Callous Disregard Comes At Awful Price

They knew what they did.

When President Clinton and Vice President Gore opened the White House to visits from China’s top arms peddlers and allowed Beijing’s middlemen to drop money into the political begging bowl, they knew that they were increasing the power of the world’s biggest dictatorship, one particularly devoted to religious persecution.

Now they complain about not being fully informed by their staffs or investigators about donations. Journalists ask what counts in courts of law - what did they know or why didn’t they know?

But in the courts of political morality and common sense, they are indicted for having empowered China not just at fund-raising time but year ‘round since 1993. That was when Clinton made business deals with China his top priority, not human rights or weapons proliferation, or other items outside the cash flow.

The evidence is obvious. Clinton and Gore are neither ignorant, stupid nor naive. They understand that when you hold out the bowl, the hand that gives today will be the fist that knocks on the door tomorrow. They know nobody in a dictatorship interested in staying off the rack arranges money for foreigners or pays campaign White House visits without instructions from the regime.

But here’s some lovely news: Americans are getting fed up with the administration’s passionate courting of China.

They are awakening, sadly late, to the communists’ persecution of the Christianity that the great majority of Americans practice themselves. The awareness is creating the first nationwide constituency to oppose American appeasement of Beijing.

So far, the administration and the China business lobby have been getting away with a collection of falsehoods about U.S.-China relations:

An annual deficit of $35 billion in trade with China somehow is dandy for the United States. Americans will eventually get jobs out of it, if they wait patiently while forced-labor products flood them out of the market.

The persecution in China of Christianity and other religions will not be as easily diddled out of the American conscience once it takes full hold.

For all dictatorships, free religion means free minds, their particular terror. Beijing meets its fears as dictatorships always do: arrests and beatings of clergy and worshipers (done recently as a prelude to Gore’s grand visit) and regulations to drive congregations into officially supervised churches. Millions of Chinese Catholics and Protestants resist and commit the crime of worshiping together in their own “house churches.”

The oppression is reported by human rights groups and the U.S. government itself. The only mystery is why Americans, Christian or not, showed such callousness to Christian persecution in China, other Communist countries and some Muslim countries. American businessmen may have feared closing off markets or oil contracts but that does not excuse them, and certainly not the rest of us.

The time of our apathy may be ending. The letters that have come to me since I began writing about Christian persecution enrich my life and buoy my belief in the importance of people living in freedom to speak and act in support of victims of despotism.

How to move from attention to action? In New York, City Council President Peter Vallone is working to end municipal investments and deposits in persecuting countries. Done nationally in cities and states, it would amount to scores of billions.

In Washington, there is increased congressional determination to help Chinese Christians and Tibetan Buddhists, the two major targets, but there is no agreement on how to do it.

One approach is to use the tariff weapon, specifically, against imports from China’s largest exporter and beneficiary of forced labor - its armed forces. The other is to withhold loans from the World Bank and the Export-Import Bank, and fight about tariffs next year.

Failure in Congress to push forward to help Christians in China would be the China lobby’s greatest victory. One letter I got came from the 11-year-old granddaughter of a famous American politician, whom she already outwrites.

She is deeply troubled about persecution of Christians. Will grown-ups keep her waiting year after year for the answer to her question: What can we do to help?

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