The New York Times, October 31, 1997

United States-China relations are built on a special, growing foundation. Before and during the visit of China's President, President Clinton and his aides showed how deeply that foundation determines the Administration's policies, judgments and moral and political values.

The foundation is a great interwoven construction made of these materials:

False choices presented to the American people. Rejection of American values going back to the Constitution and Bible. Facts so distorted that they become lies. Occasional scoldings, but no penalties for murder, torture and mass imprisonment, the strangling of religious freedom, or the half-century genocidal occupation of Tibet. The endangerment of the security of the United States.

The foundation was manufactured entirely in America. China simply did what it wanted to do rule a great people by the political terrorism that is Communism's chief weapon; no apologies.

China enhanced its military power and industry meanwhile by getting Western technology blueprints and weaponry. The U.S. was rewarded with a $50 billion annual trade deficit and a sharp boot in its security.

It was the frantic haste of the U.S. to do big business with the Communist dictatorship at any moral, political or even security cost that inspired the peculiar foundation.

Here are a few of the factual and moral perversions of which this piece of work is constructed:

"We must engage with China, not try to isolate or contain her."

Deliberately false choice. Washington knows that no human rights movement, liberal or conservative, opposed to U.S. appeasement of Beijing wants to contain or isolate China.

The contrary they want more real engagement with China. They want to deal with the people not only their masters. Since Beijing surveillance makes this impossible they want an engagement that might persuade Chinese leaders to ease the pain of political and religious prisoners and their one major prisoner, the Chinese nation.

They would tell Beijing that only so would China get from the U.S. the low tariffs it craves, international loans, high technology and acceptance as a decent civilization.

Mr. Clinton's type of engagement gives Beijing what it wants without proven payback. That does isolate China isolates the Politburo from awareness of unrest and the people from everybody but their rulers.

"We cannot have our relationship with China held hostage to any single issue." The Secretary of State says that often about human rights and China. From Madeleine Albright, who would not be alive if Britain had not given her Czech parents the human right of refuge, it is shocking. So is her curt putdown of the American bipartisan movement to penalize, however mildly, nations like China that persecute Christians and other religious worshipers.

Ms. Albright must know that it is not foreign talk about alleviating the agony of the political prisoners that keeps the other issues hostage. It is China's own human rights policy: Stay out of this or lose our business.

For decades Beijing has made the prisoners themselves hostage to international politics. When it suits its interests Beijing lets out a few. The West smarms all over them while thousands of others in China and six million Tibetans remain captive.

"Engagement with China is important to American security."

China is a major source of nuclear technology and weapons to third-world countries. Mr. Clinton says "China has lived up to its pledges" not to sell nuclear technology. It has done no such thing.

But on the basis of one more promise Mr. Clinton will lift the ban on China getting advanced U.S. nuclear reactors.

An individual perjurer might earn supervised parole. China gets nuclear reactor blueprints.

"We must also admit that we in America are not blameless in our social fabric our crime rate is too high," says the President.

Comparing shortcomings of democracy to the life-stifling cruelty of the Communist dictatorship is moral equivalency, a political and intellectual perversion of its own.

Perhaps the aroma from the foundation of shame dulls the moral nose.

What a pity all this U.S. self-abasement, and for a Government so corrupt, lawless and fearful of its people that one day it will collapse, as have all dictatorships that posed as superpowers, and were neither.