DEL.ICIO.USPublished on: 04/09/08
Not so long ago, when Sonny Perdue was still in the Georgia Senate, he considered himself a staunch anti-Communist. In 1997, for example, he supported a Senate resolution recommending that Taiwan be admitted to the United Nations.
That sort of manuever is common among those seeking to poke a stick in the eye of the Chinese government, which considers Taiwan a renegade territory that rightly belongs to their mainland. Few geo-political moves trouble the Chinese government more than attempts to recognize Taiwan's sovereignty.
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So it's a little surprising to see Perdue, now Georgia's governor, cozying up to China, one of the world's last Communist governments. He wants them to bring their money to Georgia so much that the teetotaling governor sips their liquor and refuses to utter one word of criticism about China's wretched abuses of human rights.
"I don't think that on the first visit that we have earned the right to lecture China about their human rights issues or about Tibet," Perdue told Cox Asia correspondent Craig Simons. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is owned by Cox Enterprises.)
What a difference a decade makes. In 1997, the U.S. economy was strong, with a healthy federal budget. While globalization was already making inroads — elevating China's prospects and creating headaches for U.S. manufacturers — this country still enjoyed broad economic hegemony.
Things have changed. American manufacturing has been decimated and the United States is in hock to foreign creditors, including the Chinese. With a fifth of the world's population, they are a huge potential market for our goods. Plus, they've got money to invest, so our politicians go there begging.
Never mind the ruthless tactics that China recently used to suppress protests organized by Tibetan monks who want independence. Let others disrupt the procession of the Olympic torch, bound for Beijing, where the Opening Ceremonies of the Summer Olympics will be held in August. Let others remember the Chinese military's brutal 1989 crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square, which left several hundred Chinese civilians dead.
I remember Tiananmen Square because of a formidable and courageous but modest man I had the pleasure of getting to know — Liu Binyan, a classmate during my Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1988-89. Liu was among China's most distinguished journalist dissenters; from the 1950s to the 1970s, he was repeatedly detained in Communist "re-education" camps because he refused to stop reporting on corrupt government officials. His family was forced to denounce him.
After he was kicked out of the Communist Party in the 1980s, he managed to come to the United States and received the Harvard fellowship. Ever the outspoken journalist, he publicly criticized the Chinese government after the Tiananmen massacre.
The government retaliated by making Liu persona non grata, and he was never again to see his beloved homeland. He died of cancer in December 2005 in New Jersey, after Chinese leaders declined requests to allow him to return home.
None of that seems to matter to Perdue or the officials of Delta Air Lines or to any of the 20-odd states that have opened trade centers in China, hoping to lure jobs and investment.
"We can have opinions about those countries, but that's separate. We have a federal government to deal with those issues. We went over there representing Georgia business," said Perdue's spokesman Bert Brantley.
There is certainly a place for realpolitik, for recognizing that pragmatism dictates certain mutually beneficial arrangements even with our enemies. Nevertheless, it's more than a bit disheartening to see American business and political leaders so eagerly embracing a brutal Chinese regime.
• Cynthia Tucker is the editorial page editor. Her column appears Sundays and Wednesdays.
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