Human Rights China

Two weeks before embarking on the first presidential visit to China since the Beijing regime's 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, President Clinton on Thursday defended his planned stop at that site of tragedy.

President Clinton's taboo-breaking dialogue with Chinese President Jiang Zemin and his later uncensored discussion with Beijing University students--both sessions broadcast live nationwide--have sparked another debate here: Is this the beginning of more openness in China? "It is a turning point for our country," said Huang Renwei, a professor of American Studies at Shanghai's Academy of Social Sciences.

Few American presidents have worked the sound bite or the photo op to better advantage on overseas trips than Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Reagan stumbled badly only once: when he laid a wreath at a West German war cemetery in Bitburg where members of Hitler's notorious SS units are buried. Clinton's equivalent could come Saturday.

The City Council has agreed to allow a district of Beijing to become Pasadena's sister city in China despite the objections of opponents who say it will send the wrong message about China's human rights record. The council approved the sister city relationship with Xicheng, the west district of Beijing, on a 4-3 vote, rejecting a move by Councilman Paul Little to also make the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, a sister city. Tibet, a once autonomous nation, is occupied by China.

Only a day after President Clinton's news conference with his Chinese counterpart seemed to point to a new era of openness here, security officials Sunday came to the home of a former senior Communist Party official jailed during the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and sternly warned him to keep his mouth shut.

In the eight months since President Clinton's foreign policy team elevated religious freedom and human rights in Tibet to a priority issue in Washington's prickly relationship with China, visible progress has been virtually zero.

Even as they reached agreement on a variety of issues, President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin engaged Saturday in an unprecedented public debate on human rights, aired live to hundreds of millions of Chinese on national television, that revitalized what had begun as a problem-plagued summit. "I think this has been quite an extraordinary day in the evolution of U.S.-China relations," declared Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, Clinton's national security advisor.

Nine years after the Chinese government crushed pro-democracy protests around Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the country's leaders would like people to forget what happened there on June 4, 1989. But there is one moment people still can't forget: the heart-stopping seconds when a lone man stood in the path of a column of tanks and forced them to stop. He was the face of moral strength against martial power; for an instant, his side prevailed.

President Clinton said in an interview Friday that he now supports granting most-favored-nation trade status to China on a permanent basis, abolishing the decades-old requirement that Beijing's trade benefits be submitted to Congress for approval each year. "I think it would be a good thing if we didn't have to have this debate [in Congress over China's trade benefits] every year," the president said as he prepared for his first visit to China next week.

To prepare for President Clinton and his huge entourage's arrival here on their first stop in China, local police closed several big sidewalk markets where unemployed workers sold household supplies and food to earn money. Bicycle rickshaw drivers, evocative of China's impoverished past, also were banned from areas the president will visit.