President Hu today will address Yale students on U.S.-Chinese relations. Across the campus, Yale University’s Law School will hold a symposium, named in my honor, dealing with mass atrocity. This year’s topic is “The Demands of Memory: The purposes, forms and moral obligations of remembering atrocities.” The conference will cover Nazi Germany, apartheid, and other Western hemisphere atrocities. One might say these two events are completely unrelated – and that’s exactly the problem.

At 83 years old and with a long and continuing interest in human rights, I find myself at a loss to explain why, as China emerges as a global power, its leaders are not held to account for its bloody past, which in many ways continues today. Western hemisphere atrocities are well documented, as they should be, through books, articles, and memorials, to ensure these acts will never occur again.

But what about China? In their recent biography of Mao, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday put the figure of Chinese people killed by Mao at 70 million – 30 to 40 million people died by starvation alone. During the past half-century, the people of China have endured the Land Reform movement, the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Movement, and more recently the 1989 deaths when unarmed thousands of students and civilians were killed in Tiananmen and in the streets of Beijing. All are matters of public record, but the Chinese government has never made an effort to address or redress these horrific crimes it committed against its own people.

Instead, a huge portrait of Mao still hangs over Tiananmen Square – and a man who tried to deface it was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Further, China’s leaders continue to relentlessly persecute religious practitioners, political activists, outspoken journalists, and Internet essayists on the basis of “crimes” that simply do not exist in the free world.

Rather than treating China as a pariah state, the international community has bestowed on China the honor of the 2008 Olympics (an honor similarly awarded to Nazi Germany in 1936). Will American Olympic athletes march into Tiananmen Square under the gaze of perhaps the century’s greatest mass murderer? Perhaps as important from Beijing’s point of view, America’s corporate titans, led by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, are lining up for the chance to impress their good will on Hu and his entourage, mindful of the potential for vast profits offered by China. But where is the sustained outrage against Yahoo! for supplying the private user account information that helped the Chinese authorities convict and imprison journalists Li Zhi, Shi Tao, and Jiang Lijun? A Congressional hearing in February, during which legal representatives defended the craven capitulation of America’s top information companies to unreasonable censorship demands in exchange for being allowed to operate in China, raised some fleeting interest, but is already yesterday’s news. What might have been if Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Cisco had resisted together? Not having done this, what is their responsibility besides rolling out the red carpet for Hu Jintao?

As I write, Hu Jintao is in Seattle, and the American press barely mentions China’s abysmal recent rights record. The State Department in its human rights report this year said freedom of speech, rule of law, and religious freedom have deteriorated in China. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, said torture is pervasive and his monitoring trip was impeded. The prisoners he talked to were frightened. More than 500 lawyers taking sensitive cases have been detained or had their licenses suspended. Behind these reports are thousands of Chinese people sentenced for long terms, tortured in psychiatric asylums, and brutalized for challenging the state.

China’s state-controlled news will showcase its president holding forth at Yale, a propaganda coup. Yale has a long record of scholarly exchange with China, which should give Hu’s Yale hosts standing to tell him firmly and frankly that human rights are a priority for the university and the American people – a message that should not only be conveyed in private.

There is, in fact, a connection between the two events occurring at opposite ends of the Yale campus this week: the lesson from history and from China that economic and military might too often blind those who should be the most stalwart guardians of basic rights and freedoms.

I hope one result of President Hu’s trip is that Chinese leaders hear that recognizing and accounting for past crimes is vital to a prosperous future as part of the world community. Yale leaders, like American business leaders, must take possession of what might seem to be opportunities for China’s rulers – and turn them instead into opportunities on behalf of the Chinese people to begin this long overdue process.

Mr. Bernstein, former chief executive officer of Random House, is the chair of Human Rights in China, an independent Chinese human rights organization with offices in New York and in Hong Kong. The Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship Symposium takes place at Yale Law School on Friday, April 21.