CHINA IN TURMOIL : U.S. to Speed Up Visas for Chinese Who Want to Flee

The Bush Administration pledged Tuesday to assign additional diplomats to process visas and do “whatever it takes” to help Chinese citizens trying to flee their strife-torn country for the United States.

Although the Administration promised only to give a yes or no answer promptly to visa requests, a State Department official said that, in practice, a high percentage of the requests probably will be granted to allow Chinese to escape the government crackdown on the pro-democracy movement.

At the same time, pressure was building on Capitol Hill to impose additional economic sanctions on China in response to the regime’s sweeping arrests of democracy demonstrators. The chairmen of the Asia subcommittees in the Senate and House, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), issued separate calls for further action against the Beijing government.

“I would favor immediately dropping the People’s Republic of China from the list of countries getting most-favored-nation trade treatment, and I would consider other steps in the future,” Cranston said.

Solarz visited the State Department to urge additional sanctions. A spokesman said Solarz argued “that because of events in Beijing since the initial crackdown, we need to do more than the President announced last week.”

President Bush suspended arms sales to China and halted U.S. military contacts with the Chinese army after the June 4 massacre in and around Tian An Men Square but he has taken no additional steps in response to the continuing crackdown.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said long lines of Chinese seeking visas have formed outside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and at consulates in other cities. The visa sections in Beijing and Shanghai, the nation’s largest city, have been closed, but Tutwiler said they will reopen today. She said the U.S. consulates in Canton, Shenyang and Chengdu are operating normally.

However, Tutwiler said that normal operations may prove to be inadequate in the face of the expected demand for temporary permission to come to the United States.

“We will be monitoring the requirements to assure that staffing levels are adequate to provide the full range of consular services, including visa issuances,” she said. “If it’s above the normal load of visas, whatever it takes to process visas” will be done.

At issue are non-immigrant visas, usually granted to students, tourists and business people. For Chinese citizens who have passports, the visa is all that is needed in order to leave the country. They are approved at the discretion of U.S. consular staff members after they state a valid reason for wanting to come to this country.

In practice, however, only a relative handful of Chinese citizens hold passports. A Chinese citizen can generally obtain a passport only for government-approved travel abroad and often has to surrender it on return. Thus, the State Department move is unlikely to make a significant difference in the number of Chinese able to come to the United States, although it may help some students with passports who previously had been denied U.S. visas on the grounds that their true intent was to emigrate.

Extended Current Visas

The Justice Department last week extended all visas currently in effect because of the unsettled situation in China. Officials said it is unlikely that any Chinese already in the United States would be sent home until conditions in China improve.

“The detention or arrest of people for exercising their basic human rights of freedom of expression and free association is contrary to internationally recognized standards,” Tutwiler said in the Administration’s first direct reaction to the wave of arrests by the Chinese government.

Tutwiler said that Secretary of State James A. Baker III received on Tuesday a comprehensive list of possible options for new U.S. sanctions. But she said that no immediate action is planned.

“This is nothing more than a list of options, should a situation ever materialize so that you would be ready, you would not have to spend the hours that the people have spent to pull them together and collect all the information,” Tutwiler said. “This is not something that has been sent to him in the form of recommendations. . . . Which options he might or might not choose, I don’t know. He doesn’t know.”

Most Americans Have Left

As a practical matter, most possible U.S. economic sanctions have already been overrun by events. For instance, in recent years the U.S. government attempted to put economic pressure on Libya by ordering U.S. business people to leave the country. There is not much point in doing that in China because almost all American citizens have already fled the country. Similarly, an embargo on new U.S. investment in China would seem to be superfluous, at least for the time being.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) told a breakfast meeting with a group of reporters that “business in China is pretty much dead” so there is very little left that would be affected by sanctions. Lugar, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the chances of salvaging U.S.-China relations are fading rapidly and “it simply may not be possible to restore good relations with this particular Chinese government.”