New Yok Times, January 28, 1997

ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL

On Jan. 22 and 23, the world press reported that Beijing was moving swiftly now in Hong Kong, getting ready to cancel basic freedoms when Communist China takes over from Britain on July l.

On Jan. 24, a Clinton foreign affairs official said U.S. relations with China were "multifaceted" and could not be held hostage to any one issue.

On Jan. 26, The New York Times reported in a front-page story by Patrick Tyler, its bureau chief in Beijing, that the half-century Politburo crackdown on religion, which had driven millions of Roman Catholic Chinese to worship underground, had been stepped up as part of a new wave of repression begun by President Jiang Zemin.

The same day, the Clinton official said relations with China were "multifaceted" and could not be held "hostage" to any one issue.

It was the routine point and counterpoint on China.

The press reports more repression in China and the Clintonian response is painstakingly plain: The business of the U.S. is business. Human rights matters torture, forced abortion, religious persecution, slave labor none of that must interfere with business.

But in the past week, the official got special attention. This was the new Secretary of State talking, Madeleine Albright.

Nobody expected her to say anything startlingly different than President Clinton had been saying the past three years since he broke his human rights promises to the Chinese and Tibetan people.

But because of her reputation for toughness, there was some thought that she might move a smidgeon from the Clinton party line on China.

She did not. She did not cross the line from toughly carrying out the boss's orders to being tough where it was dangerous courageous tough, tough enough to signal that on human rights for Chinese she had some thoughts, some misgivings.

Maybe she will cross over another day; too early to give up hope but burning with a brilliant light it is not.

While we wait, let's at least unspin the hostage story. America is already hostage not to an American human rights policy, for there is none, but to China's.

We cannot rescue ourselves unless we acknowledge that.

Beijing blackmails American companies in the China trade into silence about political and religious repression played out under their own noses.

China sells missile and nuclear technology to dictatorships that hate the U.S. China knows its threats of economic reprisal count in Washington, enough to make the U.S. slither away from legal sanctions or discussion with the American public.

On Jan. 23, answering a written question from Senator Bob Bennett, the Utah Republican, Secretary Albright said the U.S. had received "reporting" about "transfers" from China to Iran of material that could be used in biological warfare. No sanctions were planned, she said. But she did offer the Senator a "classified" briefing. That's nice unless you think the American public should know, since the Chinese and Iranian dictatorships already do.

For irony collectors: Prof. Andrew J. Nathan of Columbia University writes that it was when the U.S. did talk of economic penalties for human rights horrors like the slaughter at Tiananmen Square that Beijing made business concessions to the U.S.

Professor Nathan makes the critical point about why human rights in China are of national interest to the U.S. Countries that respect the rights of their citizens are less likely to start wars, export drugs, harbor terrorists, produce refugees. The greater the power of a country without human rights, the greater the danger to the U.S.

The dreadful, unexpected reality of America's desertion of Chinese human rights is known to prisoners in the torture cells; count on it.

Wei Jingsheng knows because briefly he was free.

He had been sentenced for writing his mind. When they found that the first 14-year term had not broken him, the Communist leaders with whom President Clinton and Secretary Albright will meet to talk multifacets ordered 14 more years: same Nanpu New Life Salt Works Prison, same guards, same isolation cells.

Well, some people must suffer for freedom; tough world. We who live in freedom already, what we have to do is speak up for them. Sometimes we do. Only thing is, sometimes we just have other business.