Words can topple regimes or shatter lives. That is more so about words uttered at important occasions by public figures with clout. What President John F. Kennedy told the crowds at the Berlin Wall “Tonight, we’re all Berliners!” and what Martin Luther King declared on the National Mall “We have a dream, one day…” have made imprints in change of course in history.
What Hilary Clinton told journalists on Feb. 20, on her way to China for a first visit as the top US diplomat, cannot be cast away into thin air as merely words. She said that human rights “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crises.” For all sides, these words have weight because they indicate the Obama Administration’s yet-to-be articulated China police.
Ms. Clinton’s words were ostentatiously quoted in an official Chinese Xinhua News Agency editorial on Feb. 23. Xinhua couldn’t help comparing Ms. Clinton’s tip-toeing around human rights to her well-known strong words about human rights and women’s rights when she attended the World Forum on Women in Beijing in 1995 as the first lady of the US, and her call last year, as a senator from NY, for President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics to protest human rights abuses and repression in Tibet. Headlines across other official newspapers had the air of triumphantly celebration of the retreat of US pressure on human rights during Clinton’s two-day visit. Huanqiu (World), a hardliner newspaper run by the Ministry of State Security, had a long front page story titled “Clinton Visiting China Avoided Human Rights!”
Chinese human rights activists and dissident intellectuals, many of whom were put under house arrest or surveillance in and around Feb. 20-22, were indignant upon learning Ms. Clinton’s deliberate choices of words.
“I didn’t plan to meet her and now I have less interest in bothering her now since she has placed human rights at the bottom of her agenda!” said Weise, a Tibetan poet/writer who lives in Beijing.
“I told the police who followed me that I was going to my church, an officially banned house church, and Clinton was going to an officially hand-picked church – we had nothing to do with each other! Why you are wasting your time monitoring me? I bet she dared not to mention persecution of house-church Christians to avoid ‘interference’ with her talk here about N. Korea and trade problems!” said another Beijing dissident writer.
“I went over the list of women whom Clinton met. Except for Gao Yaojie, a veteran AIDS doctor, the others are all from pro-government or government-organized ‘non-governmental organizations’”, another Beijing intellectual told me. During the one-hour meeting with these women, Clinton said nothing about women’s rights or human rights, according to Ms. Gao, the AIDS doctor.
Glaringly missing from the women’s gathering were the Tiananmen Mothers who have been seeking justice for their loved ones killed twenty years ago by government troops who crushed pro-democracy protester in Beijing; also uninvited was Zeng Jinyan, an AIDS activist and the wife of Hu Jia, also an AIDS activist who is serving a three-and-half year sentence for “inciting sedition against state power;” and yet another woman who should have been invited is Liu Xia, an artist, who has been asking the police in vain for the whereabouts of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a dissident writer, who was detained on suspicion of drafting a widely popular manifesto of political reform known as “Charter 08.”
Ms. Clinton’s political postures on her China trip are painful to watch. They shamed us Americans. They signal a callousness to those Chinese who have suffered from their struggle for justice, freedom, and democracy – the values that define what America is about. Ms. Clinton’s usual compassion for injustice and for those who suffer is lost in crude calculations of political gains from the Chinese leaders.
What should concern us most may not be Ms. Clinton’s words of choice but the fact that it may have given substance to the unrevealed China policy of the Obama Administration. To be true to his inaugural speech, Mr. Obama should shun from thorny issues – human rights, Tibet, etc. – in dealing with the Chinese leaders, who by nobody’s stretch of imagination belong to the ranks of “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent”, those who are “on the wrong side of history”.
Feb. 26, 2009
