Our Mourning Sold To False Profits

Thousands of Chinese children die in orphanages every year from deliberate medical neglect and starvation. This is policy, part of Beijing’s technique of controlling the increased number of children abandoned by parents who either could not feed them or feared the regime would cut the rations for the whole family for the crime of having more than one or two children.

This report, detailed by Human Rights Watch, is, of course, sad. But do we have the right to mourn?

America, people and leadership, has known for decades that every Chinese Communist regime used forced abortion and starvation to control population growth, used slave labor as an intricately planned part of its economic program, used torture and prison as fundamental instruments of political power.

The U.S. response, bottom line: Shut up, or the Chinese may forbid us to enrich them with trade that might one day turn a little profit for U.S. businessmen.

The U.S. government and Western society in general have sold - for theoretical trade profit - the right to mourn the orphans. They didn’t get much more for the deal than Chinese military provocations and political slaps in the American face.

The United States and its allies have betrayed not only orphans and women forced to abort, but also the principles and safety of our democratic society.

So be it. But some Americans, by consistent protest against Beijing’s horrors, do have a right to mourn for the orphans and can serve them best by speaking up again.

The issue is simple. How long will Americans allow the wealth they created under freedom to be used to give dictatorship the strength it needs to destroy freedom?

This problem has confronted America much of this century. More often than not, American wealth wound up bolstering dictatorships. The very nature of these dictatorships drove them to use their power, reinforced by U.S. trade, to create a military threat that led to war. See Germany, Italy, Japan and Iraq.

In the China trade, profits go mostly to China. It sells the United States eight times more than it buys. Since wages are so low in China, and in labor camps non-existent, this will mean loss of jobs to America.

And, predictably, most of China’s profits go to its armed forces and the huge police force that enables the Communists to stay in power.

In memory of the orphans, please note: Their death is more refutation of the myth, spread by Western apologists, that human rights progress will follow economic progress.

Like all dictatorships, Beijing uses increased economic power for increased police power. The more powerful the police state, the better it hides its atrocities behind barbed wire and coerced denials.

After corporate America decided that profits were worth the risk of building up China, President Clinton decided it was worth breaking his own word to submit. He scrapped his executive order pledging to use trade tariffs to persuade the Chinese Communists to ease, however slightly, the repression of their own people and the occupied Tibetans.

This did soil Clinton’s honor, naturally, but it turned out to carry no penalty here on earth. Republican presidential candidates, except Pat Buchanan, trot behind the China lobby. And our allies, as great as Germany and small as Israel, are also busy at the Communist trough.

Yet those Americans who care are not powerless. Republican and Democratic politicians who never surrendered their faith in freedom or their disgust with tyranny can make murdered orphans, forced abortion, religious oppression and slave labor an issue at the presidential conventions. They can demand tariff penalties for these instruments of Beijing’s governance.

Other Americans can make them an issue at stockholders’ meetings, in churches and synagogues. Remember South Africa. We can boycott Chinese imports and investments in companies that feed at the trough, uncaring of the blood therein.

That can be our flower, for the graves of the orphans.