THERE’S BEEN a great lot of hand-wringing these past few weeks over the “axis of evil,” President Bush’s State of the Union coinage for hostile foreign dictatorships that cultivate weapons of mass destruction and make sponsorship of terrorism a conscious policy. The president’s critics wonder: Do the three despotisms he has located in this orbit–Iran, Iraq, and North Korea–genuinely constitute a discrete and coherent “axis” on the world stage? And insofar as they might not, what does the president’s commitment to pursue “regime change” in these three countries imply about U.S. relations with a host of other terror-infected, arms-proliferating dictatorships around the globe? This latter question becomes all the more interesting upon consideration of what’s not been controversial about the president’s remark. No one of any stature complains that Saddam Hussein, the Iranian mullahs, and Kim Jong Il lead governments that aren’t evil. Nor does any respectable voice suggest that states like these might be made virtuous purely through exposure to the enlightened world’s diplomatic customs and commercial treasures. Whether, to what extent, by what means, and on what schedule America should assume actual responsibility for the dissolution of aggressive foreign tyrannies seems open to debate. That America should, at very least, seek to contain and isolate such regimes–and announce our hope they be replaced–seems a matter of general consensus, however. And then there is the People’s Republic of China, which President Bush visits Thursday and Friday of this week. For three decades and seven presidencies, almost without interruption, it has been the official policy of the United States to make a full place for China in the community of civilized nations, as if the invitation alone conferred the necessary qualifications. China’s market reforms, proponents of this policy have promised, will inevitably liberalize its domestic politics and international posture. But it has never happened. China remains implacably, essentially hostile to the United States, as a brief peek at any given issue of a state-run Chinese newspaper makes clear. China maintains a large and growing arsenal of ballistic weaponry, targeted on the United States and its democratic allies, and persists in exporting aggressive military technology to rogue and tinderbox states across the globe. Moreover–worst, of course–China continues to be a dictatorship, its market reforms apparently designed only to smooth the transition from communism to something like national socialism. It is the world’s largest and most powerful terrorist regime. That the terror is directed only against China’s own citizens (if you’re prepared to overlook Tibet) and that American corporations would dearly love to sell each victim some much needed life insurance and a cheeseburger . . . well, these are not facts sufficient to distinguish the People’s Republic, in principle, from any other country in which a “regime change” might be hoped for. Are they? Is the Chinese Communist party somehow less deserving of pariah status, because somehow less “evil,” than the strongmen who govern Iran, Iraq, and North Korea? It would be impossible to defend such a proposition. And we rather doubt George W. Bush believes it. “Engagement” is a bipartisan delusion, of course, and many of his aides have suffered from it throughout their careers. But Bush himself has always seemed a man slightly but significantly apart from the herd: a president unlikely to make fresh accommodation with foreign horror simply because Brent Scowcroft says it’s the smart thing to do–and visibly uncomfortable with such moral compromises of U.S. policy as he has inherited from his predecessors. Our current president is not Bill Clinton, for example, who as it happens will be in Sydney, Australia, this week to pocket $300,000 for a speech to a Beijing front-group promoting China’s “peaceful” reabsorption of Taiwan. Bush has already announced, after all, that his government will do whatever might be necessary to defend Taiwan’s democracy. Bush has also–and personally–made plain his disgust with Beijing’s persecution of those “unauthorized” social and religious groups millions of Chinese people bravely continue to join. As if directly to challenge the president on this score, and in open mockery of the engagement crowd’s optimistic predictions, Jiang Zemin’s government has been conducting a brutal campaign against freedom of conscience almost from the moment Congress enacted Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China in 2000. The crackdown on members of the Falun Gong meditation movement is best known and farthest along: hysterical propaganda, mass arrests and disappearances, public beatings, not-so-secret torture, scores of people dead “of natural causes” in police custody. But Falun Gong having by such means been driven underground, Beijing appears lately to have redirected its appetite for sadism to a different group altogether. As confirmed in documents smuggled out of China and publicized last week by Freedom House and the New York-based Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China, the Communist party’s various security agencies now seem principally intent on eradicating any and every independent practice of Christian faith. The Chinese government sponsors “Christian” churches of its own, of course, in which sermons are subject to censorship, baptism is forbidden, contact with overseas denominations is illegal, and the Creation and Second Coming are written out of the Bible. Chafing against such restrictions and blasphemies, however, millions of Chinese reject the official congregations and worship instead in Catholic and Protestant “house churches.” Each of which Beijing bans as a “cult” the moment it’s identified. Security officials believe the recent, explosive growth of Chinese Christianity–according to one of the documents released last week–has been instigated by “hostile Western powers headed by the USA” so as to “perpetuate infiltration” and “tie us up.” In order to defeat these “antagonistic powers,” national and local police must “enhance the consciousness of law and evidence,” “intensify the investigation and interrogation,” “detect the illegal and criminal activities,” and “terrify” those citizens who might yet fall prey to Jesus, the American spy. It would be comical in its sheer stupidity–but for its consequences. Consider the testimony of Zhang Hongjuan, a 20-year-old communicant in the South China Church, a banned evangelical Protestant organization whose leader was recently sentenced to death. She writes: “On August 14, 2001, I was arrested by officers of the Shi Pai Police Station. The police officers interrogated me with severe torture before sending me to the Detention Center of Zhong Xiang Police Department. . . . They put shackles on my hands and feet, and used electric clubs to touch my whole body, especially my chest. . . . They forcefully unbuttoned my shirt, tearing off one button, and touched every spot of my chest with the electric club. I yelled at the top of my voice, but they moved the club into my mouth to stop me from crying.” Others fared still worse: “When it was Li Li’s turn to be interrogated . . . they came up to her and tore at her blouse. . . . They continued to torment her by inserting the electric club underneath her shirt to burn her chest and her lower parts, pulling off her hair by handfuls from her head, and splashing water in her face. For a whole day, a whole night, and yet another whole morning she was continuously tortured.” A “regime change” would seem in order here, long overdue and properly an explicit goal of any honorable American foreign policy. We would expect George W. Bush, consistent with the admirable moral purpose he has attached to U.S. international diplomacy since September11, to handle this week’s Beijing visit accordingly. A refusal to embarrass Chinese evil would itself be an embarrassment to the United States. This time, this president should find some public way, on Chinese soil, to demonstrate that his host government’s atrocities against universal human rights do not escape American notice and will not escape American condemnation. –David Tell, for the Editors
