Are We Trading Our Moral Leverage for Business Interests?

Western diplomats are preparing once again to ignore reality and turn a blind eye to the sufferings of millions of people in the world’s largest country.

Last year at the U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting, the U.S. supported Denmark’s effort to raise the issue of China’s human rights record. “If you cannot raise the issue of human rights in the United Nations,” asked the Danish foreign minister, “where can you raise it?”

Where, indeed? That effort by a brave little country failed. The Clinton administration has just announced that the U.S. will not sponsor a resolution criticizing China’s human rights record at next week’s commission meeting in Geneva.

This year, Denmark’s voice will be stilled, as the European Union moves to vote on China’s human rights record. We can be sure that its position will not be one that might affect trade.

Beijing is only too willing to link trade and human rights. China’s rulers threaten sanctions against any who question their conduct. The EU will capitulate. Taking their cue from the Clinton administration, many Europeans are saying “profits uber alles.”

The record of the Chinese government has not improved. Far from seeing trade change China, we are seeing China changing the traders. During the U.S. debate over most-favored-nation status for China, many members of the new China lobby--multinational corporations with extensive ties to Beijing--protested. MFN was not the proper “venue” for action on human rights, they argued. Yet when Denmark moved the question in Geneva, none of these corporate China hands voiced support.

Trade with China has not only compromised some of our large aerospace and communications corporations, but also threatens to involve us in the gruesome traffic in human body parts--a growing trade in organs taken from executed prisoners.

We have alarming reports of a rising tide of religious persecution in China. Chinese Communist Party directives smuggled to the West confirm a “special class struggle” being waged against unregistered churches, both Protestant and Catholic. And we know how the regime oppresses Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims in the northwest.

In the 1980s, America was a champion of human rights. Ronald Reagan gave hope to prisoners in the Soviet gulag and to people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. He backed democracy in Latin America and the Philippines.

The Western democracies are unlikely to take a strong stand at Geneva now that the U.S. has signaled that it will not lead. Despite this setback, human rights advocates will continue to press America’s leaders to speak and act forcefully with respect to China’s egregious treatment of its citizens.

Our nation must speak with a strong voice in behalf of human rights. People in chains need America’s message of hope.