Balancing Act

Pondering its response to the repression and brutality inflicted by the Chinese government on its own people this month, the Bush Administration found itself confronting a sad and familiar dilemma. American moral values and political principles demanded that official outrage should be not just expressed but tangibly acted upon. The question, as always, was how to do that without, in the process, doing harm to the Chinese people, with whom this country has no quarrel, and without jeopardizing the future of a delicate and important country-to-country relationship. In the end the Administration was no better able to find a satisfactory answer than any of its predecessors were in similar situations.

What it has done is take the minimum responsive steps that circumstances required. It postponed further high-level bilateral government and military meetings. It suspended sales of certain military and other equipment. It said it would try to get international financial institutions to defer acting on pending loan applications from China. And that was pretty much that. Postpone, suspend, defer: There is nothing irrevocable about any of these actions, and, as a practical matter, nothing very effective, either. No bridges were burned by the careful U.S. response, but neither did it stay the heavy hand of repression in China.

To say this isn’t to suggest that the Administration necessarily could have done better. Some in Congress have been quick to denounce a perceived timidity and even cravenness on the Administration’s part, but their criticisms have stopped well short of proposing feasible alternative actions. What, in fact, could have been done? To have brought to bear the full arsenal of commercial, trade and diplomatic sanctions would surely have hurt China’s economy, but the heaviest pain would have been felt by its people. At the same time, efforts to impose major sanctions would only have been seized upon by those Chinese leaders who oppose closer ties with the outside world as a vindication of their autarkic and isolationist views.

What kind of China does the United States want to see? Clearly it’s in long-term American interests to have a China that is politically stable, steadily prospering, more closely integrated in the world community and governed by moderate and humane leaders. It is this sense of what the future could bring that above all has guided the measured U.S. response to recent events. The additional hope, of course, is that there will be room in such a China for far more individual freedom and far more respect for human rights. It’s proper--indeed, imperative--for the United States and other democratic countries to continue expressing that hope. It’s no less imperative that the democracies go on condemning in the clearest and strongest words all efforts by the present Chinese regime to crush that hope.