Posted on: Wednesday, August 8, 2001

Editorial
Lest we forget: 'China unvarnished'

The Washington Post produced a timely editorial reminder yesterday that progress in human rights in China is limited, sporadic and disappointing.

The Post concedes that the country is changing rapidly, with "the increase in personal freedoms, the spread of the Internet, the triumph of private enterprise."

"But such talk," warns the Post, "can too easily obscure how much in the regime remains unchanged — how cruelly it continues to treat many of its own people. China's Communist rulers commit unspeakable violence against their subjects, not occasionally, not aberrantly, but as policy: to stay in power."

The Post referred to recent reportage on the repression, including torture, of Falun Gong followers — more than 250 of them have died in prisons and re-education camps, the movement says — and the harassment of U.S.-trained academics.

The Post concludes with a warning against "a romanticized portrait of China's dictators," adding that an "honest assessment will yield more realistic expectations."

All of that is true, of course. Yet it is important also not to lose sight of the almost inescapable conclusion that "the increase in personal freedoms," which the Post readily concedes, is surely the result of China's opening to the outside world.

How then should the United States proceed? The answer is: with great care that the opening is not interrupted, and on many levels of diplomacy. There needn't be a choice between pressuring China on human rights or expanding trade; we must do both.

The Pentagon, with Hawai'i's Pacific Command in the lead, has seen the strategic challenge to America shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific; it's time for the State Department to catch up.