The New Democratic Scapegoat

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: July 26, 2007

Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are both serious foreign policy thinkers. So that makes it all the more bizarre that in one important area of foreign policy they both would drag this country backward.

That’s trade, particularly the effort to bash China as a scapegoat for our economic problems.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have signed on as co-sponsors of a bill — the latest resurrection of anti-China legislation — that could target China for punitive duties unless it revalues its currency. The China-U.S. relationship is the most important relationship in the world, and this bill would risk trade battles that would disrupt it for many years to come.

It’s precisely the kind of cowboy diplomacy that would infuriate the commentariat if it were coming from President Bush. Yet the president, while reckless in most areas of foreign policy, has been steadfast on trade and his handling of China.

The China bill that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have co-sponsored would antagonize ordinary Chinese. It would set a precedent for politicizing trade disputes. And it marks a betrayal of President Bill Clinton’s outstanding legacy on economic issues.

For eight years, Mr. Clinton tugged Democrats away from protectionist impulses and toward pro-growth and pro-trade policies that elevated America’s standard of living. Now the Democratic Party as a whole is retreating from that free trade legacy.

Congressional Democrats have been cool or petulant toward a series of free trade agreements in Latin America. This month House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and three other top Democrats bluntly declared that “our legislative priorities do not include the renewal of fast track authority” to negotiate trade agreements. In the trade arena, Congressional Democrats are gratuitously angering our allies in much the way that Dick Cheney has already done in security affairs.

Trade is a particularly useful prism through which to look at politicians, for it offers a litmus test of political courage and economic leadership. That’s because there are no political benefits to a candidate who supports free trade, but considerable benefits to the country.

There are a couple of grim possibilities here. One is that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama really believe in stepping away from the Bill Clinton legacy on trade. The other possibility, perhaps even sadder, is that they are faux China-bashers who stake out myopic positions for political calculations, even if their heart isn’t in those positions.

So maybe Democrats are only seasonal protectionists, enjoying a useful weapon against Republicans in the 2008 campaign. After all, Mr. Clinton himself was a China trade hawk when he ran for president in 1992 but then reversed himself in office — so there’s hope that Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama would likewise show more maturity in the White House.

Yet all this is dispiriting to anyone who yearns for positive leadership from the next president. Once in office, Mr. Clinton and Al Gore bravely used the bully pulpit to educate the American public about the benefits of trade and to challenge those like Ross Perot, who appealed to Know-Nothing nativists. It would be a tragedy for all the world if the next Democratic president followed Mr. Perot rather than Mr. Clinton.

It’s true, of course, that the Chinese yuan is undervalued. That’s bad for China, and it’s one of the imbalances (along with our own addiction to debt) that is disruptive for the global economy. China should sharply stimulate domestic consumption and nudge the yuan upward faster than it has been.

But this legislation vastly exaggerates the impact on the U.S. from the yuan value. China’s manufacturing juggernaut hurts Mexico and other countries that peddle cheap shoes and shirts, but it has much less effect on American workers. Meanwhile, that flood of Chinese imports helps low-income Americans by lowering the cost of essentials like clothing.

Look, there are plenty of valid reasons for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama to stand up to China. One place to start would be China’s disgraceful policy of supplying Sudan with the weapons used to slaughter people in Darfur.

There’ll be a tendency among liberals to excuse Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama for pandering on trade, because they are sensible on so many other issues.

But when we see candidates as smart and sophisticated as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, we should demand more from them than Ross Perot-style populism. And it would be a disaster if eight years of reckless gunboat diplomacy in the political/military realm were followed by reckless cowboy diplomacy in economics and trade.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

Read full post and comments:
"The New Democratic Scapegoat" >>

From Torture to Plaintiff: a Pilgrim’s Progress in China

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: May 31, 2007

WEIHAI, China

Every evening in a little village near this coastal city, peasants gather in a private home and do something that used to be dangerous. They pray.

They are Christians gathering in a little “house church,” reflecting a religious boom across China. But their story also underscores another trend: the way the legal system here offers hope of chipping away at the Communist Party dictatorship.

The tale begins a year ago when the authorities here in Shandong Province raided this house church and carted 31 Christians off to the police station. Such crackdowns are the traditional way the Communist Party has dealt with house churches in rural areas, and some Christians have even been tortured to death.

But this incident ended differently.

Tian Yinghua, a 55-year-old evangelical Protestant who runs the church in her living room, was outraged after she was ordered jailed for 10 days.

“We had done nothing wrong at all,” explained Ms. Tian. “We weren’t criminals.”

So Ms. Tian contacted a prominent Christian and legal scholar in Beijing, Li Baiguang, who traveled to Shandong Province to do something that once would have been unthinkable: Sue the police.

Even more unthinkable, Ms. Tian won. The police settled the case by withdrawing the charges. The police also formally apologized, paid symbolic damages of 1 yuan (a bit more than a dime) and promised not to bother the church again.

It was a historic victory for freedom of religion in China — and, even more important, for the rule of law.

“The police don’t bother us at all,” said another church leader, Wang Qiu. “They just stay away.”

That seems to be a growing pattern. The central government’s policy toward religion is much more relaxed than a few years ago, and in coastal areas the government usually lets people worship freely.

“In most places, it’s no problem today,” said Mr. Li, who himself was imprisoned for more than a month two years ago for his legal activism. “It’s just a problem in backward areas, or if you directly attack the Communist Party.”

Mr. Li, who enjoys a bit of protection because President Bush invited him to the White House last year, says that last year he filed suits like this one in eight provinces. The other he lost, but even in those cases the authorities were shaken enough that they have stopped harassing Christians, he says.

“On the surface we lost,” he said. “But in reality, we won in every case.”

Han Dongfang, a Chinese labor activist now exiled to Hong Kong, says that he has also found that suing the authorities is often an effective way to increase labor protections. Mr. Han was a leader in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, but now he is trying to bring about change from within. “I believe this is the way to develop a civil society, not through a revolution,” he said.

Of course, the legal system is still routinely used to oppress people, rather than to protect them. China imprisons more journalists than any country in the world, and one of them is my Times colleague Zhao Yan. Judges never go against the Communist Party; what they can do is rectify local injustices where the higher party officials are indifferent.

Moreover, even when lawsuits are allowed to go forward, many Chinese police and judges are so corrupt that they sell themselves to the highest bidder.

A common saying, which I even saw in an illegal poster pasted on a government building in Beijing, goes: “The bandits used to hide in the hills. Now the bandits are in the courthouses.”

Still, the rule of law has gained immensely since the 1980’s, when a defense attorney was imprisoned for having the temerity to claim that the police had arrested the wrong man and that his client was innocent. If the Chinese government continues to nurture the rule of law, China could increasingly follow the path of South Korea and Taiwan away from autocracy toward greater democracy.

Easing the repression could also change the religious complexion of China. Estimates of the number of Chinese Christians vary widely, but the number may be approaching 100 million, many of them evangelical Protestants who aggressively recruit new believers. And with the more relaxed policy, the numbers are soaring.

“In 20 to 30 years China will have several hundred million believers,” said Mr. Li, the lawyer who helped the Shandong church. “That will make China the biggest Christian nation in the world, with more Christians than the entire U.S. population.”

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

Read full post and comments:
"From Torture to Plaintiff: a Pilgrim’s Progress in China" >>

Look Up! Is It a Threat? Or a Plea for a Ban?

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 21, 2007
The New York Times

THE nation’s star warriors, frustrated that their plans to arm the heavens went nowhere for two decades despite more than $100 billion in blue-sky research, felt a shiver of hope last week with news that China had conducted its first successful test of an antisatellite weapon.

Having long warned of the Chinese threat, they now said their fears were vindicated and expressed optimism for their own projects, which range from new kinds of defensive satellites to flotillas of space weapons and orbital battle stations able to shatter all kinds of enemy arms.

China, a group of 26 “Star Wars” supporters warned in a recent report, has “begun to erode American space dominance” and will accelerate that slide with “both lasers and missiles capable of destroying satellites.”

H. Baker Spring of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, said in an interview that the cost to the United States of new arms and defensive measures would most likely run to “billions or tens of billions of dollars a year, pretty much year in and year out,” and added, “I don’t think that’s excessive.”

But the prospect of a new arms race in space is also energizing an opposition, including arms control supporters and fiscal conservatives alarmed at the rising costs of the Iraq war. Treaties could short-circuit the costly game of measure-countermeasure on the high frontier before it expands any further, they say. Currently, no international treaty or domestic law forbids such developments.

An unfettered arms race could hurt the United States more than any other nation, arms control advocates argue. The United States owns or operates 443 of the 845 active satellites that now orbit the planet, or 53 percent. By contrast, China owns just 4 percent.

“We not only have the most satellites but they are more integrated into our economy and our way of making war than any other country,” said Laura Grego, a staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group in Cambridge, Mass., that takes liberal positions on arms issues and environmental issues. “We have the most to lose in an unrestrained arms race.”

But that logic has not persuaded the Star Wars advocates, who say the United States needs to protect its huge investment in space satellites by being ahead of anyone else in shooting such devices out of the sky.

Diplomats from around the globe have gathered in Geneva for many years to hammer out a treaty on the “Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space,” which would ban space weapons. Arms control supporters say China and Russia have backed the process, while the United States has dragged its feet.

Last year, John Mohanco, a State Department official, told the diplomats in Geneva that as long as attacks on satellites remained a threat, “our government will continue to consider the possible role that space-related weapons may play in protecting our assets.”

A Heritage Foundation analysis of such diplomacy says China is charging ahead to build space arms while “seeking to block the United States from developing its own anti-satellite weapons and space-based ballistic missile defense systems.”

China’s strategy, the analysis says, is clear: “Work on public opinion in the United States to make moral arguments against weapons in space, develop international coalitions to limit the way that the United States can use space, and develop China’s own weapons systems and tactics to destroy American satellites and space-based weapons.”

But Theresa Hitchens, a critic of the administration’s space arms research who is director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs, said that China’s antisatellite test might be “a shot across the bow” meant to prod the Bush administration into serious negotiations. In the test, a Chinese missile pulverized an aging Chinese weather satellite more than 500 miles above Earth on Jan. 11.

Ms. Hitchens warned that an arms race in space could easily spin out of control, noting that India has been “rattling its sword” and some experts in that country are openly calling for antisatellite arms. A global competition that produced armadas of space weapons, she added, could raise the risk of accidental nuclear war if, for instance, a whirling piece of space junk knocked out a spy satellite.

“How do you know it’s not a precursor to a nuclear attack?” she asked. “Do you have an itchy trigger finger? If you’ve got a lot of satellites out there, you probably do.”

The Bush administration has conducted secret research that critics say could produce a powerful ground-based laser meant to shatter enemy satellites. The project, parts of which were made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress last year, appears to be part of a wide-ranging administration effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive.

John E. Pike, who is the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a group in Washington that conducts research on military and space topics, said that treaties and defensive measures were the smart, cheap way to counter antisatellite threats, and that the star warriors in the wake of the Chinese tests were playing a false card.

“They’re trying to piggyback on a totally unrelated topic,” he said. “This says nothing about space-based weapons, star wars or any of that.”

But a report, “Missile Defense, the Space Relationship and the 21st Century,” researched by a group of organizations that focus on national security issues and published late last year by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, called the military development of the high frontier vital to the nation’s protection from a wide variety of threats — including Chinese arms.

“Without the means to dissuade, deter and defeat the growing number of strategic adversaries now arrayed against it,” the group warned, “the United States will be unable to maintain its status of global leadership.”

Read full post and comments:
"Look Up! Is It a Threat? Or a Plea for a Ban?" >>