Before the next series of important decisions about China tumble onto Mr. Bush’s desk, he and his aides should settle on a long-term strategy that protects American interests while encouraging China to play a constructive role as it assumes its natural place as a great power. Mr. Bush outlined a reasonable approach after the release of the American crew members when he said the United States and China “have different values, yet common interests” and that both nations “must make a determined choice to have productive relations.” The United States and China need not become enemies. . . . Though Chinese rhetoric was often belligerent, Beijing ultimately yielded without the apology for the collision that it had demanded. In the end, Mr. Jiang acted as a statesman, not an ideological combatant.
— New York Times editorial, April 15, 2001
As regards future policy, it seems to me that there are really only two possible alternatives. One of them is to base yourself upon the view that any sort of friendly relation, or possible relations, shall I say, with totalitarian states are impossible, and that the assurances which have been given to me personally are worthless, that they have sinister designs. . . . [Or] we should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will. I cannot believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of this country, even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with dictators, and of talks man to man on the basis that each, while maintaining his own ideas of the internal government of his country, is willing to allow that other systems may suit better other peoples.
— Neville Chamberlain, three days after Munich, October 3, 1938
Yes, of course, we know the analogy is imperfect. The United States is not England in the 1930s, and mainland China is not Nazi Germany. For one thing, we have not abandoned our modern democratic ally, Taiwan, as the British gave up Czechoslovakia. Nor does there appear serious reason to fear imminent genocide on the Asian continent. It has already come and gone; China’s Communists concluded the last of their orgiastic mass murders a quarter century ago. But they continue in power. And they continue to maintain their gigantic archipelago of laogai — concentration camps, nothing less — into which thousands of Chinese who dare think illegal thoughts disappear each year. China, in short, remains a tyranny.
Should the mere fact that Jiang Zemin is not Adolf Hitler be sufficient to qualify him a “statesman”? And should the United States be eager to conduct “productive relations” — or even imagine it can — with the regime Jiang leads, properly understood? We don’t think so.
But the people who control and propagandize current American policy toward China disagree. Working backward from theoretical abstraction to adduce a promising “reality” that suits their wishes, they deride as so many solitary trees that forest of evidence that the People’s Republic is a political malignancy. And they indignantly recoil from — no, mock — any suggestion that this malignancy might impose certain practical and moral obligations on the world’s leading democracy. In this respect, at least, the analogy between Sinophile “engagement” and old-fashioned appeasement is nearly exact. A “Cliveden set” mentality now dominates American opinion about China, one as naive, self-righteous, and insensible to the demands of honor as that which suffused Lady Astor’s tea parties before World War II.
Thus, when Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times worries about China, he worries that . . . democracy could arrive in China too quickly! “Trying to collapse the Chinese regime overnight,” Friedman explains, “would produce a degree of chaos among one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants” that would have a most unfortunate effect on American living standards, even — somehow — the quality of “the air that we breathe.” For the United States to court such ruin by responding in kind to Beijing’s occasional provocations would be “utterly, utterly foolhardy.” So no real confrontation with China’s rulers, please. Engagement is much the more sensible course.
But it is craven. And worse.
Shortly after the last issue of this magazine went to press, China finally released the hostage crew of that now-famous U.S. military surveillance plane. Since then, if you know where to look for it, news has emerged on an almost daily basis of other recent — and graver — Chinese assaults on American citizens or residents or refugee visitors. American University sociologist Gao Zhan, wife and mother of U.S. citizens, detained in Beijing since February 11, has been formally accused of “espionage,” a crime to which the Chinese foreign ministry ominously reports she has “confessed.” Last week it was revealed that a naturalized U.S. citizen, Wu Xianming, had been detained April 8 on similarly unspecified “spy” charges. Last week it was confirmed that two permanent U.S. residents, Tan Guangguang and Xu Zerong, had been arrested by the Chinese state security service — the first man last December, the second last August — and both, again, accused of espionage.
Also last week, Hong Kong police finally located Leung Wah. Leung was co-founder of a U.S.-based dissident group, the China Democratic Unity Federation, and was Hong Kong representative of its principal publication, China Spring — at least when he was not busy acting as a financial courier to underground democracy activists on the mainland. For several days in mid-November last year, Leung was in Los Angeles to attend a pro-democracy meeting of Chinese exiles. Almost immediately after he returned to Hong Kong, he received an unsolicited phone call from a stranger who promised lucrative business opportunities in the mainland city of Shenzhen. He was seen in Shenzhen, by several accounts in police custody, on November 22. Leung was not seen again until April 13, when officials in Hong Kong announced that his had been the body dumped outside Shenzhen’s hospital on November 23. They’d had to use dental records to identify the corpse. Leung Wah had been roasted alive.
Is there no atrocity base enough to interrupt our “productive relations” with China’s dictatorship? Apparently not. In response to this latest round of assaults on people with institutional or legal connections to the United States, our State Department last week managed only to suggest that Americans might want to “carefully evaluate” such incidents before “deciding whether to travel to China.” In response to the Beijing regime’s ongoing assault against its own population, the State Department’s delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva last week asked the organization to express “concern” about certain “reports” of brutality, reports that might otherwise obscure the “significant transformation that Chinese society has undergone since the introduction of the reform policies.” The U.S. draft resolution was defeated. It would hardly have been worth bragging about had it succeeded.
Sir Harold Nicolson, with Winston Churchill one of the few prominent Englishmen bold and brave enough to repudiate appeasement before the German invasion of Poland, was jeered in the House of Commons for his criticism of Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement. “I know in these days of ‘realism,’ principles are considered as rather eccentric and ideals are identified with ‘hysteria,'” he replied. “I know that those of us who believe in the traditions of our policy, who believe in the precepts which we have inherited from our ancestors, who believe that one great function of this country is to maintain moral standards in Europe, to maintain a settled pattern of international relations, not to make friends with people who are demonstrably evil, . . . I know that those who hold such beliefs are accused of possessing the ‘Foreign Office mind.’ I thank God that I possess the Foreign Office mind.”
Would that such a mind existed in the United States today — in our diplomatic offices or anywhere else.
David Tell, for the Editors
