Misplaced Priorities in China

Last week, American politicians had ample reason to be angry at China. On Sunday, more than 600 police and paramilitaries descended upon unarmed peasants in southern China, opened fire and killed two farmers and wounded at least 18 others. The farmers had gathered peacefully to protest city and township corruption. Then, on Wednesday, a Beijing factory worker named Chi Shouzhu was arrested as a pro-democracy “counter-revolutionary.” He will be imprisoned not for inciting pro-democracy demonstrations—not even for promoting democracy—but for printing out information from a pro-democracy website on a friend’s computer.

It is no surprise that American conservatives were huffing about China. They called for China’s normal trade relations status to be revoked. Some members of Congress even called for punitive sanctions against China. But the reactionary conservatives in Washington were livid not because peasants in Jiangxi Province had been gunned down, nor were they concerned for poor Chi Shouzu. Instead, they were angry that Chinese authorities had deprived an American of sleep.

The nerve of those people! Waking up an American pilot in the middle of the night to ask him questions about a crash that had killed one of their pilots. How dare they!

I do not mean to trivialize the U.S.-China spyplane standoff. I know that there was more to this kafuffle than China’s uncharacteristically humane treatment of the 24-member crew of the damaged jet. In addition to submitting our men and women to a nine-day “ordeal,” they also kept our plane.

The fight for the spyplane has elicited a new round of censure from Washington, and has brought relations between the two countries to levels of frigidity unheard of since the pre-Nixon era. On one hand, it was refreshing to see that our government could get tough with China—that unrestricted trading access to the world’s largest market does not rule out justified retaliation. On the other hand, it is unfortunate that we were retaliating for none of the right reasons.

Where were our Congress members when Chi Shouzu was arrested? Actually, it is unlikely that most Americans even heard of Chi Shouzu—arrests like his are so regular that his story did not even make Western newspapers. “Dissidents” like Chi Shouzu are held without trial, beaten and imprisoned. The authorities provide no official explanation for their arrests and their relatives are hardly ever informed of their loved ones’ unfortunate fate.

And it gets much worse. When township officials apprehended 30 year old Zhou Jiangxiong in May 1998, they hung him upside down, repeatedly whipped and beat him with wooden clubs, burned him with cigarette butts, branded him with soldering irons and ripped his genitals off. What did this man do to deserve such a heinous punishment? According to Amnesty International, he was tortured to death because the officials were trying to make him reveal the whereabouts of his wife, whom they “suspected of being pregnant without permission.”

In China, torture is institutionalized and an everyday part of law enforcement. The government-initiated “strike-hard” anti-crime campaigns have given tax collectors, judges, court clerks, party leaders and other officials a free reign on using torture to extract confessions and information from “criminals” like Zhou Jiangxiong. These practices are particularly prevalent in restive Tibet and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where ethnic minorities and their families undergo various forms of cruel and unusual punishment if they are even suspected of being involved in separatist activities.

There are a few things in this world that warrant jeopardizing lucrative trade deals and access to a market of 1.2 billion people. Flagrant, frequent, unrepentant human rights violations are foremost among those reasons. Initiating periodic United Nations censures against China’s communist government is not enough. The U.S. must take a tougher stance on China and human rights. China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) should be conditional on a tangible improvement in the respect of human and minority rights. A U.N. monitoring team must also be allowed into Xinjiang and Tibet to ensure that separatists and protesters are treated fairly. Admittedly, China will not be happy about such conditions. But WTO access is worth more to China than having the freedom to torture its people. The U.S. government ought to use its leverage to help China’s leaders understand this.

Of course, there are many people who still share the Clinton administration’s naïve view that the more we integrate China into the global economy, the more influence the West will have on China’s policies. To continue to advance this view is to turn a blind eye to the reality of decades of rapprochement with the Beijing government. To argue for “trade first, democracy later” is to forget June 4, 1989. At a time when China was opening up its economy to the West with alarming swiftness, the world watched in horror as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and the Chinese army murdered peaceful demonstrators. The world was outraged, but after the dust had cleared, trade negotiations quickly resumed. Twelve years after Tiananmen, China has not begun to improve its record on human rights.

So forgive me if I do not grieve for our “heroic” spyplane crew, nor for our plane. When it comes to China, getting back a damaged aircraft ought to be the least of our concerns. If you want to denounce China’s oppressive oligarchic regime, then do it—but do it for the right reasons.

Nader R. Hasan ’02 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.