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Jewish World Review Jan. 20, 1999/3 Shevat, 5759
Paul Greenberg
Destructive engagement: How to encourage tyranny
(JWR) --- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com) "And what I would like to see is the present government, headed by this president and
this premier, who are clearly committed to reform, ride the wave of change and take
China fully into the 21st Century and basically dismantle resistance to it. I believe they
are." -- Bill Clinton, visiting Communist China last July.
Clearly committed to reform? The only clear commitment the president and premier of
the "People's Republic" of China have shown of late is to repression. One show trial has
followed another. And three times in as many weeks, Jiang Zemin, that great reformer,
has spoken out against any reforms that might challenge the absolute rule of the
Communist Party on the mainland. "The Western mode of political systems must never
be copied," he warned at one point. "We must be vigilant against infiltration, subversive
activities and separatist activities of international and domestic hostile forces." Which is
partyspeak for any sign of freedom.
Jiang Zemin and dictatorial company have taken Bill Clinton's words last summer about
the need to respect human rights for what they were worth: nothing.
William Jefferson Clinton's pilgrimage to the Middle Kingdom accompanied by a cast of
hundreds was interpreted, correctly, as the grand kowtow to tyranny it was. Whether it's
getting impeached or currying favor with Red China's tyrants, this president seems
determined to outdo Richard Nixon's record at every turn.
Not even at the height (or rather depth) of Detente did President Nixon-Kissinger
mistake Leonid Brezhnev for some kind of visionary leader who was going to guide
Russia to freedom. But on his visit to another evil empire last summer, our garrulous
current president could not refrain from hailing his host as a man of "imagination," a
visionary leader who was following the `morally right" course for his country, a
statesman of "extraordinary intellect" and "very high energy.`
It hasn't taken long for Jiang Zemin, the architect of the massacre at Tiananmen Square,
to put all of that very high energy to work repressing the Chinese people. Bill Clinton has
given him the green light.
Now the Party's leaders are confident that Washington will not react to their latest
barbarities in any serious way. Madeleine Albright, secretary of state and dithering, will
doubtless deliver another of her oh-so-even-handed speeches taking an objective, neutral
stance between freedom and tyranny, tolerance and persecution, and that'll be the end of
it. Beijing need not fear any diminution of its huge trade surplus with the United States or
any other real repercussions. And so the repression will continue.
Madame Secretary calls this policy "constructive engagement," and its results could
scarcely be more destructive. Red China continues to fill its gulags with dissenters and to
export arms to regimes that wish America no good, all with a wink and a nod from our
"statesmen" in Washington.
Or as Bill Clinton, that innocent abroad, said of Jiang Zemin and his gang just last
summer: "There's a very good chance that China has the right leadership at the right
time." Good chance or not, some folks might not bet on it. Like the Tibetans still in thrall
to Chinese imperialism. Or the Chinese dissidents being jailed again, and their still-free
friends who must now watch their step and bide their time. The latest series of arrests,
decrees and warnings will make them more careful, not any less determined. Their time
will come, perhaps sooner than all the experts, those old China hands, imagine. For there
was a time when the Soviet Union was supposed to be forever, too. But freedom is hard
to dam.
Why the crackdown in China now?
Maybe because the regime on the mainland does not have the right leadership at the
right time, let alone rulers who are following the "morally right" course.
Maybe because Red China's economy is not as robust as the enthusiastic reports and
fabricated statistics out of Beijing would have the Chinese people and the world believe.
Maybe because the regime on the mainland is not composed of idealistic visionaries after
all, but is in the fumbling hands of frightened little men who can feel the freedom tide
rising, and don't know what to do except crack down.
Maybe because Communism in China is like one of those massive red stars whose light
still shines bright to us light-years away, though it has already burned out at its core and
is even now collapsing on itself.
And maybe because all those glowing reports our president brought back from
Communist China last summer were, to call up one of the more candid headlines ever to
appear in an American newspaper, just More Mush From the
If these are the words of a reformer, then Mao Zedong was a Jeffersonian Democrat.
Nor are these just words. There has been a notable increase in the usual number of
arrests-trials-and-sentences. (They all seem to blend together into one phenomenon in
Communist regimes.) New decrees now have been issued subjecting publishers,
filmmakers, musicians and of course developers of computer software to life in prison if
found guilty of "incitement to subvert state power," which can mean anything the
authorities decide it means.
Zemin tries on tri-corner hat in colonial Willamsburg
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