The Beijing Love-In

They were gathered in Shanghai for a “global forum” celebrating the October 1 fiftieth anniversary of Mao’s Communist party takeover of mainland China. And they were going to have a real fine time there — better even than at the Hamptons — because their hosts, Mao’s heirs, had anticipated every potential inconvenience. And extinguished it.

The dog problem, for example. It’s illegal to keep an unlicensed housepet in China, and the licenses cost more than most folks earn in a year. But still some Chinese remain devoted to their dogs, ignoring the relevant regulations and thereby abetting unpatriotic social disorder. So in the weeks before October 1, the government’s Bureau of Environment and Health embarked on one of its periodic, nationwide anti-canine sweeps. Any dog found in a public place — whose owner could not instantly produce the requisite documents — was clubbed to death in broad daylight by a uniformed animal-control officer.

Would the great Henry Kissinger have to fly home from Shanghai with his shoes soiled by the droppings of some black-market bowser? Not a chance.

Nor would visiting American celebrities be confronted by any black-market human beings. The state security service’s months-long “operation strike hard” had mopped up almost 70,000 of China’s most-wanted “criminals.” Criminals like Gao Hongming, Zha Jianguo, She Wanbao, and Liu Xianbin. All four are members of the “subversive” China Democracy party. In August, each was sentenced to prison, for 8 to 13 years, for the crime of advocating a multi-party political system.

Needless to say, human rights was not on the agenda of the Shanghai business pow-wow, nominally about China’s “next 50 years.” And Time magazine’s latest issue was not then on the local newsstands; retail copies were abruptly confiscated by Communist party officials — because that week’s feature package contained essays by exiled dissidents about Chinese human rights violations.

Note well: This fresh example of bald-faced censorship deterred not a single invited U.S. media executive from remaining through the conference’s full schedule of craven Sinophilia — including the suppressed Time’s own editors. And the editors of Fortune, which magazine had organized and principally sponsored the “global forum.” As the festivities opened, the chairman and CEO of Time-Warner, which owns both Time and Fortune, presented “my good friend Jiang Zemin,” China’s president and censor-in-chief, with a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

The chairman and CEO of Viacom, which owns MTV Mandarin, Asia’s most widely watched music channel, spent his time in Shanghai proudly advertising the company’s plans to expand its media presence in China still further. What editorial policies would these future subsidiaries adopt toward their intended market, asked one reporter on the scene? “You can rest assured,” Viacom’s chief replied, that “we are not going to take any action with respect to our content that is displeasing to the Chinese government.” How’s that again? “We do not view it as our role to tell the government of China how to run China,” he elaborated. “Our job is not to impose on a country like China our culture, but if we do business in China to be aware of the specific sensitivities.”

More American businessmen than one cares to think about have gone bowing and scraping to Communist China like this for more than a quarter century, of course. They have rarely received anything but vague assurances of “friendship” and “cooperation” in return. Nevertheless, the U.S. business and political establishment has persisted in the kowtow — so mesmerizing is the prospect of corporate profits tomorrow from sycophantic “engagement” today. And Washington and Wall Street have always angrily denied that such engagement might inevitably entail some major betrayal of America’s principles and international security interests. Quite the contrary, the pro-China mythology has it: Contact with our free economy will slowly inspire the Chinese to emulate our free polity, as well. America cannot lose.

But it isn’t true. The United States is as much affected by engagement as China is, and not for the better. For proof we need look no further than Fortune’s “global forum” itself.

Representatives of the World Trade Organization will meet in Seattle at the end of November. Before that meeting, the Clinton administration would like to strike a deal — long sought by American export and service industries — for China’s accession to WTO membership. But bilateral negotiations have been going badly, and China has lately withdrawn even those necessary trade concessions it initially offered in April. So all those American CEOs went to Shanghai in late September looking, more than anything, for some sign from the Chinese of a renewed willingness to bargain. They did not get it.

Instead, they got bluntly lectured about Taiwan. In a public speech on September 27, Jiang Zemin reminded his American visitors that “we will not undertake to renounce the use of force” to absorb now-democratic Taiwan into the still-Communist mainland. Nor will China “allow” any foreign country to “support” a continued mainland-Taiwan “split.” Three days later, at a private interview in Beijing with these same U.S. executives, prime minister Zhu Rongji made explicit Jiang’s barely veiled threat. America, he said, must “quit emphasizing” that the question of Taiwanese retrocession should be settled only by peaceful means — and Washington must similarly stop “implying that it would help defend Taiwan” in the event of war. “Otherwise,” Zhu warned, “sooner or later it will lead to an armed resolution.”

As Zhu was delivering these ultimatums inside the Great Hall of the People, party cadres were busy outside in the streets of Beijing. Hunting down that city’s illegal housepets. Expelling all the migrant workers to the countryside. Dumping untold thousands of other undesirables into temporary detention camps. And otherwise imposing the martial-law restrictions that would shut down central Beijing throughout the next morning’s October 1 “National Day” commemoration. Once it began, that meticulously planned parade would be an awesome spectacle: next-generation Russian-manufactured fighter jets screaming overhead while nuclear missiles capable of reaching California rumbled through Tiananmen Square — led by 10,000 People’s Liberation Army troops marching under a banner that read “The issue of Taiwan cannot be delayed indefinitely.”

And how did American “engagement” respond to this provocation? By immediately capitulating. Less than 24 hours after the last soldier goose-stepped out of Tiananmen, the Clinton White House was leaking word to the Washington Post that it had “mobilized the business community” in an emergency effort to defeat a previously almost invisible piece of legislation called the “Taiwan Security Enhancement Act” (TSEA), now pending in both houses of Congress.

And what is TSEA? Mostly, it is a restatement of the traditional rationale for American support of a free and secure Taiwan. It certainly poses no practical threat to mainland China, nor on its face does it threaten U.S. business activity in China. The legislation authorizes or requires the president to do little on behalf of democratic Taiwan that he is not already authorized or required to do under current law. TSEA is thus an honorable gesture of support for Taiwan, but nothing more.

The only reason the American business community has to weigh in against such a gesture is to please the government of Communist China. So what started as an effort to build a trade relationship with the mainland has become American eagerness merely to placate Beijing. And U.S. relations with a democratic ally have been corrupted.

Behold, the essential nature of engagement with China is revealed. Call it appeasement. There is one institution that can salvage some honor from this disgraceful farce. That is the U.S. Congress, which should pass the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act without delay and dare the president to veto it.

David Tell, for the Editors