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There is a reluctance to be forceful with China on the issue of human rights.
When I say `forceful,' I do not mean the use of force, but the willingness to stand forthright for what this country should stand for.
We turn a cold shoulder to our friends in Taiwan, where they have a multiparty system, and seem to quake every time China is unhappy with something someone says or does.
As the editorial suggests, we should `respond far more sharply to Wei Jingsheng's sentence.'
I am pleased to back this administration when they are right, as in Bosnia, but I also believe that we should be much stronger in setting forth our beliefs as far as the abuses in China. I ask that the editorial from the New York Times be printed in the Record after my remarks.
Along the same line, Stefan Halper, host of NETE television's `Worldwise' and a former White House and State Department official, recently had an op-ed piece in the Washington Times titled `Taiwan's Unheralded Political Evolution,' which I ask to be printed in the Record following my remarks and after the New York Times editorial.
The reality is democracy has grown and is thriving in Taiwan, and we should recognize that in our policies.
The material follows:
China's Challenge to Washington
If the United States intends to develop a relationship of mutual respect with China, it must defend its interests as vigorously as Beijing does. Now is the time, for China has shown a dangerous new bellicosity in matters from human rights to military threats.
Last week Beijing again showed its contempt for the rights of Chinese citizens by convicting Wei Jingsheng of sedition and sentencing him to 14 years in prison. The activities the court cited included organizing art exhibitions to benefit democracy and writing articles that advocated Tibet's independence. This heavy-handed muzzling of the country's leading dissenter is a measure of the Chinese belief that America and other Western countries will not make them pay a diplomatic or economic price for the abuse of human rights.
Chinese behavior has been equally provocative in other fields. In recent months Beijing has bullied the Philippines over contested islands in the South China Sea, twice conducted missile tests in the waters off Taiwan, resumed irresponsible weapons transfers and imposed its own choice as the reincarnated Panchen Lama, the second most important religious figure in Tibet. Meanwhile, as The Times's Patrick Tyler reports, influential military commanders have begun pushing for military action against Taiwan and turned to confrontational rhetoric against the United States.
Washington has minimized these provocations, setting them in the larger perspective of China's encouraging economic reforms and Washington's hopes for political liberalization. That was the same logic that led the Administration, early last year, to abandon its efforts to link trade privileges for China to Beijing's record on human rights, arguing that anything that helped China's booming economy would ultimately advance political freedom as well.
It is working out that way. The 19 months since that policy change have been marked by a serious deterioration in China's responsiveness on human rights and other issues. Discouragingly, this seems to be happening not simply because a new generation of leaders is maneuvering to succeed the failing Deng Xiaoping. Nationalist military officers are steadily gaining political influence, and the two top civilian leaders, President Jiang Zimen and Prime Minister Li Peng, seem committed advocates of political repression. That suggests the newly belligerent policies may not be just a transitional phase, or a sign or insecurity in the leadership group, as some China scholars in the West have said.
The Clinton Administration, having done all it reasonably could to smooth relations, including an October meeting between Presidents Clinton and Jiang, now needs to recognize that a less indulgent policy is required to encourage more responsible behavior by China. The first step is to respond far more sharply to Wei Jingsheng's sentence, beginning with a concerted diplomatic drive to condemn China before the United Nations Human Rights Commission next March. U.N. condemnation would be an international embarrassment for China, one it desperately wants to avoid.
Another step is to oppose non-humanitarian World Bank loans to China, as already provided for under United States law. Some Administration officials also want to consider human rights issues in judging China's application to join the new World Trade Organization, even though that is likely to bring objections from other W.T.O. members.
The Administration still refuses to reconsider the simpler, more obvious step of restoring a link between trade and human rights. In this critically important diplomatic game, the United States may no longer be able to deny itself the leverage that link could bring.
From the Washington Times, Dec. 13, 1995
Taiwan's Unheralded Political Evolution
In an era that believes America's future lies in Asia, what is the Asian democratic model? Singapore and Malaysia are single party states refreshed a bit by economic freedom. Hong Kong, still a colony, has lately been given a measure of self-government--which Americans of 1770 would have scorned--only to be swallowed whole by the not-so-democratic People's Republic of China in little more than 18 months. South Korea? It's dominated by a government party whose last president is now up on charges of stealing $600 million--give or take a couple of hundred million.
Japan, for 38 years, has been run by a corrupt single party (the LDP) only to cede power to a collection of reformers who themselves squandered the chance for real change. Today the LDP is back in a cynical misalliance with its nemesis, the socialists, whom it hopes to shortly expel.
When does that leave us? With the Burmese, or the Indonesian generals, or perhaps Thailand, where politicians are so corrupt they stay out of jail?
Reading the Mainland press, Taiwan's recent peaceful, multiparty elections never happened. No mention--the dog that didn't bark. A decade ago, the phrase `Taiwanese democracy' would have been rightly dismissed as an oxymoron, though compared to Mao's mainland, the island republic was widely seen as an economic miracle.
Ironically, it is this economic strength today--$100 billion in hard currency reserves and America's ninth-largest trading partner--that has obscured Taiwan's political evolution. The late Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomingtang single-party rule, was replaced by his son and successor Chiang Ching-kuo, who created a supportive environment for democratic pluralism before he died in 1988. Martial law was lifted, opposition parties were legalized, press restrictions were eliminated and it was agreed that Chiang's successor would not be a member of the family or even a transplanted mainlander. Instead President Lee Teng-hui is a native Taiwanese so far determined to further reform by supporting younger, Taiwan-born politicians as leaders of the KMT.
In the last eight years, three legislative elections have been held, each time with slowly shrinking KMT majorities. The old National Assembly dominated by KMT geriatrics has been mercifully stripped of its powers. Direct presidential elections will be held for the first time in Chinese history next March.
Literally nowhere in Asia, except Taiwan, has a ruling party allowed itself to be eclipsed. Nowhere has the attack on political corruption been so singleminded as it is in Taiwan. Vote fraud, unlike Thailand and Korea, has been almost eliminated. Vote buying in the recent Dec. 2 poll has been reduced to rural areas and to a level that would boggle the minds of most Japanese and Thai voters.
At present, the KMT holds a six-seat majority in the legislature. Sessions will continue to be raucous, often undignified--not unlike the 19th century U.S. Congress or for that matter Congress today, recall the Moran-Hunter fight a few weeks ago--but so what? The opposition has strengthened as the exhausted Nationalists confront the reality of an increasingly pluralist Taiwan.
Though Democratic politics is often a matter of shades of ugly, the alternatives in Asia--both left and right--are vastly less attractive. Why the, despite Taiwan's effort, has it's progress been ignored? Are American interests served by recognizing and nurturing democratic growth--or has some blend of security and mercantile priorities cast our lot with the Mainland? The Clinton administration, still struggling with this Wilson-Rossevelt policy cleavage, has said nothing on the subject, even while embarrassing itself before and after Lee Teng-hui's summer address at Cornell, his alma mater.
Yet in the hall of mirrors that passes for Taiwan's politics, the Nationalist Party-KMT reflects its belief in `One China' while the opposition New Party, with 13.5 percent of the vote, is even more forceful on the subject. And as for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), it is split on the issue with the majority having muted the call for independence. Maybe the mean Chinese uncle in Beijing, implacably opposed to the island-nation's existence, succeeded with this muscular diplomacy--missile tests, mock landings and war games. After all, the stock market dipped and successionist politicians had limited resonance during the election.
So why are the mandarins in Beijing worried? Perhaps it is because on the heels of Hong Kong's democratic election that saw the defeat of pro-Mainland candidates, Taiwan has emerged as the Asian democratic model; and the first successful, full-blown democracy in five millennia of Chinese history, underscores the difficulty of reunion with China. Or perhaps the mandarins in the Forbidden City realize that their options have narrowed; that the use of force against Taiwan would be a disaster for U.S.-China relations and U.S. credibility and, most of all, would tear the web of Asian security and economic relationships that have sustained China's and the region's growth. We shall see.
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