China’s Dissidents All Alone : Freedom: Since 1971, Washington has retained a studied obliviousness to Beijing’s human-rights record in deference to geopolitics.

Amid George Bush’s exhortations about the work of freedom having been done in the Persian Gulf, there has been a pronounced muteness from the White House over the attacks on freedom in Beijing courtrooms. This stems from two principal sources: indifference to human-rights issues in China by successive U.S. administrations and, since Tian An Men, the fragmentation of the Chinese exile dissident movement.

While the air war proceeded over Iraq, the Chinese government tidied up the remains of the 1989 democracy movement by shuffling professors and research workers hurriedly through courtrooms and into the vast Chinese gulag. These dissidents, who had demanded nothing more than such minimal human rights as democratic government, freedom of speech and expression, the right to assemble and protest, went to their fates without a whisper from the President.

It is fruitful to recall American selectivity on human-rights concerns around the globe. Toward the Soviet Union, particularly toward the horrific consequences of anti-Semitism rooted in Russian society and Soviet policy, American presidents have been forthright in their condemnations. Yet, since the earliest moments of rapprochement with Beijing in 1971, Washington has retained a studied obliviousness to China’s human-rights record, insisting the greater imperatives of geopolitics not only outweighed, but made insignificant such niggling problems as torture, imprisonment and suppression of basic rights.

The legacy of this emphasis finds root in the work of the architect of the U.S. opening to China, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, whose approach to international crises embodied this focus on the lofty ideals of global ordering. Emphasis on geopolitical strategies, which can translate into a near-apologist attitude, is evident in George Bush, himself a child of Kissinger’s policies as the U.S. representative to Beijing. During his brief tenure in the Chinese capital, Bush never raised his voice in protest over the abhorrent human-rights record of Mao Tse-Tung. And currently Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, is also a product of the Kissinger school--his prior job was with Kissinger Associates.

Now, more than a year and a half after the bloodshed on Beijing’s streets, the regime has settled the final scores of the spring protests. Students and professors, the most articulate and heroic voices of those heady days in May, are being subjected to quick trials and shipped off to the various labor camps in western China. Some of those tried--conviction is preordained--have been sentenced to four years; others, including Chen Ziming and Wang Juntao, regarded as the organizers of the Tian An Men movement, received 13-year sentences.

It has become conventional wisdom that the war in the Persian Gulf provided convenient cover for Beijing to proceed with the trials. To be sure, U.S. news magazines and newspapers were preoccupied with Gulf coverage, to the exclusion of much of the rest of the world. What this argument neglects is that Beijing’s octogenarians have never been terribly concerned with what the rest of the world thinks of its behavior towards its own people. After all, Chinese soldiers involved in the massacre were given wristwatches adorned with a picture of the front gate of the Forbidden City, a profile of a helmeted soldier and the slogan: “June ‘86--Commemorate the Suppression of the Rebellion.” Indeed, Deng Xiaoping has been regularly quoted over the past decade boasting of his Teflon-like immunity to criticism, that the West is eager to shrug off repression as long as business opportunities glow like the towers of Oz.

There has been an interesting reaction to these trials in Washington and among China watchers; “lenient by Chinese standards” has been the most common observation. Perhaps it will be comforting to the Chinese dissidents on the way to labor camps to realize there are, after all, no larger standards of human-rights and political freedoms they should aspire to. Too bad for them that they are Chinese; they must hew to China’s standard.

This attitude, that essentially Beijing is moderating its conduct, achieves its most insidious form in the relentless paring down of the deaths committed by Chinese troops in the capital on June 3-4, 1989. While the Chinese toll has always been fictive, early estimates, based originally on a Chinese Red Cross figure of 2,500 dead, have been battered down to the generally used “several hundred.” This diminished number, encouraged by the White House, and abetted by some U.S. journalists, is nothing more than a politically acceptable number of deaths. Reliable sources within the Chinese security apparatus, including accounts from the relatives of senior security officials now living in this country as well as unreleased reports at the State Department, are explicit in adhering to a number in the mid-2,000’s killed by the Chinese army.

It is important for Bush that the Chinese government not appear too barbaric. After all, needless attention to Chinese crimes against human rights would have jeopardized Beijing’s precarious neutrality on the U.N. Security Council, the minimum necessary for the White House to preserve U.N. sanctions for the coalition’s actions against Iraq. Reprimanding China for jailing peaceful protesters would only have upset the apple cart of international solidarity.

That attention has not been drawn more intensely to the Chinese government’s actions is due not only to the Administration’s deep desire that those actions remain obscured, but to the organizational decay within the Chinese exile community. It is hard now to remember the excitement that accompanied the successful escapes to the West of the student and intellectual leaders of the Tian An Men protests. But for some months, these young men and women toured the United States and Europe, describing in moving detail the collapse of the democracy movement in China.

For an array of reasons, however, these exiles were unable to preserve even a minimal focus on China’s internal repression. Their own organizations have been riven with personal and political differences: egos clashed, consensus shattered in squabbles over whose dissident group was more pure and, lastly, the very youth of many dissidents assured the exile movement’s evanescence. The vast majority of the 40,000 Chinese students in this country, gripped by the events of Tian An Men, have been thoroughly disillusioned by the factionalism of the dissident organization and have returned, single-mindedly, to their studies. So instead of a structured association of exiles intent on reminding the West of China’s barbarities, many dissidents--former college students we must recall--have returned to universities or moved to foundations to get on with their lives in their new worlds.

The result is that there are few pressures on U.S. opinion or Washington policy-makers to reproach the Chinese. As the decision whether to renew China’s most-favored-nation trading status is again before Congress, there seems little likelihood that many voices will be raised in opposition.

For the young men confronting China’s notion of justice in these recent weeks, though, Bush’s ringing calls for the defense of freedom in the Persian Gulf must seem like a perversion of what they’ve struggled for. The billions of dollars spent each week to defend autocracies--Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states--are the clearest sign to China’s democracy advocates that their fight for freedom will receive no support from Washington. The freedoms China’s dissidents seek are not those of the Gulf, they are the freedoms they see in the United States. They will have to win them on their own.