Bush’s Very Fragile China Policy

President George Bush has won the fight to sustain his veto of a law that would have protected Chinese students in the United States against forced repatriation to their homeland. His victory, however, has come at considerable cost and the results hardly can be regarded as a vote of confidence in the President’s approach to Sino-American relations. In the end, 62 senators and 390 members of the House voted against the Administration.

Mindful of the damage done by the bruising political battles over the China question in the 1950s and ‘60s, Bush’s four immediate predecessors went to great lengths to maintain a bipartisan policy toward Beijing. Now that consensus is shattered. All 37 senators and 25 House members who voted to sustain the President’s veto were Republicans. Worse, the Administration’s spokesmen in the Senate--Bob Dole of Kansas and Alan Simpson of Wyoming--advanced the President’s case in a rancorous and wholly partisan fashion. Simpson, for example, accused the Democrats of acting in pursuit of campaign contributions.

Sino-American relations are too important to be argued on such a level, and Bush must now exert every effort to restore the required degree of bipartisanship. The first step in that process must be an unswerving continuation of the President’s temporary executive order barring deportation of the Chinese students in this country.

Having risked so much to win the right to pursue his own policy unfettered by legal restraint, Bush also bears the burden of showing concrete results. At a bare minimum these must include: a demonstrable willingness on the part of the Chinese to tolerate at least a measure of dissent; an end to secret executions and the release of the imprisoned student leaders, and an easing of the onerous restrictions on the foreign press. Finally, Beijing must halt its rollback of the basic economic reforms that have begun to lift the burden of privation from the backs of a courageous and resourceful people.

Perhaps the most important lesson to be taken from this unfortunate episode is this: As their outpouring of support for the students shows, Americans care deeply about the Chinese people. And, because of those deep feelings, Americans want their government to do what it can to ensure that the Chinese do not continue to live under a police state.