PERSPECTIVE ON CHINA : A Rogue State of This Size Needs Containing : Beijing’s contempt for universal values bodes ill for would-be friends and foes. Should it remain on the Security Council?

China has once again revealed its contempt for international values with its rejection of the universality of human rights at the U.N. conference in Vienna. This is the state with which the President wants to do “business as usual.”

But America’s China policy is not just a matter of human rights, or of the unfavorable trade balance. It’s about the critical realities of a huge power that threatens the geopolitical future of Asia and the emergence of a safer democratic world order. Only pressure, not rewards, can eventually bring to heel this renegade state, much as it was only firm, long-term pressure that finally brought the moment of truth to the Soviet Union.

By too many critical measures, China lies outside the norms of acceptable behavior. At a time when the global East-West chess game is over, when Asia has never been more peaceful and prosperous, China is rapidly arming itself to the teeth for as yet unknown conflicts and adventures. It may be burgeoning Chinese military power that eventually pushes the Japanese into the nuclear camp in self-defense. China also is unwilling to join in serious Security Council sanctions against North Korea’s quest for nuclear weapons--at what is perhaps now the defining moment in international relations on how the world will handle rogue proliferators. China remains the major backer of the murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which has long stymied the U.N. peacekeeping operation. While arming itself, China continues to flout international agreements by selling missile systems and even nuclear technology to countries like Iran. And, with extraordinary shortsightedness, cash-desperate Russia is selling China large quantities of weapons, which may yet be turned against the Russian Far East.

Beijing’s selection of international partners and friends also cannot fail to disturb. Fidel Castro perceives himself, Beijing and Pyongyang as the last bastion of loyalist holdouts. In Russia, neo-Bolsheviks view China as the last best hope for the resuscitation of the dying dinosaur of communism.

It is not just China’s military power per se that is disturbing, but the character and intent of the political order that possesses it. Tian An Men was a foretaste of how China’s leaders will handle its most decisive challenge in the coming years: the collapse of Chinese empire. As the gerontocracy in Beijing totters, major nationalities in China will seek to free themselves from one of the last remaining great imperial systems. The Tibetans have made a decisive case for their independence after suffering years of brutal destruction of their culture and ongoing “ethnic cleansing.” Eight million Uighur Turks in Xinjiang province--long called Chinese Turkestan--have seen the independence of their Turkic brothers in Central Asia. Large Mongol minorities in Inner Mongolia seek union with independent Outer Mongolia. Will China acknowledge these aspirations or continue its bloody imperial repressions, this time out of sight of CNN?

In the end, human rights is not simply about being nice to people. The absence of human rights in China suggests a contempt for basic values of democratic and legal governance, not only at home, but toward the international order as a whole. China cynically accuses rights and democracy activists of “Western arrogance” in trying to impose their parochial values on “a Third World majority with different values.”

Just what might those values be in a country that now lags behind Albania in reforming its political system? The issue isn’t even about whether Asians might “prefer” to be ruled by sclerotic communists rather than to live under the more universal values of participatory government, protected from arbitrary state power and Chinese racism. Chinese totalitarianism characterizes a state bent on operating outside the rules. Why else is China so insistent that Hong Kong be handed over bound and gagged by the British without a chance to determine its own fate or even democratize its internal rule?

Which brings us to the question: In a time of increased international activism by the United Nations, is China an appropriate member of the Security Council? Why should a state that does not share dominant international values be in a position to hamstring the actions of a growing community of democratic nations that share a vision about the expansion of more responsible, answerable, transparent governments across the world? Surely, Japan, Germany and even India qualify far more readily for Security Council membership in their commitment to a democratic international order and rule of law. While China’s expulsion from the Security Council is probably not feasible, it is sad that the Security Council should be saddled with an uncooperative and philosophically hostile state when the world is trying to build a post-Cold War order.

At a critical point in the evolution of that order, China is an outstanding holdout. If we do not seek now to bring about fundamental political change there, we will come to regret it in years ahead as that state, flush with military power and a growing economy but facing a destabilizing imperial breakup, blocks responsible international action and seeks to impose its will in Asia upon a community of nations that have signed on to a democratic order.

Accommodation with totalitarianism is an unwise step at this stage of international development. China must pay a price for its preferred role as renegade nation if critically necessary change is ever to be brought about in Beijing.