Chinese President Hu Jintao came to Washington last week. An occasion of much pomp and circumstance, the visit was full of closed-door meetings with important American leaders and culminated in a White House state dinner.
Some important American goals at the event included simply avoiding embarrassing mix-ups and putting on a good show for the world. The bar was set fairly low after Hu’s last visit, when former President George W. Bush was in the White House.
But no matter how hard President Obama worked to keep things moving smoothly, there was a large group of people determined to ruin his plans. Congress, as usual, would not be managed.
Every big name from the Capitol had something to say about China, and almost none of it was very nice.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, declined their invitations to the White House state dinner. Reid also called the Chinese president “a dictator.”
Of course, Reid seemed perfectly civil when compared to members of the House’s Committee on Foreign Affairs.
A member of that committee, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., went on a Washington radio show to call Chinese government officials “Nazis.” He then defended those statements while calling Hu a “gangster” on CNN.
The committee’s chairwoman, Rep. Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, R-Flo., hit Hu with a slew of human-rights charges and expressed outrage when he denied that China has a forced-abortion policy.
But Ross-Lehtinen wasn’t looking for a policy debate – those rarely occur at such formal events. She, like her congressional colleagues, was looking for a sound bite. Our leaders weren’t speaking to Hu — they were speaking to us.
They could have used this opportunity more constructively. As Hu put it, “a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights.” And name-calling won’t accomplish anything.
The truth is, China has been making important progress for some time now.
Internet users, approximately 450 million in number, have blown a massive hole in the Chinese government’s attempts at “thought-control.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a frequent critic of Chinese media censorship, has done some interesting web experiments in Beijing.
Setting up blogs critical of the Chinese government, he discovered that it’s getting easier to express controversial thoughts online.
The government will still shut you down, but not until you become very popular.
That’s what happened to Liu Xiaobo, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in prison for dissident web postings. Liu signed the pro-democracy petition Charter 08 with some 10,000 other Chinese citizens. So far, he’s the only one the government has bothered to arrest.
China’s policy on organized religion has turned into a bizarre cross between Anglicanism and “Don’t ask, Don’t tell.” State-sponsored religions promote a national identity, while underground churches get a version of benign neglect.
Meanwhile, the “one child” policy has been so effective at curbing population growth that government leaders and Chinese academics alike are beginning to question its future.
Alone, these may sound like small victories, but together they’re important steps forward. China’s vast autocratic bureaucracy is being ground down by the constant, restless progress of its people.
That’s something to encourage, not dismiss.
Reach John at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
