Editorial: Bush should be a bull in China

As long as he is there, however, he ought to continue to publicly press the Chinese government on its execrable, thuggish, antediluvian human rights record. He already provoked a sharply defensive overreaction from Chinese leaders with his mild remarks Thursday in Thailand in favor of greater freedom in China. Good.

That means the president’s bully pulpit still works, even on the other side of the globe. But Bush should do more. His model ought to be President Reagan’s memorable 1988 speech to students at Moscow State University. There, right under the noses of communist authorities, even as the Soviet Union kept thousands of nuclear warheads armed and aimed at the United States, Reagan said: “Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. ... It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people.” The Soviet Union fell three years later.

Today, the Chinese people and their masters in government — who revoked an American Olympic champion’s visa merely because he called for an end to atrocities committed in Darfur with aid from China — desperately need to hear the same message. And they need to hear it from somebody speaking not from the safety of foreign soil, but while standing on Chinese territory. Only then will the example of free expression reinforce hope against the repressive Chinese state.

And yes, that state is indeed repressive — viciously repressive, murderously repressive. As Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon noted in Thursday’s Examiner, the Chinese regime has just this year sent tens of thousands of potential “troublemakers” to labor camps; overseen the slaughter of hundreds of Tibetan monks; and continued to repress religious practice (with particularly harsh treatment of peaceful Falun Gong adherents and of Christians bringing Bibles to the Chinese people).

These are not the policies and actions of a civilized regime. They are the tactics of  brass-knuckled autocrats.

That’s why President Bush was right to say in Bangkok that “America stands in firm opposition to China’s detention of political dissidents and human rights advocates and religious activists.” But he needs to say it again — and again — where it really counts.