Bush’s China Syndrome

Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, speaking for the Bush Administration, professes to see “favorable” signs that China is easing the intense repression it launched last June when it acted to crush popular political dissent. Those signs, however, are hardly visible to others who have bothered to look into the savage reality of what goes on inside China’s police stations, courtrooms, prisons and execution chambers.

The State Department’s annual world review of human rights, scheduled for publication on Feb. 21 but widely leaked to Congress and the press, concludes--Eagleburger notwithstanding--that “the human rights climate in China deteriorated dramatically in 1989.” The report, among other things, describes in detail the existence of slave labor camps in western China, the use of executions as a tool to force political conformity, the religious persecution of Buddhists and Catholics.

Asia Watch, a private organization that monitors and promotes human rights, provides compellingly grim evidence in its latest report on China of mass arrests, long detentions without trial, frequent torture that has left many of its victims dead or crippled and secret executions of real or suspected dissenters. Unsparing in its description of China’s official contempt for human rights, this respected organization also harshly criticizes the Adminis-tration’s “shamefully supine policy . . . toward the unrepentant tyrants of Beijing and their ongoing suppression of the pro-democracy movement.”

It was in defense of that policy that Eagleburger appeared before a Senate committee last week to suggest that the brutal crackdown under way since last June 4 might properly be seen as only another of those “episodic convulsions” that China has been prone to in periods of intense change. Such a dispassionate assessment would perhaps be understandable if Eagleburger were recollecting ancient history in tranquility. But in the context of butchered students, a farcical justice system and routine torture and killings, the assessment comes perilously close to denying any need to hold the Chinese regime to a basic moral standard.

“Does the United States,” asks Asia Watch, “want to signal to the Chinese people, and to the reform-minded majority of its intellectual and government elite who will inevitably return to power some day soon, its resolute commitment to the cause of democratization and freedom . . .? Or will it, by default and inaction, rest content to convey the message that the U.S. people and its government are but fair-weather friends of that cause . . . .?” It’s the right question to ask. The Administration has yet to give the right answer.