June 27, 2001

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: China

The White House's top official on Asian affairs told a Washington conference last week that the president's visit to China "shouldn't be tied" to the release of the American citizens and residents now being held in jail there (Charles Snyder, "Bush Visit 'Not Tied to Scholars,'" Hong Kong iMail, June 23). Torkel Patterson, a special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, was reported as saying that the U.S. should be prodding China to improve its judicial system and its treatment of prisoners more generally. We should "not get into the old habits" of focusing on the release of certain individuals, at the expense of "genuine reform."

If this is an accurate account of Patterson's view, and of the White House's, the administration will have -- in conjunction with the president's previous decision to grant China normal trade status (NTR) -- taken off the table the two most important bargaining chips it has in getting Americans out of China's jails.

Patterson's comments reflect a flawed conception of what the U.S. Government's obligations are to its citizens. It is an elemental duty of the U.S. Government to protect to the extent possible the liberties and safety of its citizens both here and abroad -- a duty which flows naturally from the rights set out by the Declaration of Independence and which our government was established to protect. From the nation's earliest days, we have not tolerated the arbitrary seizure of our citizens abroad; to do otherwise would be to increase the danger that our adversaries would conclude there is no cost to seizing Americans and holding them hostage.

Moreover, the logic of associating judicial reform and release of the U.S. citizens and residents implies that there is a legal process underway in China that, while flawed, should still bind our actions. Given the character of the Chinese judicial system, this is absurd. Indeed, Patterson appears to argue that the individual liberty of our citizens should take a back seat to some larger, indeterminate process of internal Chinese reforms. One wonders if he would be making the same argument if his wife, daughter or son were sitting in a Chinese prison.

The dictators in Beijing will not respond to weak or conciliatory measures. They will only behave constructively when they think we take our citizens' liberties seriously. For the White House to say now that the president will be going to China regardless of whether Americans are still incarcerated there is the wrong signal to be sending.

Torkel Patterson, however, is right about one thing: no one likes it when U.S.-China policy is reduced to seeking a handful of released prisoners or other discrete concessions. By all means, our China policy should have a broader and more strategic focus. In the short-term, that means containing China's regional ambitions and, over the longer-term, doing everything in our power to push for China's democratization. But pretending that the current regime is interested in "genuine reform" because, in Mr. Patterson's words, it wants "to be seen in the world as a just society" is naive and dangerous.