Jiang Zemin Conquers America
Jiang Zemin Conquers America Smooth, Western-style media skills do not come naturally to Chinese Communists. At a press briefing here in Washington last Wednesday, a reporter asked Chinese embassy...
...They want to be dealt with politely, as equals, people just like us, people you would be proud to take home to Mother...
...We try to make some PR job," one Chinese "expert on the United States" tells the Washington Post...
...Jiang Zemin, Time magazine tells us, loves Benny Goodman, Mozart, and Elvis, too...
...At a press briefing here in Washington last Wednesday, a reporter asked Chinese embassy propagandist Yu Shuning to summarize the intended theme of Jiang Zemin's big U.S...
...We hope the protests are as large and loud and obnoxious as possible...
...This is what the Chinese want, more than anything else...
...Liu next had his stomach pumped full of salt broth, after which "the floor was covered with pools of blood" and "my mouth was a numb and swollen mound of raw flesh...
...What's it all about, Yu was asked, "What image does President Jiang want to create for himself at sites like Pearl Harbor and the Liberty Bell...
...The Chinese may sign a few of those minor agreements they habitually violate as soon as the ink is dry, and that's about it...
...A prison official "stuck a metal brace in my mouth, twisting it open so wide that the skin on the corners of my mouth ripped open...
...tour...
...Indeed, he will...
...China's maximum leader has an impressive series of photo-ops on his schedule: the U.S.S...
...Other prisoners "lifted my legs in the air while kneading and pressing down on my stomach...
...There is, for example, the image of Wei Jingsheng in confinement at a Hebei-province concentration camp called the Nanpu New Life Salt Works...
...At the end of a brief hunger strike, Liu has since written, he was tied to a "special metal chair...
...Right, the reporter persisted: "What kind of image would he like to create for himself...
...But it will be right...
...The Boeing and Hughes corporations will be nice to Jiang in Long Beach and El Segundo...
...policy since 1994...
...The master of the Nanpu New Life Salt Works has no business invoking Abraham Lincoln, or appearing next to the Liberty Bell, or drinking champagne at the White House...
...Can't have that...
...Yu was flummoxed by the Liberty Bell...
...You can't wrest much serious political cooperation from people who "disagree" about something so basic as freedom, of course, and administration spokesmen have for weeks been careful to minimize practical expectations for the summit...
...He will get all this "first-class" ceremony, explains someone from the National Security Council's Asia office, because he is "the leader of a great nation who deserves to be treated with respect and dignity...
...He's a big, cuddly teddy bear of a man, apparently...
...America itself is not "blameless in our social fabric," the president reminded his listeners...
...And the message, this week as always, is "nice...
...The task of rescuing American honor this week will fall to those allegedly unsophisticated protesters who will dog Jiang Zemin wherever he goes, exercising their rights under what Yu Shuning calls "the First Amendment of the Constitution, et cetera...
...Shall the United States notice these facts and conduct its China diplomacy accordingly...
...He knows the Gettysburg Address by heart...
...Pause...
...Though he was recently passed over for the 1997 Nobel peace prize in favor of some hippie from Vermont, Wei remains the world's leading prisoner of conscience, locked up all but six months of the past 18 years for "illegal" activism in behalf of democracy...
...They are working hard to achieve this goal, in their ham-fisted way...
...The official then "clamped a pair of metal pliers onto my tongue, pulling it way out of my mouth before sliding a length of tubing into my esophagus...
...I have already said," Yu finally responded, "President Jiang will bring images to the United States...
...Pearl Harbor and what, he wondered...
...But we may fairly guess at the daily ordeal he and countless thousands like him suffer...
...Or shall the United States largely ignore these facts—since any commensurate response might threaten American corporate profits in the Chinese market—and celebrate Jiang Zemin and his dictatorship as worthy and valued players on the international stage...
...Harvard University will be nice to Jiang in Cambridge...
...Candid debate about China policy, Newt Gingrich's press secretary says, might "appear an insult" to their visitor...
...engagement" diplomacy, substance is not really the point...
...And though we may disagree with the Chinese about important matters, he advised, we must nevertheless cooperate with them...
...It diminishes American principle that he has been invited to do such things...
...Arizona Memorial in Honolulu, Colonial Williamsburg, the White House and the Capitol, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and so on...
...Then Yu needed help with the question itself: "What kind of image...
...Mere manners are the message...
...relations generally and this week's Jiang-Clinton summit in particular...
...And how depressing it is, nauseating even, to see elite America eagerly collaborate in the construction of this spin—which is, at bottom, after all, a lie of gigantic proportions...
...Rebuking him wouldn't be nice, you see...
...They will be nice to Jiang Zemin at the Capitol on Thursday, where a breakfast banquet will be thrown for him behind the safety of closed doors...
...school officials tell the Los Angeles Times that the audience for his scheduled speech there "has been carefully 'groomed and sifted' to avoid embarrassing confrontations...
...And that China's rape of Tibet was in fact a successful effort to rescue that country from slavery, like our own Civil War, and that "the American people should be happy" about it...
...During his pre-summit address last Friday, Bill Clinton touched oh-so-delicately on the essential character of Jiang's regime, explaining it away as the product of China's search for order in a time of profound change...
...Former president George Bush and the CEOs of AT&T, Kodak, and IBM will be nice to Jiang in New York...
...The dissident Liu Qing was subjected to a lengthy prison term in the 1980s for the "crime" of publishing a transcript of Wei Jingsheng's 1979 show trial...
...There you have it in a nutshell: the central problem confronting Sino-U.S...
...He will get a 21-gun salute and a state dinner and a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra...
...They will be nice to Jiang Zemin at the White House on Wednesday...
...China is a hideous, aggressive, unapologetic despotism, and Jiang Zemin is China's unapologetic despot-in-chief...
...The National Park Service and Drexel University will be nice to Jiang in Philadelphia...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Needless to say, we know the answer already—it has been official U.S...
...It diminishes American principle further that he will be applauded for it by our elected leaders, by our college presidents and Kissingers, by our business chieftains, by our "sophisticated" opinion leaders...
...No China-related legislation will reach the House or Senate floor this week, the Republican leadership has promised...
...Jiang is also a man, of course, who tells American journalists that "democracy and human rights are relative concepts...
...But in the narcotic inertia of Sino-U.S...
...It won't be "nice...
...And that Wei Jingsheng is a common criminal, not a "so-called" political dissident...
...One of them "squeezed my throat tight and pinched my nose shut...
...He has "favorite American authors," the Los Angeles Times reports: "Mark Twain and"—we're not making this up—"Zbigniew Brzezinski...
...Jiang issues these spectacular insults, all of them in the last few weeks, but draws no official and direct American rebuke or demurral...
...Reliable details of his current condition—he is said to be gravely ill—are impossible to obtain...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 8
