It was 22 years ago, in the spring of 1989, that thousands of
Chinese students gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demand
democracy. The students even fashioned their own 30-foot high
replica of America’s Statue of Liberty. It represented the
aspirations for democracy of young Chinese. They yearned to join
young people in Poland, East Germany, and the then-united nation of
Czechoslovakia. It was a time when it seemed the winds of hope and
change might sweep away tyranny from the whole world.
It was not to be. While Gorbachev in the Kremlin refused
to send in the tanks, refused to shoot down demonstrating students
in Eastern Europe, Chinese Communist cadre Hu Jintao joined those
in the Communist leadership in Beijing who had no such qualms. Hu
would counsel deadly force rather than relax the iron grip of the
Communist Party in China.
The world watched, astounded, as a single young Chinese
man, wearing a white shirt and holding an innocent briefcase, stood
down an entire column of tanks in Beijing. As the lead tank
maneuvered to get around the man whose name we now know was Wang
Wei-lin, the young man shifted ground and stood squarely in the
tank’s path.
It was a dramatic moment. The world watched, awed, at the
courage and the idealism of young China on vivid display. But the
clash ended quietly and out of sight of Western TV cameras. China
democracy advocates who later took refuge in the West testified
that Wang Wei-lin was taken into a nearby hotel where, out of view,
he was quietly strangled to death.
That driver of the lead tank, a young officer in the
People’s Liberation Army, was also killed by state security forces,
China democracy refugees tell us. After all, if he had followed his
orders, he would have swiftly run over the brave young man in the
white shirt. There would have been no dramatic standoff. Thousands
of Chinese students would likewise be overrun by the regime’s tanks
and shot down as they fled Tiananmen Square.
Their bodies were burned. China’s rulers soon washed down
the bricks of their capital’s ceremonial center.
Today, Hu Jintao is president of the People’s Republic of
China. He was not voted in by the Chinese people, but chosen by the
aging politburo of the Communist Party, one of the more durable
totalitarian regimes on earth.
Washington is welcoming Hu Jintao. We have to roll out a
red carpet for the man and the regime that hold a trillion
dollars in U.S. debt. The blood-red flag of the People’s Republic
of China flies on lampposts along Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue
.
Both President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have
publicly muted their criticisms of China’s appalling record on
human rights and on religious freedom. It’s ironic that President
Obama issued his
Religious Freedom Proclamation even as workers were raising
China’s flag along the broad avenues of the capital.
As a result of Obama and Clinton policies, U.S. taxpayers
must once again give millions to the UN Population Fund (UNFP).
This UN group aids and abets China’s government as it brutally
enforces its one-child policy. Hundreds of millions of Chinese
women have been forced to have abortions. China’s unborn children
who are tested and found to be female are at special risk. Nor is
this heinous policy limited to the unborn. Female infanticide is
routine in rural China, as the Population Research Institute’s
courageous Steven Mosher has documented.
The Obama administration’s position is surely strange for
one that professes to be pro-choice and pro-woman. But that is no
stranger than seeing the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize,
Barack Obama, wine and dine the jailer of Liu Xiaobo, who
is the 2010 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize!
The Nobel Peace Prize committee says that human rights are
the soundest basis for peace. As a former U.S. ambassador to U.N.
Human Rights, I believe they are surely right about that. The fact
that China’s Communist rulers continue to give the back of their
hand to international concerns about human rights, and come with an
iron hand against all domestic opposition, is a matter for concern
for the entire world.
President Obama conceded in his acceptance speech for the
Nobel Prize that he had far to go to merit the same prize that Dr.
Martin Luther King’s work had fully earned. It is most unfortunate
to see Mr. Obama treading the wrong path to peace.
