Last week, Frank Wolf, Republican congressman from Virginia, publicly stated his belief that President Bush should not attend the 2008 Summer Olympics, hypothetically comparing his attendance with that of FDR sitting in the stands in 1936 with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. Essentially, Wolf wants Congress to prevent any U.S. diplomat or government official from using federal money to fund their trips to Beijing this summer.
I’d like to take a brief moment to applaud you, Frank Wolf. The sentiment in our country today in regard to China is one of acute fear and distrust. It takes chutzpah to come out and challenge the “evil empire” in the public realm. We read stories in the news and entire books written about how China is on the rise and the United States is on the decline. Our government seems unwilling to take any firm positions on China’s blatant violation of countless human rights and trade laws. This is probably because our debt to Beijing is staggering — hundreds of billions dollars worth of U.S. bonds just sitting in Chinese reserve banks that their government could unload at any moment and theoretically crash the U.S. economy (Note to reader: they won’t).
Obviously, this massive trade imbalance is cause for concern. It’s never good to owe anyone that much money, but where do we draw the line between protecting our domestic economy and capitulating to a regime that prints copies of various international treaties on human rights and political freedoms and uses them as toilet paper?
Wolf wants to make sure that the U.S. government doesn’t fund any trips to Beijing for the Olympics this summer. This would seem to be just significant enough a demonstration to quiet liberals in the media — liberals like Steven Spielberg, who quit his creative role with Beijing 2008 over concerns about China’s human rights policies. Somehow, though, I think it is cover for his anger over all the money he’s lost to Chinese bootleggers. At the same time, such a small demonstration, especially in light of President Bush’s expected attendance in August, would not cause any diplomatic troubles with the Chinese government and more important, would keep free traders with economic concerns sleeping soundly at night.
It’s important that our government does something to show the world that we are not asleep at the wheel of the freedom-protecting image we’ve created for ourselves in recent years. China is guilty of a number of egregious human rights violations, from suppression of political freedoms in Taiwan and Tibet to persecution of women’s and religious rights. They are among the biggest supporters of the regime in Khartoum, Sudan that is perpetrating a mass genocide in Darfur. Free press in China means nothing more than complimentary newspapers.
Our government must act firmly but responsibly. We must protect the American consumer and the nearly $400 billion in business we did with China in 2007. Sending the president alone without an entourage of diplomats sends just the right message. The United States respects China’s place on the world stage by sending our leader just as the rest of the world will do the same. However, the special treatment the Chinese government gets from our own in turning a blind eye to their actions will not continue without real movement toward a change in these policies. Such a display would be completely justified. After all, it’s our money that’s helping to pay for this Olympics to begin with.