TALKING TO CHRIS PATTEN ABOUT CHINA

by A.M.Rosenthal

The International Herald Tribune - The New York Times

March 20, 1998

Recently I had breakfast with a man I had met far from here but whom I wanted to see in this city, on the record. The two times I had talked with Chris Patten were in Hong Kong, when he was the British governor there. With the colony tense as the Chinese takeover neared, what he said was not for publication,

But what this politician-diplomat learned from experience with the Chinese struck me as increasingly important for readers in Europe and America. So, on the record, this sums up what he said in both cities:

* China needs Western business far more than the West needs Chinese business. Britain's exports to China are 0.4 percent of the British total. Britain sells 15 times more to the Benelux countries than it does to China.

* China's economic power against the West is no more than the power of blackmail against the fearful, which vanishes when confronted.

* Western business and governments act, however, as if this were not the case. Through fear of loss of Chinese trade they make business and political concessions that are against their interests, economically and morally.

* The Chinese not only know this fear-driven Western weakness but incorporate it into their international business and political policies. When China wanted to show its economic muscle, it canceled some contracts with a suitably small country, Denmark. It punished Denmark for its stand against Chinese human rights abuses. For all the talk of continental unity, Europe did nothing and neither did the United States.

* Vastly stronger economically and technologically than China, the West must divorce its political, strategic and moral needs and principles from business deals with China. Only then will the Communists treat the West with respect, instead of with the contempt it has earned. As Mr. Patten talked, I thought of what had happened in the previous few days, events that showed how hypnotized Washington has become by the fake watch of profit that the Chinese keep swinging before its eyes. President Bill Clinton pushes forward a visit to China. He cancels Washington's yearly attempt to -get the UN Human Rights Commission to criticize China's human rights brutalities. America's diplomatic spin doctors sell the story that China is improving its human rights behavior - as Beijing again rounds up suspected dissidents. The Clinton administration considers canceling missile technology sanctions against China imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. And I have just received a copy of a report on religious rights in China

by three U.S. clergymen, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.They were dispatched by the president of the United States and received by the president of China; they did not permit U.S. journalists to accompany them. Their report has all the passion and compassion of a telephone directory. In tone and language, the clergymen treat the Chinese government - warden of the Chinese gulag and persecutor of Chinese Christians who disobey Beijing's "patriotic" religious regulations - as if they were bowing themselves in and out of an emperor's presence. Mr. Patten is a Conservative, a Tory with juice - a phrase stolen from conversation with Warren Hoge, who reports from Britain for The New York Times.

Mr. Patten squirts some juice on Rupert Murdoch. Harper Collins, a Murdoch publishing house, canceled Mr. Patten's book, "East and West," for fear the Chinese would take their anger out on Murdoch holdings in China. Bottom line: Mr. Patten got a settlement from HarperCollins, contacts from Macmillan in London and Times Books in New York and mountains of free publicity. The press in Britain and America jumped all over Mr. Murdoch. That was fine, except when the attacks came from journalists and academics who have been silent about Mr. Clinton's sellout of Chinese and Tibetan human rights. They fit the Patten definition of the publisher who would not publish: "China's useful idiot.