Christopher Trip to China

* U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher was humiliated at Beijing and he deserves it (“U.S., China Trade Embittered Words on Human Rights,” March 13). This is exactly the result of the mixed signals the United States has been sending to China.

Despite China greeting Christopher’s visit with arresting dissidents, the State Department withdrew its objections of the past six months to the launching of an Australian communications satellite, made in the U.S. by Hughes Aircraft, on a Chinese rocket. And the Defense Department announced earlier this month that it is interested in having closer ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the same army that killed the pro-democracy students at Tian An Men Square on June 4, 1989.

No wonder China has the impression that the United States had already decided to renew preferential trade privileges, the most-favored-nation trading status.

President Clinton’s credibility is on the line. China has called the U.S. a paper tiger. The Clinton Administration has to demonstrate that the paper tiger can bite.

CHIA YU-TAI

Silicon Valley for Democracy in China

San Jose

* I’m with China on this one. The U.S. will lose this argument. The U.S. has been dealing with China since the early 19th Century and in all this time and with all its experts, it still does not understand the Chinese.

The party bosses do not run China, the People’s Liberation Army runs China. The PLA does not like city workers, students and intellectuals. The bulk of the so-called dissidents come from this so-called privileged class.

The U.S. in the present and in the past has allied itself with the worst kind of repressive governments, so how can the U.S. pretend to be highly moral when it comes to human rights? For example, our Congress and our President just passed the NAFTA agreement with one of the most undemocratic countries (Mexico) in the Americas. We are no paragon of virtue.

We don’t protect our own citizens from crime, from the ravages of management against workers and the environment that our people need to live with. We should stop being godlike and moral throughout the world. It is hypocritical.

HOWARD A. SAMUELS

Northridge

* Regarding Christopher’s trip to lecture the Chinese: The Chinese see maodun (contradictions). Christopher criticizes Tian An Men Square. The Chinese see our Kent State. In both incidents the ruling government sought to preserve itself by intimidation.

Christopher criticized the Chinese treatment of dissidents. The Chinese remember that Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly jailed and that the FBI sought to destroy him.

JOHN FLEISCHER

Burbank

* I note where a group of 200 American businessmen publicly opposed our government’s position regarding China’s egregious civil rights violations. I would be interested in knowing which 200 companies these were. American businesses expressing a public display of opposition to our government’s legitimate demands for civil rights progress, while on foreign soil, is appallingly callous.

LELAND THOBURN

Tujunga

* China’s most prominent political dissident, Fang Lizhi, argues that the U.S. government should revoke China’s most-favored-nation trading status (Commentary, March 16).

It makes me sick every time I hear these political dissidents trying to drive a wedge between the U.S. and China without regard for the two peoples and their economic welfare. They would enjoy it if the U.S. and China get at each other’s throats instead of working out their differences and getting ready for a prosperous Pacific century.

STEVE LAU

Huntington Beach