Canberra, Aug. 10 (CNA): US appeasement towards mainland China has only made Beijing more aggressive and dangerous, and unless Washington draws a clear line, the challenge will only grow more dangerous, an American columnist warns.
In his article headlined: "US in sweet and sour relationship with China" published on the Australian Financial Review on Tuesday, Charles Krauthammer, a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group, said: "The Clinton administration's China grovel has gone from merely embarrassing to potentially dangerous. The past two months of our relationship with China are a chronicle of appeasement that has, predictably, made things worse." ** The U.S. appeasement started from President Bill Clinton offering five public apologies and a compensation of US$3 million after the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia; ** U.S. repeatedly berating Taiwan and demanding for a retraction of President Lee Teng-hui's statement of "a special state-to-state" relationship with China; Krauthammer said it would be one thing if this obsequious attempt to placate China worked. But look at how China responds: ** It organizes massive anti-US demonstrations over the embassy bombing, leading to the stoning of the US embassy in Beijing. (The US ambassador responds in perfect Clintonesque tone: "Clearly this is going to make the road a little rockier to stabilizing the relationship between China and the United States.) ** It seizes a Taiwanese ship near the island of Matsu (last heard from in the John F. Kennedy-Richard Nixon debates in 1960), accusing its crew of "smuggling." ** It flies more than 100 menacing military sorties over the Taiwan Strait. ** It denies the United States landing rights for military planes in Hong Kong. ** It launches an intercontinental ballistic missile with range designed to reach the United States.
** It sentences two human rights activists to long prison terms.
** It launches a massive crackdown on the Falun Gong sect, a peaceful semi-mystical movement in China that the regime has decided to eradicate.
"Most ominous is the manner in which the crackdown is carried out. The sect is being persecuted in classic high-Maoist fashion: State TV launches an incessant, vitriolic propaganda campaign. Sect members are arrested and sent en masse to 're-education' schools. Sect leaders are forced into giving public confessions," Krauthammer said.
He noted that globalization does not change China because its economic freedom has not led to its political freedom.
"But there is nothing inevitable in history. We had several mid-20th century cases of vicious fascist dictatorships running non-socialist, relatively free economies. Which is what we have in China today: a ruthless party dictatorship, communist in name only, savagely bent on maintaining power against all opposition," he said. "The Clinton administration seems totally wedded to the notion that as long as it keeps feeding the Chinese economy and propping up our much-touted 'strategic partnership', it will soften China's internal repression. That is no more true than that US appeasement is softening China's external aggressiveness," he said. "The Chinese know how pliant Clinton is and how far he will go to keep trade relations humming. That has emboldened them to openly challenge both the US 'hegemony' and its Taiwanese client," he said.
"Unless Clinton draws a clear line across the Taiwan Strait, the challenge will only grow more dangerous," he warned.
(By Peter Chen)
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