Folks;
This critical commentary from the WSJ as we get closer to Clinton's China visit.
Reprinted for personal use only:
. . . As a Dishonest President Cheapens Our Ideals
By CLAUDIA ROSETT
The white Goddess of Liberty Statue in Tiananmen Square was gone by daybreak. No doubt when the Chinese government has finished dealing with its people, the tidy square will be presented again as a suitable site for tourists, visiting dignitaries and the Chinese people to come honor the heroes of China's glorious revolution. It will be important then to remember the heroes of 1989, the people who cried out so many times these past six weeks, "Tell the world what we want. Tell the truth about China.
--The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 1989
Tanks were still rolling through Beijing when I filed that report to this newspaper on June 4, 1989, a day that brought the Chinese government's repressive machinery out of the shadows and into full, televised view. The country's rulers had sent the army shooting its way into Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of civic life in China. Today, the great lie has long since been patched back into place: the lie that the same Communist Party that ordered the killings has the right to speak for the Chinese people. The square is home again to official ceremonies in which China's dictators welcome their guests--with pomp, without protest. And President Clinton's plans to become the first American president to visit China since the Tiananmen crackdown have sparked lots of talk over how to deal with the vast square in central Beijing that has become a symbol both of China's cry for freedom and of its repression.
It is debatable whether any U.S. president should dignify China's dictatorial regime, first by going there and second by following the official script through Tiananmen. But the question at hand is not whether any president should go. More to the point, the answer is that it is grossly inappropriate for this particular president to go. In a speech last Thursday, Mr. Clinton defended his planned visit to China, which begins next week, as a "principled, pragmatic approach." The pity is that even if there is some sound reason for the leader of the free world to visit China right now, and even if Mr. Clinton makes the correct call to speak out in memory of Tiananmen--husky voice, teary eyes and all--he is still the wrong man to lecture the Chinese.
The mismatch comes because the uprising we call Tiananmen Square was at its core about a simple thing: telling the truth. Sick of corruption, desperate for a more just society, the Chinese turned out by the millions in a mighty effort to roll back the vast, sleazy lies Beijing's communist dictatorship felt free to inflict on them. From the beginning it was close to hopeless that by peaceful rebellion the Chinese could overthrow one of the world's most ruthless regimes.
Nonetheless, many risked their livelihoods, and some risked their lives, in the hope of being heard. Part of what transfixed the world was the sudden outpouring of sweet sense and normal human yearning, from a nation where for years the folks who spoke up in public had mainly recited the mottoes of Chairman Mao or droned on about irrigation projects. For a brief season, the Tianamen protests overturned all that. What the Chinese told the world, over and over; what I heard from them day after day on the streets, was that they too wanted freedom, wanted democracy--that this was the truth
about China. They were desperate to unhitch politics from lies, to couple public life with truth.
Mr. Clinton, as it happens, is not a figure history is likely to associate with a strong streak of truth-telling. The flaw here goes beyond a dash of hypocrisy--though there's been plenty of that. Recall that during his 1992 campaign, Mr. Clinton denounced President Bush for a China policy that "continues to coddle aging rulers with undisguised contempt for democracy, for human rights and for the need to control the spread of dangerous weapons technologies." Since then, not much has changed in that part of the China equation--except that Beijing, possibly with the help of lax controls by Mr. Clinton's administration, has been perfecting missiles that by some reports are now capable of hitting Los Angeles or New York.
The larger problem is that Mr. Clinton travels in his own haze of lingering questions about the truth. He has in recent years looked the American public in the eye to say he did nothing untoward with Monica Lewinsky, or Gennifer Flowers, or investments in Arkansas, or whatever. More important, he has left unanswered a wealth of questions about Chinese government money helping to fund his 1996 re-election campaign, and the subsequent easing of rules effectively restricting the transfer of missile technology to China.
With so many questions yet to answer, Mr. Clinton is in no position to do any honor to the Chinese people--either to those who died in 1989
defending the hope of an honest society, or to the Chinese who may quietly preserve those dreams today. Mr. Clinton's tale is by now a far cry from such prized apocrypha of the American presidency as young George Washington confessing that he cut down the cherry tree--a legend long loved for its stress on truth in politics. The world might well expect that Mr. Clinton, faced with similar circumstances, would deny knowledge of the cherry tree's condition but promise to get to the bottom of it.
As the Chinese people could roundly explain today--were they free to speak up--lies at the top levels of politics are dangerous and deeply corrupting to any society. When Chinese protesters in 1989 quoted the Gettysburg Address and built their own Statue of Liberty, they were aspiring to the kind of open, honest society that Americans, too, have long treasured. To the extent that Mr. Clinton has devalued the importance of truth-telling in American politics, he also debases the dreams of the Chinese who died trying to send the message that they wanted freedom. For Bill Clinton to go to Tiananmen and keep silent would be terrible. For him to go there and speak up would be revolting for its hypocrisy. Bad choices all around, but then that's often the price of lies.
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