Thug governments aren’t intimidated by mighty democracies with soft bellies.
Chinese President Hu Jintao underscored that point when he met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top U.S. officials in Beijing last week to discuss relations between the world’s two largest economies. His Excellency informed Hill and company to butt out of his country’s domestic affairs, even as a hurricane of human rights abuses swirled overhead, its grim eye focused on a desperate, handicapped dissident who had fled to the U.S. embassy days earlier and wanted to leave with Hill on her plane.
“Given the different national conditions, it is impossible for China and the U.S. to see eye-to-eye on every issue,” Hu told Hill, who tossed in her diplomatic two cents.
“We believe all governments have to answer to our citizens’ aspirations for dignity and the rule of law, and that no nation can or should deny those rights,” she waxed as if oblivious to the drama unfolding over Chen Guangcheng, the blind, self-taught lawyer who was jailed for seven years, and then placed under house arrest for his investigations of state-enforced abortions and sterilizations — the muscle behind China’s reprehensible one-child policy.
Chen’s predecessors know the road to freedom is paved with potholes.
“The Chinese government knew the Americans were soft from the very beginning,” stated Chinese activist Wei Jingsheng, who spent more than 17 years in Chinese prisons. “They’re more concerned about economic interests than about human rights.”
China may be the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, owned more than $1.2 trillion in bills, notes and bonds, but its economic boons are overshadowed by its ongoing crimes against humanity.
Weeks before the bilateral talks, Ni Yulan, a wheelchair-bound critic of state-enforced evictions and other housing violations, was slapped with a two-year and eight-month jail sentence for “picking quarrels and making trouble.”
Defector Ji Yeqing told a congressional panel last fall that in 2003 Chinese authorities dragged her out of her home in Shanghai, rushed her to a clinic, and held her down on a bed while she underwent a forced abortion for the crime of being pregnant with her second child: “I felt empty, as if something was scooped out of me,” said the woman, who was eventually divorced by her husband for failing to produce a son.
Back in March, 2010, the English-language newspaper China Daily reported that trash bags containing 21 decomposing babies, with their hospital tags intact, were fished out from under a bridge in the Shandong province — the handiwork of state-run hospitals, it stated.
The barbarism is business as usual for China, the planet’s leading executioner currently detaining an estimated half a million people without charge or trial, and preventing millions more from seeking justice for their grievances, while repressing minority and religious groups, according to Amnesty International. Its gross disregard for human rights continues with its recent decision to legalize “disappearances” of people deemed “subversive” by the state.
Others are targeted to simply rot away, as recorded in the shocking 1996 documentary, “The Dying Rooms,” which exposed how unloved Chinese children were deliberately starved and left to die in “dark rooms” in state-run orphanages.
China continues remorselessly to cash in on the blood, sweat, and tears of its tormented people, begging the question: “Is this the kind of nation the Free World should do business with?”
Read Shavana Abruzzo column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail her at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.
