With Clinton, Watchdog Is China Lapdog

President Clinton’s defenders have said that we should ignore private morality and focus on public performance. The facts suggest otherwise. Not only has the president’s personal life completely captured the public’s attention, lowered respect for political leadership and threatened his hold on office, but his penchant for deception and double talk has bled over into our relationship with foreign powers, with fatal results. “Compartmentalism” is this year’s Big Lie and its deadliest deception.

Clinton’s China policy is the major case in point. Before he became president, Clinton criticized President Bush for “coddling” China’s dictators. The sight of Bush administration officials toasting the butchers of Tiananmen Square was too much for candidate Clinton. If elected, he would be a watchdog, not a lapdog. But Clinton has exceeded Bush’s shameful accommodation. He is not only toasting the butchers, but also pushing plans to sell them nuclear technology, despite their record of weapons sales to Iran and Iraq.

In addition, he is essentially running a pro-China public relations campaign. Reports of Clinton fund-raiser Johnny Chung’s testimony that he channeled tens of thousands of dollars from Gen. Liu Huaqing, China’s top military commander, to the national Democratic Party during Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign raise even more troubling concerns.

According to the reports, Liu was in charge of China’s drive to modernize the People’s Liberation Army by using proceeds from weapons sales to acquire Western technology. At the time the Chinese money was flowing, Clinton was making it easier for American civilian communications satellites to be launched by Chinese rockets, a major goal of the PLA.

In 1994, when he was vigorously lobbying to extend most-favored-nation status, the president countered criticism from human rights groups by promising to keep China’s feet to the fire regarding its abysmal human rights record. He pledged, explicitly and passionately, that he would “step up efforts” to secure approval of a U.N. resolution condemning abuses. According to released dissident Wei Jingsheng, the resolution is “a matter of life and death” for Chinese reform. MFN was extended. So were the rights abuses.

While the State Department’s most recent report on China was rightly criticized by Amnesty International for pulling punches, even it reported “widespread and well-documented” horrors, including state-sanctioned murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced abortion and sterilization and continued brutalization of Protestants, Catholics and ethnic minorities, including Tibetans. Clinton’s own assistant secretary of state for Asia admits that “the situation has deteriorated.”

How has the administration reacted? With silence. Silence despite the fact, according to the Washington Post, that China’s regime is as oppressive today as it was in 1994. Silence despite the fact that last month the FBI arrested two Chinese agents for allegedly attempting to sell human organs plundered from the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners.

When the Clinton administration threatened $3 billion in sanctions unless China stopped pirating CDs, it showed its sense of priorities: Pop stars are worthy of protection, but political and religious dissidents are not. By the way, this move did not work. The Chinese merely made a show of compliance.

Not only has the president failed to push the U.N. resolution, but his administration has tried to silence other critics. It attempted to pull the plug on a Voice of America Mandarin Chinese broadcast featuring Wei Jingsheng. It has strongly opposed the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act, which would create an office in the State Department to monitor international religious persecution and recommend penalties.

The result of his China pandering cannot be understated. As Wei Jingsheng said, “If the United States, Britain and other European Union members don’t take the lead on a U.N. resolution criticizing China’s human rights practices, the resolution will die, and the international community will lose a critical opportunity to promote improved respect for human rights for the Chinese and Tibetan people.” The torture and murder will continue, with the Clinton administration’s tacit blessing.

Some of us have argued that a man who will lie to his family will lie to the rest of the world. The ever-widening squalor of the Clinton administration, with its deadly worldwide consequences, proves that every public horror has its roots in private moral belief--or lack thereof.