Today is one of those days that reminds me why I still have a subscription to the dead tree version of my local newspaper, the Washington Post. The reason: an interesting front-page story by long-time China hand John Pomfret on China’s increasingly effective lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill (the Pomfret piece, if anything underplays the growing Chinese presence — and effectiveness — on the Hill, especially because it does not get at the various “fronts” the Chinese use as force multipliers), juxtaposed with a column on the op-ed page that reprinted the letter by Vaclav Havel and other former Czech dissident leaders to Chinese President Hu Jintao, protesting the outrageous imprisonment of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who on Christmas Eve was sentenced to 11 years in a Chinese gulag for circulating an on-line petition calling for freedom and democracy.
The powerful letter from the former Czech dissidents stands as a stunning rebuke not only to the kind of legitimacy that China has been trying to buy through fat lobbying contracts with the likes of Patton Boggs, but also to those US legislators who could be influenced to support China’s authoritarians. To whit:
