Clinton will rue the day he visited China
Houston Chronicle
7-9-98 Chris Matthews
Clinton will rue the day he visited China
By CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS
CONGRESS' most outspoken critic of Chinese human rights violations believes President Jiang Zemin's repressive policies could make President Clinton "rue the day" of their just-completed summit.
"To heap all this praise on (Jiang) Zemin, to call China a democracy, to ignore China's proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and ignore the violations of trade relationships is not going to make this relationship better," Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in an interview this week.
The five-term congresswoman, whose diverse San Francisco constituency includes many Chinese-Americans, dismisses much of last week's ballyhoo from Beijing, including the live Chinese TV broadcast of a Clinton-Jiang "debate," as feel-good symbolism by a die-hard regime bent on the status quo.
"They'd said 'no' to lowering tariffs to conform to the WTO (World Trade Organization), 'no' to the U.N. convention on civil and human rights, 'no' to missile technology control regime. Once President Clinton had agreed to the trip, they knew they had him!"
The insults kept coming, Pelosi notes, even as Air Force One was taking off, highlighted by the denial of visas to three U.S.-based journalists from Radio Free Asia.
"Saying 'no' to the three reporters, rounding up dissidents, arresting a Catholic bishop at the time of the arrival, the insistence on his reviewing the troops at Tiananmen Square, this sent a signal back home."
Only after getting everything they wanted, Pelosi argues, after humiliating Clinton before his own country, did the boys in Beijing throw their guest a bone.
"When I saw the press conference was being broadcast live, I thought that the Chinese had concluded that this trip had to be redeemed. It was not reading well back home. Nice travelogue but no good as summitry. They needed to do something to snatch this trip from the flames.
"It was very clever. They did just enough for local consumption in both countries, but nothing to free the prisoners, nothing reversing the decision of Tiananmen Square."
While she views Clinton's public discussion of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators as a "plus," she criticizes him for buying the Beijing line that the massacre was but a sordid piece of the Chinese past. Placing the horrors in the past is "what the Chinese would like to do."
"Relegating it to history," she said, "ignores the on-going repression of those who spoke and demonstrated for democracy in 1989.
"We can't put it behind us until the verdict has been reversed, until the people who spoke at Tiananmen Square are released from prison."
Pelosi also voiced deep concerns about the president's statements on Taiwan. While she agrees with "one-China policy" and American opposition to independence for the offshore province, the question of Taiwan's ties to international organizations such as the United Nations "should have been left as vague as it has been."
"I wish he had not made those statements, especially on Chinese soil." She noted the tragic irony of an American president undercutting Taiwan, a land that honors democracy and free markets, while cheering on a regime like Jiang's.
Overall, she said, Clinton engaged in too much "meticulous diplomacy" aimed at not offending his hosts.
"Nobody expected him to visit prisons and throw open the cells, but this sets a very lower standard for what should come from a summit. We're going to make progress very slowly if we go as slow as the slowest ship."
Matthews is Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, and a syndicated columnist.
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