Adopt Hard Line Despite Soft Money Obscured Devotion Although Clinton Has Flip-Flopped On This Important Issue, China’s Dictators Haven’t Changed A Bit.

During the 1992 presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton was asked if he, as president, would cut off trade relations with communist China.

Responded Clinton: “Absolutely. Most Favored Nation status, I would. Look, (Bush) let his friendship with the leaders in China obscure our devotion to freedom and democracy when those kids set up in Tiananmen Square, and I think it was wrong.”

As president, Clinton apparently has let $4 million in so-called soft campaign money from the butchers of Beijing obscure his devotion to freedom and democracy. Democrat Clinton not only has pursued Republican George Bush’s policy of granting most favored nation status to China annually, he also wants to make that status permanent.

Although Clinton has flip-flopped on this important issue, China’s dictators haven’t changed a bit. Boeing, General Motors, Morgan Guaranty and Microsoft - and apparently, Clinton - couldn’t care less that persecution of dissidents and people of faith continues unabated. (In fact, Beijing has called underground evangelical and Catholic churches “a principal threat to political stability.”) For filthy lucre, a few corporate giants are ignoring the fact that Beijing routinely forces abortions, kills little girls and deformed babies, and embraces the Nazi practice of killing prisoners in order to harvest their organs for sale.

In 1996, according to the State Department’s annual human rights report, “All public dissent against party and government was effectively silenced by intimidation, exile or the imposition of prison terms, administrative detention or house arrest. No dissidents were known to be active at the year’s end.”

Clinton’s policy of engagement with China has failed miserably - as appeasement did in Neville Chamberlain’s time. Bullies don’t respect weaklings. Rather than capitulate, Clinton should use his bully pulpit to denounce China’s behavior. The U.S. should use its economic leverage against China, as it did against South Africa, to force Beijing to recognize human rights and religious freedom, and to stop exports of nuclear technology to nations such as Pakistan. No foreign aid. No special trade status. The Chinese export four times as much to us - about $50 billion annually - as we export to them. They’ll listen if we make them do so.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: Change travels trade pathways

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