First Lady To Attend China Talks

Hillary Rodham Clinton, her way cleared by China’s release of human rights activist Harry Wu, will travel to Beijing for an international women’s conference next month, the White House said Friday.

The administration had agonized about whether the first lady should lend her prestige to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women despite the fact that the United States has condemned China’s human rights record.

Republicans in Congress had urged her to boycott the two-day gathering, which begins Sept. 5, but Hillary Clinton and others in the administration had argued that her presence would be a powerful endorsement of the conference’s goals.

It is the conference’s goals that Republicans are worried about.

“They got all these far-left ideas they want to discuss,” Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said Friday.

But Wu’s release helped tip the balance in favor of Hillary Clinton’s attendance. The president made the final decision Thursday at his vacation residence in Jackson Hole, Wyo., after reading a memorandum weighing the “pluses and minuses.”