From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
Red China vs. Free China
Hu's on first--or is it WHO?
NEW YORK--This world capital got a visit Monday from the mystery man expected soon to become the next ruler of China, Vice President Hu Jintao--whose brief stop here gave China watchers more to ponder than perhaps he had planned. Not that Mr. Hu did anything wild. He made the staple visiting-dignitary rounds: He rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, surveyed ground zero, met with Mayor Mike Bloomberg and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and then decamped to Washington for the serious powwows, including a meeting with President Bush.
But New York these days has a new newspaper, the New York Sun, which amid Mr. Hu's peregrinations here homed in on the real story. Maybe it helped that the Sun's president and editor, former Wall Street Journal staffer Seth Lipsky, has brought to his new job his eccentric old habit of straight speaking.
With refreshing clarity, the Sun in a page-one headline described Mr. Hu not simply as a leader of China, but of "Red China." Under a photo of Mr. Bloomberg meeting with Mr. Hu, the Sun ran a caption starting with the neatly precise phrase, "Greeting a dictator." There are China experts who would surely object that such wording is unsubtle, old-fashioned, maybe even likely to rile the ever-sensitive despots of Red China. Indeed, yesterday's Sun carried a letter to the editor from one Alexander Goldstein of Brooklyn, who chided that the term Red China "conveys a nostalgic, backward-looking stance that seems petulant and childish."
But the Sun's vocabulary does have the virtue of being accurate. One can quibble that even China's communist bosses find communism a tediously outdated ideology these days. Nonetheless, they choose to depend not on elections but on a Marxist-Leninist creed, with all its nasty security apparatus, as the source of their brutal mandate. Recognizing this truth, amid all the nuanced debate over who's Hu, can be a mighty help in understanding what's what in China. That, in turn, can be a big help in coming up with wise U.S.-China policy.
The Sun went on to deplore Mr. Bloomberg's break with the tyrant-averse "foreign policy" of former mayor Rudy Giuliani. The Sun noted that Mr. Giuliani eschewed despots of all stripes, at one point ejecting Yasser Arafat from a concert and after Sept. 11 rejecting a $10 million charity check from a Saudi prince who blamed the terrorist attacks on American support for Israel. In keeping with his principles, noted the Sun, Mr. Giuliani avoided get-togethers with big shots from Red China, steering clear of visits to New York by President Jiang Zemin in 1997 and Premier Zhu Rongji in 1998. Instead, he made a point of meeting when possible with elected Chinese leaders from democratic Taiwan, to which the Sun referred, accurately, as "Free China."
From there, the Sun's account got even more interesting. The news arising from Mr. Hu's visit was actually a gaffe made by Mr. Bloomberg, who at a press conference after meeting dictator Mr. Hu made the slip of referring to China and Taiwan as two separate nations--noting that he would "certainly meet visitors from either country." This, of course, differs from longstanding official U.S. policy that there is one China, and Taiwan is part of it. But, as the Sun pointed out, it was a mistake that friends of Taiwan read as well attuned to reality. Whatever the diplomats say, we are in effect dealing these days with two very different Chinas, one a politically backward dictatorship, the other a modern democracy.
Indeed, Mr. Bloomberg was echoing a similar slip made last month by Mr. Bush, in welcoming the entry into the World Trade Organization of "both countries, both the Republic of Taiwan and, of course, China." And though the White House quickly tried to soothe Beijing by explaining away Mr. Bush's phrase as an "oral mistake," we all knew what he was talking about.
But Taiwan's leaders actually represent voters, while Beijing's tyrants represent nothing but their own chokehold on power. No one knows, for example, precisely what inner party machinations have gone into the apparent designation of Mr. Hu as China's next supreme tyrant--he certainly hasn't been stumping his country giving campaign speeches, and it's routine party policy that any potential democratic competitors brave enough to speak up will land either in exile or in prison. By contrast, we have good reason to expect that Taiwan will, on schedule, hold a lively presidential election in 2004.
To an embarrassing extent, the free world plays it Beijing's way, with the result that Taiwan has official representation in only 28 countries, most of them specks on the map, such as Grenada or Tuvalu. Its de facto embassies in major capitals such as Washington go under such obscure names as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office. And while Mr. Giuliani may have stuck to his democratic guns in the 1990s, President Clinton fell all over himself trying to please and placate Beijing, a policy that included delaying for years Taiwan's membership in what is now the World Trade Organization, until China was deemed ready, sort of, to join--lest China be oh so offended that Taiwan got there first. Such games do no one any favors. Far from appeasing Beijing, they feed its delusions of grandeur and global respect, while watering down our own principles of valuing freedom and enlightened government.
The observer status Taiwan seeks has already been accorded to such outfits as the Palestinian Authority and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Taiwan, trying further not to rouse the bullies in Beijing, is hoping to join under what I'd call the overly modest, not to mention ludicrous label of "Public Health Entity"--leaving the Beijing regime, with its full WHO membership, lots of room to carry on with its fantasies that it genuinely represents the people of China. This year, the U.S. and the European Union have passed, respectively, a bill and a resolution supporting WHO observer status for Taiwan.
But, China, with the eager help of Fidel Castro, has stymied such moves before. Having blocked Taiwan's entry to the WHO for many years, China is again lobbying to keep Taiwan's 23 million people cut off even from access to this organization dedicated simply to the goal of global health. China's ambassador to the U.N., Wang Yingfan, has been sending out letters warning countries supportive of Taiwan's application that "this attempt is doomed to failure," adding, "I sincerely hope that, bearing in mind the fundamental and long-term interest of our bilateral relations, your country will not support any draft resolution inviting Taiwan to participate."
The U.S., to be sure, has come far on China-Taiwan policy since such low points as President Clinton's 1998 visit to Shanghai, where, to Beijing's glee, he parroted quite unnecessarily Beijing's full line of claims on Taiwan. On Mr. Bush's watch, the U.S. allowed a "transit" visit to the U.S. last year by Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian, approved an arms deal last year with Taiwan and OK'd a recent visit by Taiwan's defense minister to a conference in the U.S. Underscoring all this, Mr. Bush undid some of the Clinton damage by articulating last year that the U.S. would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan.
Part of defending Taiwan entails not shunning or ignoring its leaders at Beijing's behest, but sending Beijing the firm message that while we respect Red China's sovereignty, we also respect democratic government. The reality today is that we have two very different Chinese regimes--one red, one free, or, as the Washington Post's veteran China correspondent John Pomfret described it this week, "arguably Asia's most vibrant democracy." Learning more about who's Hu is fine, but the real charting of China policy depends more right now on ensuring that Taiwan gets its well-deserved observer status in the WHO.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."
