There’s Something Rotten In D.C.

President Clinton, his supporting cast of bureaucrats and even most of his political opponents are so twisting the essence of the visit to the White House of Communist China’s top weapons dealer that the deeply important meaning is wrung right out of it. And that is no accident.

Clinton is doing what comes naturally at times of political embarrassment, the old Washington dance. Wriggle, two, three, four, wriggle, two three, gliiide, everybody sing out together: “Doin’ the White House wriggle!”

“It was inappropriate,” the president says with a fine show of chin. Screening must be tightened!

Republicans and Democrats un-in-love with Clinton say no, the problem is political money. Wang Jun, the Chinese Army’s chief arms broker, missile salesman and weapons smuggler, was brought to a White House reception by an Arkansas businessmen who became a hotshot Democratic fund-raiser.

Taking some of the stink out of fund-raising would be real nice. But it won’t get at the why and how-come of Wang, whose job is to make money and build power for the Chinese armed forces by peddling weapons worldwide, and whose name is known to every China expert, spook and high military officer in the world, getting to a White House do with the president.

Nor will it deal with the hypocrisy of the administration now clucking about this fellow’s visit in February when the man he reports to was the official guest of the U.S. government just a couple of weeks ago. This one got to the White House not for a handshake but for a real sit-down meeting with none other than the old screening-tightener-upper, Clinton himself. He is Gen. Chi Haotian, who gave the order to kill dissidents in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989 and was promoted to defense minister by a grateful Politburo.

No, the answer to how these characters got to the White House is not political money or screening. It is Clinton’s decision to base America’s policy about Communist China on trade.

For Beijing, the principal purpose of trade is to build up its police and military power. The biggest owner of Chinese industry and commerce is the military establishment. It uses the profit to build more weapons to sell, particularly missiles amusingly forbidden under U.S. regulation, and to modernize its armies, including the police army operating the Chinese gulag.

There is no hiding place, not for Clinton, not for America’s allies, not for American CEO’s, not for the American consumer or stockholder: doing business with China means providing money for the Chinese armed forces. So let’s not get all wriggly when China’s killers and arms-selling chiefs show up at our parties.

Most of Clinton’s political opponents are trapped by and with him. They went along with him in sacrificing democracy and American security to the Trade Gods. So, like him, they have to do something when a killer-salesman comes to Washington. Watch them dance.

How did a nice young fellow from Arkansas, who preached human rights when he ran for president the first time, sell them out a year later? Why did that nice assistant secretary of state for China affairs go along, after attacking the early Bush clone of the Clinton policy?

Why did Bob Dole, and his party, wipe out any difference of principle between them and Clinton on providing China with the huge trade profits to build its military power? Oh, who cares why; they did.

To all the readers who have written that they will not support the suppression of Chinese freedom by purchasing China-made goods, this column goes with respect and thanks. These people, they just do not know how to wriggle.