There will be champagne toasts galore and endless speeches about good will and mutual cooperation between America and China during tonight’s White House state dinner for Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao. Here are three issues that probably won’t be on the agenda during Hu’s time in this country because President Obama and others in the U.S. government fear that raising them would offend Beijing. First, China remains the world’s largest, most powerful and longest-lived communist regime. It famously came to power, according to Mao Zedong, “at the barrel of a gun” and has thereby remained in power ever since, slaughtering millions of its subjects along the way. There have never been free and open elections that would let the Chinese people choose their leaders. Though carefully structured and monitored economic freedom has been allowed in recent decades, there is no freedom of speech, religion, petition or assembly in China. Obama should remind Hu of these facts and press him to allow public circulation and discussion of Charter 08, the underground democracy manifesto associated with China’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xaiobo, if only to give hope to the millions who yearn for freedom in his country.
Print subscriber? Click here to login/register your account
Digital subscriber? Click here to login/register your account.