The New York Times

Friday, September 18, 1999

ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL

Partying in China

SAN FRANCISCO -- Riding with the waves, Fortune magazine in New York has come up with a terrific, with-it, win-win idea.

For Oct. 1 the Chinese Communist Politburo has organized a national celebration of the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic following the military triumph of Mao Zedong. Everybody knows where office and factory workers will stand, precisely what slogans to shout, and which Chinese with a dissident political or religious record the police will take off the streets during the celebration.

But every big party needs celebrities. Not very many would have shown up on their own just for the Communist Party's victory banquets. So Fortune invited the kind of celebrities the Politburo loves most -- top foreign business executives from America and other countries to go to Shanghai Sept. 27 to 29 for an economic forum and then to Beijing, where their private planes are guaranteed red-runway treatment. Only multinational business, please, and only chairmen, presidents and C.E.O.'s.

The enticement was knowing they would get the chance to meet Chinese who interest them most, those who approve business contracts.

Fortune said President Jiang Zemin had "graciously" agreed to give the keynote speech in Shanghai. You learn to talk real humble if you do business with the Chinese Communists.

More than 200 C.E.O.'s have signed up already; a real A-list. About a dozen of the world's communication chiefs whose employees are supposed to report on China are listed -- including Time Warner, Fortune's owner, CNN and NBC.

Top folk from American industry, finance and commerce will be there, from Boeing to Calvin Klein. The Boeing man will be Philip M. Condit, chairman, forever a historical footnote for saying that his attitude toward human rights violations in China was the same as his attitude toward them in America -- after all, people have been beaten and shot in the U.S. civil rights struggle, haven't they?

I think that for any member of the press to organize a party for a government dictatorship is damaging to the publication and the rest of us.

But the basic problem is what goes on in the minds of the Condits: The pretense of American business, and the legislators its money helps elect, that it cannot see the obligation of American corporations to use their economic power to help the viciously oppressed; the sardonic stand that American faults can be equated with Beijing's use of terror as the instrument of government; the philosophy that money comes ²ber alles, even ²ber Americans' principles, and what their own religions teach.

So, of course, ²ber God.

Everything having to do with business and profits and how to get more of both is on the Shanghai agenda -- everything except the human rights of the Chinese who are buying our products and providing our cheap labor.

Human Rights Watch in China is not questioning, as I am, the very idea of businessmen getting together to worship the money idol in China. But it pleads with business people to read the accounts of the independent-minded Chinese sentenced to labor camps and how they were tortured, sometimes forced to exist in their own feces. And then please -- stand up in China, and use the safety of foreign passports to dare to speak up.

People often ask me -- Don't you get a feeling of defeat, writing so much about human rights in China and other dictatorships, all the while knowing that leaders of America, particularly the President and the business community, grovel to the Chinese?

Often. But then I think of the former Chinese prisoner Harry Wu, who secretly went back to the labor camps to track the fate of those still there. And I think of Representative Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat who has not weakened on Chinese human rights for a moment. She represents San Francisco, so I asked her what she would say this time. She thinks about it and then sends me this message:

"The spectacle of the U.S. C.E.O.'s kowtowing to the Chinese Communist leaders is grotesque but not new. This time, however, when the C.E.O.'s stand in Tiananmen Square with the Beijing regime to 'celebrate' 50 years of killing and repression, they will have blood on the soles of their shoes."