Weekly Standard Editorial

April 16 / April 23, 2001/Vol 6, Number 30

None Dare Call It Tyranny

By David Tell

Three years ago this month, America's political, foreign policy, and business establishment was rolling its eyes in anticipation of yet another ritualized congressional debate over renewal of China's most-favored-nation trade status. Once again in that debate, small-minded, irresponsible types were expected to harp on minor imperfections in the Sino-U.S. relationship, like the fact that China's trade economy sustains a political regime of hair-curling, systematic barbarity. Elite opinion would no doubt prevail against these quibblers, as usual, in order that the great god Engagement might continue to smile on Wall Street. But elite opinionators were nervous just the same, for they knew that the pending debate itself—all that exaggerated hair-pulling about the footnotes in some do-gooder organization's human rights report—would offend Beijing, Engagement's holy city.

So, uncomfortable about the prospect of such sacrilege, and determined that it not recur in future years, the Clinton administration redoubled its efforts to abolish the MFN debate by securing China's accession to the World Trade Organization. To that end, President Clinton himself planned a trans-Pacific pilgrimage in June. And so, in April 1998, the Commerce Department was already in Beijing, leading a high-level delegation of American corporate executives through a series of pre-summit meetings with trade policy officials in the Chinese government. One of the Americans on this trip was a fellow named Armand M. Pacher, senior vice president of the Prudential insurance company. A reporter from the Newark Star-Ledger caught up with him during an after-hours break.

"The change is breathtaking," Pacher marveled as he looked out his hotel window at the Beijing skyline. "The progress is just outstanding." It's a "terribly exciting" time, a brand-new China, in fact, a completely "different world" from the grey-toned Maoist past. For instance: There are suddenly so many "wonderful restaurants" in the capital, "as nice as you can find anywhere."

So many wonderful restaurants, and yet, at that exact same moment, 750 miles south-southeast of Armand M. Pacher's contented belly, a 30-year-old rural laborer named Zhou Jianxiong hadn't had a bit to eat in several days. And that was the least of it. In January 1998, Zhou and his wife, Jiang Lianhui, had left their 9-year-old son with his grandmother. Jiang had then moved to Guangdong province and Zhou had moved to the city of Changsha in Hunan—both of them in search of work. But by April, state birth-control-policy enforcement officers in the couple's native Hunan township of Chunhua had somehow convinced themselves that Jiang was pregnant without permission. So they tracked Zhou down, brought him back, and ordered him to produce his wife for a gynecological examination.

Zhou did not know where Jiang was exactly, he told the birth-control police, but his wife couldn't be pregnant in any case: She'd undergone a tubal ligation the previous November. Rejecting this explanation, the officials summarily detained the young man, denied him food, and brutally tortured him for ten straight days. Four days into the ordeal, Zhou's mother and son arrived at the birth-control office to plead on his behalf. They, too, were detained without food. Zhou's mother was forced to stand still for nearly a week, listening to her son's screams from an upstairs room.

On May 12, the family was released from custody on condition that Zhou Jianxiong and Jiang Lianhui immediately complete paperwork requesting authority to have a second child. Returning the next day, Zhou reported that he remained unable to contact his wife, and therefore couldn't obtain the signature necessary to process the sterile woman's pregnancy application. He was again detained. He was again denied food. He was stripped naked, roped around the ankles, and hung upside down. He was whipped with lashes and beaten with wooden clubs. He was burned with cigarettes and branded with a soldering iron. And after 48 hours of this, in the service of China's national one-child policy, Zhou's interrogators tied electrical wire around his penis and testicles and then tore them from his body. Whereupon, sweet mercy, on May 15, 1998, the poor man finally died.

That same day, here in Washington, Robert A. Kapp, president of the U.S.-China Business Council, published a nifty little essay in his house organ, the China Business Review. Kapp lobbies Congress on behalf of American commercial interests in China. He draws a handsome salary, that is to say, for representing a Potemkin-village understanding of Beijing as indisputable verity, while deriding any doubter's concern for the real-life villagers as so much adolescent self-indulgence. It is necessary and proper, Robert A. Kapp wrote on the day Zhou Jianxiong was mutilated and murdered, for right-thinking Americans to "celebrate...the extraordinary depth of change and progress that China has achieved." And it is "long past due" for the "hyperventilation and virulent domestic political accusation" the rest of us persist in directing against China to stop. Such criticism is an "anachronistic irritant" to cooperation between our two great peoples.

A few months later, Congress re-upped Beijing's preferential treatment under the U.S. tariff schedule—as if to prove Kapp correct. And in the process, Congress altered the traditional designation from "most favored nation" exporter to the presumably less anachronistic "normal trade relations" partner. As if there were anything "normal" about an America, founded to vindicate the universal truths of human liberty, that nowadays eagerly makes speculative business investments in, and buys its textiles and tennis shoes from, a 3.7-million-square-mile dictatorship.

As this is written, bipartisan Washington grows increasingly desperate to repair such an abnormal normality—to "move on," in President Bush's words, past this regrettable misunderstanding about China's having downed an unarmed American plane, interrogated its crew like prisoners of war, and held them hostage. We explain in the editorial above why this incident will indelibly alter the geostrategic calculus of Sino-U.S. relations, no matter what its resolution, and how disastrous it will be for the American government to pretend otherwise. But we would like to point out, as well, that the status quo our leaders propose to return to comes quite close to practical and moral disaster in its own right.

It would more than prove this argument, we think, even had the crisis over our surveillance plane never occurred, that the Chinese government has lately adopted the habit of arresting without warning—and committing to its gulag—visiting U.S. residents and citizens. And that our government has inexplicably decided that the best it can say or do on behalf of these people, our people, is . . . virtually nothing. Were any other country on Earth involved, deafening alarm bells would be going off in the White House and Congress. But no: The State Department's consular information program continues blandly to advise American travelers that "China is a safe country"—that they should merely observe "normal safety precautions." You know: "Check that fire exits are unlocked and free from obstructions in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and shopping centers." And "remain alert for signs of altitude sickness" in the mountains.

One might think China's internal security service worth mentioning. One might think China's internal security service worth mentioning merely with respect to China's own citizens. And one might think—we do think—that the plight of China's citizens alone should be sufficient to establish the just and proper goal of American policy toward the People's Republic. "Friendship" and "cooperation" are not that goal.

Complaining that the Hainan Island airplane controversy was bad for business, a lobbyist representing such American retailers as Avon and Tupperware told the Wall Street Journal on April 4 that "China isn't our enemy." But the Chinese government is surely the enemy of the billion-plus people it commands. The murder of Zhou Jianxiong was not an anomaly. He fell victim to a regime as violent and primitive in its contempt for freedom as any that now exists, a despotism in which summary detention, torture, even death—for arbitrarily identified "crimes"—are normative, occurring thousands of times each year. The United States is supposed to cast itself the enemy of such a tyranny. We dishonor ourselves every day that we fail to do so.

By David Tell

-- Anonymous, April 09, 2001

Answers

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-- Anonymous, April 09, 2001