Published by: World Tibet Network News, Tuesday, June 25, 1996

By Hugh Williamson in Bonn

Far Eastern Economic Review

June 27, 1996

Back off on human rights, and prosper; That's the message Beijing is giving its European trade partners, and Germany is buying. On Tibet, for instance, Chancellor Helmut Kohl seems ready to placate Beijing in order to preserve his country's economic interests in China.

The chancellor showed proof of his faith in mid-June, when his government tried to distance itself energetically from an international conference on Tibet in Bonn. The event, titled the "Second International Conference of Tibet Support Groups," brought together the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader; top officials of the self-declared Tibetan government in exile, and more than 260 delegates from Tibet support groups in 56 countries.

China repeatedly called on Bonn to cancel the event. It also shut the Beijing office of Germany's Friedrich Naumann Foundation, which co-hosted the forum with the Tibetan government in exile, and urged Kohl's government to act against "certain people inside Germany who always interfere in the internal affairs of China."

The Germans were ready to oblige. Kohl and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel cancelled a $190,000 government grant for the conference, and tried to block a related all-party parliamentary motion criticizing the Chinese presence in Tibet. Bonn also demanded that Tibetan leaders travelling from their exile base in the north Indian town of Dharamsala sign a statement saying that they would be in Germany as private citizens, not as representatives of the government-in-exile.

But this the Tibetans refused to do, forcing Germany to drop the demand, and the conference went ahead. Bonn's actions drew sharp criticism. "The Chinese don't take Germany seriously because talk about human rights always results in nothing," commented the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, a leading newspaper.

But this is unlikely to dent Kohl's China policy of wandel durch handel, or reform through trade. Indeed, the chan cellor has much to lose by giving in to anti-Beijing forces, having spent hundreds of millions of marks subsidizing the entry of Siemens, Volkswagen and other German firms into the Chinese market.

Meanwhile, analysts agree that China's attempts to mute its overseas critics are set to gain momentum. In early June, Beijing blocked Chinese artists from attend ing a festival in Munich celebrating the culture of China because it included a workshop on human rights.

China expert Rudolf Wagner of Heidelberg University says Beijing's "cal culated overreaction" to such minor events "aims to make governments think twice on political criticism of China." He says the tactic works because "China has successfully locked the fantasy of its economic potential in people's minds."

This point was not lost on the Tibetans gathered in Bonn. They decided to focus more intently on lobbying international institu tions such as the UN and the Group of Seven industrialized countries, rather than individual countries, to prevent China play ing Western nations off against each other.

Otherwise, says Lodi Gyari, a special assistant to the Dalai Lama who runs the international support campaign for Tibet, what happened in Germany could hap pen everywhere. "Germany blinked so many times, and sent the signal to China that they are vulnerable to pressure. They've created a precedent and will keep having a problem with China,"he says.