out about the human-rights situation in Tibet, didn't make the list.

Clinton contends that the more trade with China the better. But it doesn't help American workers when U.S. companies export jobs to China. And it doesn't help human rights there, either.

As China has opened its doors to foreign capital, it has slammed doors shut on political freedoms. According to press accounts, every Chinese dissident is either in exile or in prison today, Tibet is still under occupation, thousands of Chinese work in labor camps, and forced abortion is the order of the day.

China now combines the worst of two worlds, Stalinism and capitalism. And the U.S. government is going along. It doesn't mind the Stalinism too much, so long as there's money to be made.

Jiang, who once called the massacre at Tiananmen Square "much ado about nothing," was largely unrepentant about human-rights abuses in general and Tiananmen Square in particular. "The political disturbance that occurred at the turn of spring and summer in 1989 seriously disrupted social stability and jeopardized state security," he said chillingly. "Therefore, the Chinese Government had to take necessary measures." This put the lie to all the clowning he did in public, a clear P.R. move by the People's Republic to put a smiley face on brutality.

Sometimes, leading members of the U.S. media played along. Right before his visit, Time magazine ran an exclusive interview with Jiang, which was almost a parody. The editors at Time asked two questions on human rights, with no follow-up whatsoever.

Here was one of the questions: "Should you make some gesture on human rights, which would smooth discussions across the whole breadth of U.S.-China issues?"

Note the word "gesture." Time didn't ask for a change in policy, just in cosmetics.

And Jiang's answer was a beaus. He talked about Tibet and said, "We have fundamentally resolved the problem of slavery there. I believe the American people should be happy about that."

And the editors of Time let him get away with it.

China's human-rights record in Tibet includes liquidating a million people and committing such horrors as raping nuns. But these unpleasantries remained unspoken.

The editors' last question began in a promising way: "How can you sleep at night. . . ." But then it trailed off into inanity: ". . . knowing that you have responsibility for 1.2 billion people."

This allowed Jiang to go way out on a limb and thank his wife. "She tries to persuade me that, after all. I have to eat and try to get some sleep because the next day I have to continue working."

Clinton hailed the nuclear-power agreement with China as one of the positive things to come out of the summit. If this was victory, we'd settle for failure.

First, there's the serious problem of China s role in the proliferation of nuclear-weapons technology. And second, sending China further down the path of nuclear energy is a dead end. As anti-nuclear activist Harvey Wasserman notes, it greatly increases the odds of a Chinese Chernobyl. This technology is just too unsafe, too environmentally destructive to be relied upon. How many Three Mile Islands, how many Chernobyls, and how many tons of nuclear waste do we need before we understand that? And given the density of the Chinese population, the toll of a nuclear-power disaster could be catastrophic.

But for U.S. nuclear-power companies, the China market looks like a godsend. The "nuclear-energy market of China is critical to the survival of the U.S. nuclear-power-supply industry," the President's Export Council announced in June. Guess who headed the Council's study on China? The CEO of Westinghouse, according to Dan Morgan and David Ottaway of The Washington Post.