On Voting
Against China in Next Week's
Human Rights Meeting
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- All the dons sitting
around the tea table with China's most famous dissident, Wei
Jingsheng, seemed decidedly nervous and unusually quiet by
the everyday standards of Britain's most revered university.
It took me a few minutes to figure out why and then I
guessed if your brain is telling you that this may be the
Nelson Mandela of China, future ruler of one third of the
world, then a little awe and a roomful of silence are to be
expected.
After the tea there was the speech to
students. Direct, eloquent, his 18 years in jail on a
wind-swept, bitterly cold, 10,000 feet high plateau, behind
him, he tore into the Chinese communist regime and to the
western governments who give it so much comfort and
assistance. With almost serene self-confidence he appeared
to predict that his cause will triumph sooner rather than
later--"every ordinary Chinese now recognises the need for a
complete change in the dictatorship inside China."
This is a bold claim, but even if
exaggerated one can see already manifestations of the
democratic impulse: the village level elections just
completed, aided by poll watchers from Jimmy Carter's Centre
in Atlanta working under an official contract; the dissident
votes on quite important issues in the National People's
Congress; the tolerance of an underground press in Shanghai;
and the personal and often political empowerment that has
been the inevitable bi-product of growing economic freedom.
But it is in choosing the tactics of
how to best develop these signs of incipient democracy that
Wei Jingsheng and the most powerful western governments
diverge. It was with a sigh of great relief that Washington
joined its European Union friends in announcing on Sunday
that it was dropping American sponsorship of a resolution
condemning China's record on human rights. The annual
resolution, first introduced at the UN Human Rights
Commission in 1990 after the massacre of unarmed students in
Tiananamen Square the year before, has always infuriated
China. The commission opens its meeting in Geneva next week.
The Europeans got themselves off the
hook a few weeks ago. In the words of British prime minister
Tony Blair, current president of the EU, "it was not the
right way to proceed." In Washington, at least, the decision
making seemed to be more measured, an apparent response to
Beijing's announcement last week that it was going to sign
the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights which lays down precepts on freedom of expression,
religion and movement. A senior administration figure was
quoted in the New York Times as saying that the decision not
to vote against China "is being done as a calculation. It is
being done because we believe it is the way to make progress
in the future."
But is it? Wei Jingsheng's own belief
is that "when Beijing's relations with the West improve
conditions get worse for the dissidents inside China's
jails." This, of course, begs the question why Mr Wei was
eventually released. It was surely a sweetener to follow up
President Jiang Zemin's visit to Washington last autumn and
pave the way for Bill Clinton's China summit, now moved up
to June.
China's dissident policy doesn't have
the clear-cut pattern that Wei Jingsheng suggests. It is
both sweet and sour, almost unpredictably so, and the art of
dealing with China is knowing how to bring out the sweet and
how to protest the sour.
There IS an argument for getting
closer to China. Diplomatic recognition by Richard Nixon was
the first and necessary step. Trade on the most favourable
terms, the Clinton policy, another major step. There is no
good to be had in treating China as a pariah and everything
to be said for binding it closer to the West both
economically and politically. There is no reward for
wilfully undermining Beijing's self-esteem.
But the West must also stick to its
principles and the most important at issue is China's
disrespect for human rights.
Standing up for human rights should
not normally involve economic penalties--though the
"go-slow" after Tiananmen Square was a necessary punishment
for an outrageous event. But it should involve regular
diplomatic pressure, plain public speaking and certainly
voting the right way when these issues come up in public
fora, as they will at the UN next week.
Democracy feelings are bubbling up
from beneath as Wei Jingsheng so lucidly argues. Outsiders
need to keep the steady pressure on, just as was done with
Soviet Union. Perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly the dam will
break, as it did in eastern Europe. Wei Jingsheng,
doubtless, will be ready and prepared. Will we
be?
March 18, 1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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