Taking Out A Dragon's Fire

Fire of Liberty
Max Boot wrote a great article in the October 10, 2005 issue of the Weekly Standard that notes how the US and its Asian allies have an ever increasing concern about the rise in China's economic, strategic, and military strength in the region. While a lot of the "China hands" in the various think tanks, National Security Council as well as the State Department have been promoting China and continue to urge patience or advocate a policy in which economics and diplomatic niceties play a bigger role than calling China to the mat about its aggressive military buildup, daily threats to Taiwan, and its lack of freedom. Thankfully, Max Boot has laid out a pretty good policy that the Bush administration and its allies have got to do in order to ensure that the Chinese Dragon is one that is still a dragon but just want be breathing a deadly fire. While Boot provides a myriad of suggestions and retooling of our current "China Policy," I'd say that the following is one of the most important things we should do:

BEYOND CONTAINMENT, deterrence, and economic integration lies a strategy that the British never employed against either Germany or Japan--internal subversion. Sorry, the polite euphemisms are "democracy promotion" and "human rights protection," but these amount to the same thing: The freer China becomes, the less power the Communist oligarchy will enjoy.

The United States should aim to "Taiwanize" the mainland--to spread democracy through such steps as increased radio broadcasts and Internet postings. At the moment, Beijing does an effective job of censoring free speech with the unfortunate connivance of giant American companies, which in various ways agree not to expose Chinese consumers to such "subversive" concepts as democracy and human rights. American companies even help the security services nab people who dissent from the party line. Yahoo!, for instance, recently assisted the Chinese authorities in tracking down a journalist who dared to email information about censorship to a New York-based website. He got 10 years in prison. The U.S. Commerce Department and, if necessary, Congress should pass rules that forbid U.S. firms from facilitating human rights abuses in China.

American technology should be used to crack open, not cement, the authority of the Communist party. The United States needs to step up spending for the Chinese service of the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other organizations that aim to penetrate the Bamboo Curtain. China does an effective job at the moment of jamming U.S. transmissions, so we need to develop technology to get around their censors. In 2004 Congress allocated $1 million for a trial grant to the Broadcasting Board of Governors for a project to circumvent Beijing's Internet controls. That work needs to be greatly expanded. As suggested by the congressionally chartered U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, we need to create an Office of Global Internet Freedom within the executive branch that would work on undermining government controls on the web not only in China but also in dictatorships from Cuba to Syria.

In general, the U.S. government should elevate the issue of human rights in our dealings with China. The State Department wrote in its most recent human rights report that the Chinese government's "human rights record remained poor, and the Government continued to commit numerous and serious abuses." The U.S. government should do much more to publicize and denounce such abuses. We need to champion Chinese dissidents, intellectuals, and political prisoners, and help make them as famous as Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, and Lech Walesa. There is no point in continuing to mute our criticisms in the vain hope that, in return, China will do something tangible to help stop the North Korean nuclear program; notwithstanding the much-ballyhooed six-party deal announced in early September in Beijing, there is still no sign of Beijing's cracking down on Pyongyang.

As I've said before, G-d's given rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is a very powerful and event changing stick to wack up against a regime like the ChiComs in Beijing. Its worked everywhere else and more likely than not would be accepted by the people of China. Lets just hope we've got good thinkers like Boot somewhere at the "China desk" over at State or the NSC like we've got over at Defense.