Wei Jingsheng is a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned for almost 20 years because he had the courage to stand up for the basic human rights you and I take for granted as citizens of a free country. He was expelled from China in November 1997, probably because he was one of the most well-known of China’s many prisoners of conscience.
Jingsheng traveled to Paris where only the junior minister of “cooperation” would meet with him. In London, Prime-Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook were too busy to see him– probably had a party with OAISIS scheduled or something– so only an obscure bureaucrat would agree to talk with him.
The Clinton Administration had made a point of demanding that China honor the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, until about 1994, when more and more U.S. corporations insisted that Washington’s hard-line stance was harming business with the Communist giant. A lot of U.S. corporations salivate uncontrollably at the thought of a billion households that don’t yet have telephones, microwaves, or cable TV.
Cuba, on the other hand, only has about 7 million people, so it’s quite all right if you want to get all righteous about human rights under Castro. When it comes to China, however, you’re talking big bucks. As Bob Dylan once observed, before his own sell-out, “money doesn’t talk/it swears”.
A lot of people–especially corporate types–will argue that human rights should never be tied to commercial relationships. Oddly, this argument does not polarize along the political leanings you might have expected. Some very conservative U.S. congressmen support the demands for greater accountability for human rights abuses in China, while Clinton himself appears to be folding under pressure from the big corporations, and, as observed, Tony Blair and his Labour Party doesn’t have the time of day for a pro-union Chinese dissident.
You may recall that we went through this whole debate during the South African crisis, and Maggie Thatcher led the opposition to economic sanctions on the basis of the argument that they don’t work, and that they only harm the average citizen, not the powerful elite. Does Thatcher support sanctions against Iraq? The U.S. insists on tightening the sanctions against Iraq until they admit the U.N. weapons inspectors: isn’t Bill Clinton in a position of hypocrisy?
We ought to be more consistent on this. If sanctions worked against South Africa (they appear to have helped) and if they are believed to work against Iraq (this is somewhat questionable), and if it is hoped they will work against Cuba (dream on), then they ought to be applied to China.
What we have to do is remove the element of hypocrisy from the idea of sanctions. We constantly insist that we apply sanctions out of high moral principles, but we drop them as soon as we realize that there is fast buck or two to be made. The U.S. didn’t seem to mind the human rights abuses committed in Nicaragua or Chile, as long as U.S. commercial interests were served. Many European nations, like Italy and France, want to rebuild their business relations with Iraq, and thus they want to drop sanctions against Hussein. The U.S. won’t apply sanctions to China because U.S. corporations want to do business with the Chinese.
As China’s pursuit of the 2000 Summer Olympics demonstrated, the Chinese government does want relations with the West, and they need the technological and economic assistance only the West can provide. But such assistance ought to be dependent on well-defined and verified progress on human rights issues, democratization, and some measure of self-determination for Tibet.