It’s China’s Choice

The world will not soon forget the stirring, horrifying, agonizing images that have been projected from China in recent days. It will remember with respect the lone protester, armed only with his moral courage, standing in the path of a tank column that had been sent to reassert the state’s absolute supremacy over its citizens. It will recall with anguish the photos of young demonstrators who were ruthlessly crushed by those same tanks as they sought to flee Beijing’s Tian An Men Square. And it will be haunted by the pathetic sight of obviously beaten and terrified Chinese, dragged before the government’s television cameras and forced to confess to crimes no more heinous than telling the truth about what they saw and what they want, which in China these days can be capital offenses.

This ritual of coerced public confession is part of a massive propaganda effort to try to persuade China’s people that seven weeks of urban demonstrations were the doing of a mere handful of agitators, and that the eradication of this movement for greater freedom was achieved without any loss of civilian life. That incredible lie is being seasoned by attacks on foreign news media, including the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Chinese-language service, which are accused of “spreading rumors” and so deliberately fomenting disorder. Defiant in the face of almost universal world condemnation, China seems to be going out of its way to undercut the improved international relations it worked so carefully to cultivate in the past decade.

If it is the intention of the hard-liners who now seem to be in control in Beijing to provoke further confrontations with the United States, then certainly there are opportunities at hand. Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who is China’s best-known dissident, has taken refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing, along with his wife. The regime has issued an arrest warrant for Fang, condemning him as an alleged counterrevolutionary--an accusation equivalent to treason--and condemning the United States for interfering in China’s internal affairs by providing him sanctuary. Fang’s evasion of arrest is an embarrassment for the regime. There are and will be others, including the defections of two Chinese consular officials in San Francisco and the near-certainty that thousands of young Chinese now studying in the United States will refuse to go home.

The official U.S. response to the charges and abuse coming from China has been measured and firm, but not deliberately provocative. President Bush has reaffirmed American support for greater freedoms for Chinese and all other oppressed people. His Administration has condemned the violence carried out by the regime against its own citizens, thousands of whom it believes were killed. It has been left clearly understood that Fang Lizhi can remain under U.S. protection for as long as necessary, but care is being taken to avoid making this issue a point of confrontation with Beijing.

U.S. policy, in sum, for now seems to be based on the idea that it will be left to China to decide just how far things will be pushed and just how disturbed the bilateral relationship will be allowed to become. In the circumstances that seems the soundest course to follow. What the Chinese government is doing to its people is morally odious and politically indefensible. That observation can be asserted--and it should be, emphatically--while stopping short of forcing a break that would lose the United States whatever leverage it may still have to influence events during this cruel and ugly period of repression.