Bush’s Coldhearted China Card

Let’s suppose that two years ago you’d been asked to envision a meeting between the President of the United States and the leader of the Soviet Union. Let’s suppose further that you’d been asked to predict which of the two men at the table would have prodded Czechoslovakia toward free elections and which would have turned a blind eye to a brutal Communist crackdown on peaceful Chinese reformers?

If someone had told you then that the friend of Czech liberty would be the Russian and the accommodator of Chinese repression would be the American, you probably would have felt as if you’d fallen through the looking glass. But, as Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush meet off Malta today, that is precisely the situation.

For last week, as the Czechs began dismantling their stretch of the Iron Curtain, the President continued his effort to appease the Forbidden City’s homicidal autocrats by exercising his pocket veto of a bill that would have allowed more than 30,000 Chinese in the United States at present to remain here after their visas expire.

China intends to use the threat of forced repatriation to end pro-democracy agitation among its students at schools in the United States. The President has made his Administration Beijing’s collaborator in this sinister plan.

In fact, last week’s veto marked the second time in less than a month that Bush had blocked a congressional attempt to punish those responsible for perpetrating last spring’s massacre in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square. Just weeks ago, the President vetoed a measure authorizing State Department funding solely because it contained a provision imposing moderate economic sanctions on China.

Before Congress reconvenes in January, White House lobbyists will attempt to persuade lawmakers that the bone that the Administration would throw to the Chinese students--administrative visa extensions Bush granted the students Thursday--will protect them. The fact is that such actions lack the force of law. The courageous young Chinese who have risked all in the cause of freedom should not be forced to rely on the whim of an Administration that has shown itself to be without principle in this matter. Congress, which already has voted overwhelmingly to grant the students real security, should do so again.