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UNITED NATIONS -- Given the poor human rights situation in communist China, the United States will again call for hearings at the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission to press for a censure resolution at its upcoming March meeting in Geneva. The move comes amid what the State Department correctly calls an crackdown on political dissent and religious freedom for the Chinese people.
Though Washington has sponsored resolutions in the past to censure communist China for its human rights record, this new found enthusiasm for the subject seems politically shadowed. Last year we could not mobilize support for such a resolution, while in 1998 on the verge of President Clinton's visit to the Mainland, the US politely shelved its concerns reportedly because human rights in China appeared to be improving.
Since 1989 and the Tiananmen Square crackdown on dissent, the US has supported eight ill-fated attempts to a least verbally censure China's rights record in the UN Commission in Geneva. The last two years saw little interest. The renewed concern is particularly touching, not because the situation has suddenly worsened, but since the timing curiously dovetails with the US Presidential Primary Season.
As Candidate Bill Clinton discovered back in 1992, bashing the "butchers of Beijing" had a certain cachet. Given that during President Clinton's tenure in the White House that the PRC has profited from a ballooning trade surplus, an open season on American high technology, a spate of espionage cases, not to mention getting away with murder in human rights, it comes as no surprise that a bit of China bashing is in order to harmonize the electoral good fortunes of Vice President Al Gore.
The current State Department assessment cites the crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritualist movement, continued suppression in Tibet and "intensified controls over unregistered churches" translated as the PRC regime's systematic and viscous persecution of the Roman Catholic Church.
In a painfully crude religious provocation against Catholics, the Beijing-backed "Patriotic Church" defied the Vatican and ordained five bishops to upstage ordinations in St. Peter's in Rome that very day! Catholics in China are split between the officially- sanctioned Church in tow of the Party and a larger underground Church loyal to the Pope.
As Hong Kong's South China Morning Post opined, "There are about 60 unofficial bishops functioning on the mainland and about 70 government approved bishops ministering to the needs of the country's ten million Catholics." The Post added "unrecognized priests are still persecuted and imprisoned for affirming their loyalty to the Pope rather than the official Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association."
Interestingly the snub has frozen an ongoing but discreet diplomatic rapprochement between Vatican officials and Beijing started last Spring following PRC President Jiang Zemin's visit to Rome. The People's Republic demands that the Vatican break its long-standing ties with the Republic of China on Taiwan; the Holy See for its part wishes to see truly free worship for China's Catholics.
As Pope John Paul II has said regarding China, "Millions of believers cannot be oppressed, placed under suspicion, and kept divided."
On the issue of religious rights, the PRC has recently been keenly embarrassed by the defection of the Buddhist leader Karmapa Lama who fled from Tibet to India. The boy Lama's flight from communist controlled Tibet to freedom puts to test Beijing's spurious claim that all is harmonious in the kingdom of the clouds.
Even if the U.N. Commission were to pass a symbolic censure, and this remains quite unlikely, the realists and pragmatists will then calmly counsel that "rather than insult a reforming China, let us engage it, and transform it." Logical but wrong. Tell that to the Tibetans, the inmates of the Lao Gai Gulag, or Catholic faithful rebuilding their churches burned down by government goons.
When it comes to human rights in China, most countries are rightly accused of putting money before morality or contracts before civil rights. While it is not our place to confront China, we have the chance to let Beijing know the world is watching and her actions have consequences. The U.N. Commission hearings are a good place to start.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues who writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
