THE NEW YORK TIMES

Wednesday, December 4, 1996

CHINA TURNS THE TABLES

By Adrian Karatnycky ( A. Karatnycky is president of Freedom House,

a human rights group).

Two years ago, the Clinton Administration caved in to China when it agreed not to link the two countries' trade relations to Beijing's violations of human rights. Today, with its threats of economic retaliation against the Walt Disney Company over a film about the Dalai Lama, China is exorcising a form of "reverse linkage." Having loudly insisted that the United States decouple human rights and trade, China

is now seeking to impose its anti-democratic standards on us. Those who defy Beijing's chilling efforts to suppress free speech at home and abroad may find themselves shut out of the country's new market. Disney deserves praise for resisting such blatant intimidation and for going ahead with the movie about Tibet's exiled religious leader. But China is unlikely to be deterred from its efforts at economic retaliation. In April, the Communist Government denied Boeing a lucrative contract for airplanes, which went to the French-owned Airbus Industrie. It was widely believed to be retribution for President Clinton's decision to deploy two aircraft carriers in the Strait of Taiwan when China was intimidating Taiwan last spring. In 1994, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the News Corporation, removed the BBC World Service Television news from satellite TV service in Northern Asia to placate China, which objected to some BBC programming. And Microsoft has felt Beijing's heavy hand because it chose to develop software for

the Chinese market in democratic Taiwan. China's use of economic threats is by no means unique. Singapore, for example, has fined The International Herald Tribune and limited the distribution of The Asian Wall Street Journal because of the news reports that included a handful of unfavorable paragraphs about the country's courts and leader, Lee Kuan Yew. American corporations should not be expected

to bear the brunt of ideologically motivated pressure from other governments. Nor can American businesses be counted on to resist censorship in the face of such intimidation. If access to American markets is not a privilege but a given in the new global economy, the United States should demand that our trading partners also open their markets in the same way. The United States Government should protect American corporations by guaranteeing that political blackmail meets with a firm response, including sanctions. President Clinton and Congress should support new legislation that mandates an annual review of the conduct of our trading partners - including certification that China and other countries are not engaging in politically motivated economic reprisals against American companies. The President should also let the Chinese know that our support for their entry into the World Trade Organization will depend partly on their behavior toward American companies. Such an American policy would restore some balan

ce to a relationship that has been off kilter since the 1994 decision to "depoliticize" our trade relationship with China. If such a balance is not restored, Americans will have allowed a foreign government to export suppression of free speech.