Once a year, and for only as long as the dutiful questioning of the press corps requires, the Clinton administration is nominally tough on Communist China. The State Department’s annual “country reports” on international human- rights practices fall due. These reports follow a standard analytical format, established by law. More than most politically sensitive government documents, then, they must concern plain facts, without much interpretive color. So each year’s report on China — as befits the world’s ugliest nation — is unavoidably a story of unmitigated, brutal . . . ugliness.
The latest version of this ritual came and went last week. The new China report begins with the only summary judgment honesty will allow: The People’s Republic continues to commit “widespread and well-documented human rights abuses, in violation of internationally accepted norms,” and domestic repression has actually intensified these past twelve months. In fact, Beijing finally managed to quash “all public dissent against the party and government” in 1996, and “no dissidents were known to be active at year’s end. ” There follows a comprehensive catalogue of horrors: torture, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary arrests, show trials, religious persecutions, censorship, forced abortions — the works.
Since it all makes such a convincing portrait of things that almost couldn’t be worse, an obvious question arises. Hasn’t the administration’s deliberate strategy of Sino-appeasement turned out to be a miserable dud? They’re understandably touchy about this over at the State Department. During the January 30 press conference at which the most recent country reports were released, assistant secretary John Shattuck grudgingly acknowledged that there was a bunch of stuff “on the negative side” where China was concerned. But there was a “positive side,” as well, he insisted, referring to some laughably superficial reforms of legal procedure underway in the Chinese provinces. In any case, Shattuck concluded, China won’t change “overnight,” and “keeping faith with the process” is what American policy is “all about.”
Oddly enough, the president himself was considerably more candid in the White House East Room January 28. Yes, Clinton said quite clearly, the nearest he has ever come to a confession of major failure, “we have not made the progress in human rights that I think . . . that I had hoped to make.” It’s just that he cannot conceive of a single alternative China policy that would promise better results. It’s a function of anthropology, the president instructs us: The Chinese “tend to look at things on a long time horizon.” So he will, too, keeping faith with the process. And sooner or later, the process will work: The “spirit of liberty” will take hold in Beijing, “just as, eventually, the Berlin Wall fell.” It is, he says, “inevitable.”
This amazing pronouncement would no doubt alarm China’s politburo were there any practical evidence that Clinton actually believed it. But Clinton’s Berlin Wall analogy is inapt, offensive even. Cold Warera presidents did not spend 360-plus days a year bowing and scraping before Soviet communism, as this president now does with the Chinese, so as to secure U.S. corporate investment opportunities. Even at the height of detente, Moscow always retained a certain pariah status for American officialdom. Which cannot be said of the Clinton administration’s attitude toward Beijing.
The status of Hong Kong, which will revert to Chinese sovereignty July 1 after 150 years of British dominion, is a case in point. That island colony’s wellwishers are reluctant to draw the conclusion too vocally, for fear that any such prophecy will prove self-fulfilling, but reality cannot be disguised: It is becoming increasingly apparent that Beijing intends, despite its treaty commitment to the United Kingdom, quickly to extinguish Hong Kong’s democratic legal system. China has already appointed a stooge provisional legislature to replace the freely elected one that now represents Hong Kong’s 6 million residents. China has appointed a stooge “chief executive,” one Tung Cheehwa, to run the place with sweeping powers. And the entire enterprise, though theoretically independent of Beijing, may do nothing that contravenes the Basic Law passed by the National People’s Congress to govern its new ” special administrative region.”
At a meeting of its hand-picked Hong Kong “preparatory committee” on January 19, Beijing received a “recommendation” that twenty-five British-era colonial statutes were inconsistent with the Basic Law and must be fully or partially repealed at midnight on June 30. Among them are four ordinances establishing free electoral procedures, along with the operative titles of ordinances that codify a bill of rights and privacy protections. Also slated for repeal, and little noticed in the ensuing brouhaha, is Hong Kong’s English Law Ordinance, which secures elemental liberties of common law like habeas corpus. Beijing means to allow the creation of a semi-autonomous Court of Final Appeals in Hong Kong. But there will no longer be any significant legal grounds on which the colony’s criminal and civil defendants may make an appellate plea.
On January 21, U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said “it’s important to note” that these are merely “recommendations” by a mere committee, and that a final decision in Beijing “has not yet been made.” It is America’s “strong hope,” Burns announced, that these recommendations will be “reexamined.” And if they are not? “I’ve said what I wanted to say about this issue.”
Mr. Burns will have to think of something new to say right fast. China’s foreign ministry has since flatly rejected all foreign criticism of the proposed statutory “reforms.” Hong Kong’s post-reversion laws, spokesman Shen Guofang proclaims, are “purely an internal affair of China.” Tung Chee-hwa, for his part, has also publicly defended Beijing’s pending abrogation of civil liberties in the colony. Mr. Tung was educated in the United States. We seem to have taught him nothing.
And some of us seem to have forgotten the relevant lessons ourselves. The Clinton administration is now before the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston seeking the extradition — for trial in a forthcoming, Beijing- dominated Hong Kong — of a man wanted for bribery in connection with an alleged cigarette-smuggling conspiracy in mainland China. The facts of the case are in dispute. What is not in dispute is the Clinton administration’s central contention. Either the Senate will ratify a newly negotiated U.S.- Hong Kong extradition treaty, approved by Beijing late last year, before July 1. Or the existing extradition treaty — between America and Great Britain — will remain indefinitely in force. Either way, the extradition requests of Hong Kong’s forthcoming, eviscerated legal system must be presumptively obeyed.
So says the Clinton administration. But the Congress should not permit this to be the policy of the United States. When the Senate ratified our existing extradition arrangements with the United Kingdom in 1986, it declared Beijing obviously in mind — that no such treaty would be acceptable with “a totalitarian or other non-democratic regime.” And the rest of the administration’s argument is therefore immoral. Communist China will be sovereign in Hong Kong come July 1. When the United States enters an extradition treaty, it certifies before the world that it has confidence in the basic fairness of the foreign sovereign’s legal practices.
Beijing does not qualify. If the Clinton administration sends a Beijing- sanctioned Hong Kong extradition treaty to the Senate for ratification before July 1, the Senate should reject it. If the Clinton administration attempts to implement the existing treaty after July 1, Congress should defund it — until such time as Hong Kong’s civil liberties are once again convincingly guaranteed.
The British, at this point, apparently cannot do much to halt Hong Kong’s agonizing slide into tyranny. President Clinton is apparently unwilling to pick up any of the slack. But Congress will have many opportunities to try its hand on Hong Kong’s behalf these next few months. It must. Six million citizens of Hong Kong have almost nowhere left to turn. And 1.2 billion citizens of China could use some help, as well.
David Tell, for the Editors
