Bush Meets Chinese Democracy Activists

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON — Before departing for Beijing for the Olympic Games, President Bush is signaling that he will raise concerns from Chinese human rights activists in his meetings with Chinese leaders.

Mr. Bush met yesterday with five Chinese exiles, including Harry Wu, the geologist who spent nearly 20 years in Chinese labor camps and later wrote about his native country’s gulags, or the laogai. Also at the meeting was Wei Jingsheng, a man considered by many to be the father of China’s democracy movement and the author of the essay “The Fifth Modernization.” There was Robert Fu, a Christian minister and former prisoner who handed Mr. Bush a “prayer for China” wristband and urged the president to intercede on behalf of an underground church leader imprisoned in China named Zhang Rongliang, according to the Associated Press. The president also heard from Rebiya Kadeer, a former prisoner and advocate for the rights of China’s Muslim Uighur community that seeks independence, and Sasha Gong, a former factory worker who now works for Radio Free Asia’s Cantonese Service.

A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said in a statement that Mr. Bush promised to take the message of the five activists to China’s high officials next month during the Olympic ceremonies. “The president assured them that he will carry the message of freedom as he travels to Beijing for the games, just as he has regularly made this a priority in all of his meetings with Chinese officials. He told the activists that engagement with Chinese leaders gives him an opportunity to make the United States’ position clear — human rights and religious freedom should not be denied to anyone.”

A former ambassador to Hungary and member of the board of Freedom House, Mark Palmer, said yesterday Mr. Bush should be credited with meeting with Chinese dissidents. “If one looks at American presidents over the last 50 years, virtually none of them have met and acknowledged they have met with Chinese dissidents. There is always this concern you pay a huge price in terms of other interests like trade, security and others,” he said. Mr. Palmer was one of many voices in Washington pushing for such a meeting and said he hoped Mr. Bush would also meet with political dissidents when he is in Beijing.

But for many close watchers of China’s repressive political system, the gesture from President Bush was not enough. A scholar at the Hudson Institute here who served in the Reagan administration, Michael Horowitz, said, “In some respects what President Bush has done on China’s human rights policy, it’s hard to imagine a president having a worse impact, doing less on human rights in China than President Bush.”

President Bush has come under some pressure from members of his own party, such as Rep. Frank Wolf, a Republican from Virginia, to give a major speech in Beijing on human rights issues. Yesterday’s meeting was held in the White House residence and not the Oval Office, offering those who wished a connotation it was not official American business.

Also yesterday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser met with the Chinese foreign minister, Yang Jiechi. Mr. Bush dropped by the meeting and expressed “his desire to see a successful Olympics, and noted that this presents the Chinese with an opportunity to demonstrate compassion on human rights and freedom,” Ms. Perino said.

Mr. Bush’s State Department ended Clinton-era policy of instructing diplomats at the annual U.N. Human Rights Commission proceedings to at least introduce an annual non-binding resolution condemning China’s treatment of religious minorities, political prisoners, and the like. It was Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, Colin Powell, who initially made the case for China’s hosting of the 2008 games following the crisis in 2001 sparked by the emergency landing of an American spy craft in Chinese territory.

“This meeting is not new or radical or ratcheting up the pressure on the Chinese government,” the Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, Sophie Richardson said. “In the total atmosphere, it is hard to accept this as Bush’s big human rights gesture before he goes to the Olympics and then gives the Chinese everything they want.”

Though Mr. Bush has made his freedom agenda a high rhetorical priority in his second term, he may be reluctant to tie trade or other diplomacy to human rights in China because he is relying on Beijing on other national security priorities. He has made China a co-negotiator in his effort to persuade and cajole North Korea’s regime to abandon its nuclear weapons. On Iran, China’s vote at the U.N. Security Council is needed to pressure the mullahs to end uranium enrichment. The Chinese also have purchased more and more of America’s debt during the Bush presidency.

One set of candidates for any meetings Mr. Bush would have with dissidents within China would be Teng Biao, Li Heping and Li Baiguang, three human rights lawyers whom President Bush met with in June and who also received awards from the National Endowment for Democracy. On July 1, the three men were picked up on their way to a dinner with two American congressmen in Beijing and placed under house arrest outside the Chinese capital. It took the White House two weeks to mention anything publicly about the fate of the three lawyers.

“If John Kerry were president and took the positions Bush as taken on the Olympics or partnering with China on North Korea policy, there would be an enormous uproar from the conservative community,” Mr. Horowitz said. “Bush has neutered the conservative community, so when he does nothing on these issues, China is more protected than it would be than if any other administration were in office.”


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