Posted on: Monday, April 23, 2001

China vote: Right venue, wrong result

The United States has a lot of bones to pick with China, legitimate complaints all:

• Washington must not let up on the effort to get China admitted to the World Trade Organization, so it will be obliged to observe the same conventions that civilize the rest of the trading world.

• It must in due time work out an endgame for the EP-3A incident, preferably with return of the aircraft and — more important — agreement on protocols to allow the two militaries to operate without further dangerous entanglements.

• It must decide (as it must each year) what new armaments to sell Taiwan, balancing the need for that island's self-defense with China's insistence that such sales interfere in its "internal affairs."

• It must decide whether to lean on Olympics organizers to keep the 2008 games from being held in Beijing. (On balance, we think the international exposure of hosting the games would further open China to healthy outside influence.)

• Finally, the United States must continue to pressure China to improve its wretched treatment of its own citizens. Beijing is right to insist that its human rights performance has improved steadily since the death of Mao Zedong (except for the severe setback at Tiananmen in 1989). but China's people have a right to expect much better.

Generally, Washington is wise to pursue these and other questions separately. That's especially the case with the human rights question.

China is a vast, sprawling, disparate society, with many of its parts often not in effective communication. The EP-3E incident, for instance, may in the end tell us more about the independence of regional military commanders than about the desire of Beijing's leaders to advance the Sino-American relationship.

Washington has done the right thing, therefore, by attempting to pressure China toward better human rights performance by pushing a condemnatory resolution before the U.N. Human Rights Commission. For the 10 years this has been attempted, it has been voted down, but Beijing is aware that the resolution has steadfastly been supported by Japan and the European nations as well as the United States.

China has proved a slippery opponent in this venue. For instance, it argued this year that a hypocritical Washington should start paying more attention to the racial unrest that caused rioting in Cincinnati.

China won the battle on the human rights resolution again, but the war it wants to win in the long run is to gain acceptance as one of the world's advanced nations. As its economy and standard of living rapidly improve, it is to be hoped that its leaders can rely more on results than repression to stay in power.