chaoying@watnow.uwaterloo.ca (04/30/91)
TIANANMEN FORGOTTEN
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Normalization of relations with China is
the diplomatic flavor of the month
(Kitchener-Waterloo Record)
Sat. April, 27, 1991
By Ben Tiemey
Southam News
HONG KONG -- Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans could perhaps have
chosen a better way to put it.
Speaking with reporters here this week on his way to Beijing to put the
finishing touches on the normalization of relations between his country
and China, he said:"We'll basically jog along in the company of the inter-
national community on this issue ..."
Human rights is scarcely an issue on which one just jogs along.
But if Evans's careless style is out of line with more cautious counter-
parts elsewhere in the world, his sentiments are hardly so. These days,
getting onside with the people who brought the world the Tiananmen Square
massacre, then followed it with months of cruel Orwellian repression,
seems to be the diplomatic flavor of the month.
Largely forgotten, it seems, are the loud protests delivered by western
leaders in June 1989, less than two years ago. Set aside, to a large
extent, are the economic and political sanctions that were so indignantly
imposed. In their place, increasingly, is the belief that further protests
against Chain's inhumanity, past and present, is futile.
The United States is, of course, still a very significant holdout in the
normalization process. The Bush administration is prepared to do no more for
the moment than send an assistant secretary of state to Beijing to complain
about the U.S-Chain trade deficit, China's dabbling in Third World nuclear
aid, and to repeat once again that Chain's human rights record is difficult
to overlook.
Some smaller countries like Canada, meanwhile, have chosen even less
conspicuous paths, sending only minor officials in tentative search for
rapprochement.
But all major international players are now, to a greater or lesser
degree, blazing the normalization trail.
Japan, predictably, is in the forefront. It has sent at least three
cabinet ministers on business-as usual missions to Beijing in the past six
months.
The latest envoy, Foreign Minister Taro Nakayama, was preparing the way
visit could, in turn, lead to a visit by Japanese Emperor Akihito.
Others major players are not far behind. The French, so visible in
accepting high-profile dissident escapees following Tiananmen, have sent
two cabinet ministers as a prelude to an upcoming visit by Foreign Minister
Roland Dumas. Britain has weighed in with Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd,
the minister indulging not only in talks on the future of Hong Kong, but
lingering for a short mountain-climbing holiday.
Along with the diplomatic parade there has been a veritable flood of cash.
The Japanese have resumed the massive lending they stopped in 1989, both
the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank have approved new loans, and
increasing amounts of foreign investment capital is being committed. Last
week alone, six foreign banks - two Japanese, two American and two European
- cheerfully agreed to be part of Shanghai's new Pudong development scheme,
announced since Tiananmen.
China, it seems, is well on the way to regaining all the ground it lost
in 1989, and then some.
Some commentators argue that China has paid a price for its success in
regaining stature in the international community - Chinese leaders no longer
dismiss criticism of their human rights record as gross interference in
China's internal affairs, but are instead willing to listen to complaints.
Diplomats, perhaps to excuse their part in the normalization process, have
also pointed to the "more lenient than usual" sentences handed to Tiananmen
dissidents by Chinese courts as evidence that earlier protests and sanctions
were not in vain after all.
They are referring to prison terms ranging from five to 13 years for
speaking one's mind. That aside, there not a single concession to indicate
that Chinese leaders have in any way yielded to outside presure to secure
restored relations. Basic human rights - from freedom of assembly and speech
to freedom of the press and religion - are still routinely denied, just as
they were before the Tiananmen protest.
Earlier this month, a 23-year-od student activist, Chen Yanbin, was jailed
for forming an organization known as the Democratic Front of China and
publishing a pamphlet entitled Iron Curtain. His sentence was 15 years,
precisely the same as was handed out to Democracy Wall dissidents like Wei
Jingsheng in the late'70s.
So much for lenient sentences.
Sadly, the normalization process is taking place in the face of evidence
that the prodemocracy movement is still alive in Chain and still very much
in need of whatever protection it can get from the international community.
This week, as major western banks lined up to be part of Shanghai's
redevelopment and Australia's foreign minister discussed his policy of
jogging along with the majority, the students of Beijing's universities
risked their freedom to anonymously issue a statement to western journalists
in Beijing calling on western nations not to forget their hopes for
democratic freedoms.
The grammar left a little be desired, but the plaintive message was
perfectly clear. The students wrote:"Things like forgetting human rights and
this undemocratic situation in China in order to flirt with the Chinese
government during the Gulf War, giving the government the opportunity to
sentence those people who devoted themselves to this struggle for democracy,
should never have happen."