The Economist in 2018 recognizes U.S. engagement policy with China a failure

"The Economist and politicians of both parties may have gotten China wrong--but we have been reporting and warning of the human and religious rights violations of this regime for more than 20 years. This was obvious to anyone covering Beijing honestly." - Raymond Arroyo, EWTNews 

 Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter meet with Deng Xiaoping in 1979

The Economist, after years of cheer leading the conventional wisdom on economic engagement with the Communist dictatorship in China on March 1, 2018 recognized that they had been mistaken.

China has grown rich beyond anybody’s imagining. Under the leadership of Hu Jintao, you could still picture the bet paying off. When Mr Xi took power five years ago China was rife with speculation that he would move towards constitutional rule. Today the illusion has been shattered. In reality, Mr Xi has steered politics and economics towards repression, state control and confrontation. 

This blog over the past ten years repeatedly warned of the wholesale failure of U.S. policy towards China. Economically engaging and subsidizing the communist dictatorship in China did no lead to the regime liberalizing and incorporating itself into the family of nations as Western engagement changed it for the better.  Instead global human rights standards have been steadily in decline with Western governments, led by the United States, compromised their values for shot term economic gain for narrow interests. The influx of Western investment, technology, and know how assisted in both the wholesale modernization of the totalitarian regime's surveillance apparatus and the Chinese military machine. Considering all of this, this blog asked on September 5, 2009 the following question about U.S. policy on Mainland China: "Are Normalized relations with Totalitarian States Normal?"

Chairman Mao Zedong and President Richard Nixon

Fang Lizhi, a professor of physics at the University of Arizona, a leader of the pro-democracy movement in China before fleeing the country in 1989, published an Op-Ed in the International Herald Tribune on October 11, 2010 warned that the "dangerous notion" that economic development will inevitably lead to democracy in China was a failure: 

"Increasingly, throughout the late 1990s and into the new century, this argument gained sway. Some no doubt believed it; others perhaps found it convenient for their business interests. Many trusted the top Chinese policymakers who sought to persuade foreign investors that if they continued their investments without an embarrassing “linkage” to human rights principles, all would get better at China’s own pace. More than 20 years have passed since Tiananmen. China has officially become the world’s second largest economy. Yet the hardly radical Liu Xiaobo and thousands of other dissidents rot in jail for merely demanding basic rights enshrined by the United Nations and taken for granted by Western investors in their own countries. Human rights have not improved despite a soaring economy. ... As the unfortunate history of Japan during the first half of the 20th century illustrates, a rising economic power that violates human rights is a threat to peace."

On December 12, 2014 this blog took a closer look at engagement and consequences during the Clinton Administration. Apologists for de-linking human rights concerns often cite national interests and strategic concerns trumping human rights. President Clinton took this line of argument to a new level in 1998 justifying a second waiver to the Loral Corporation providing technical information to the People's Republic of China at the time saying: "I believe it was in the national interest and I can assure you it was handled in the routine course of business, consistent with the 10-year-old policy." However CNN in  1998 reported that "[a] Pentagon office concluded in a still-secret report that 'United States national security has been harmed," according to government officials.' 

President Clinton completely de-linked human rights and trade with China

Further digging done by Edward Bolton in a 2000 report to the National Defense University National War College provided an analysis that points to particular financial and corporate interests, not national interests explaining the de-linking of human rights from MFN and also provides insight into the Clinton Administration's waiver for the Loral corporation to provide sensitive information to the Peoples Republic of China:

Boeing, which donated millions to both Democratic and Republican candidates over the years, is the parent company of Loral Corporation. In 1993, Loral sought and received a waiver to launch Loral/Hughes satellites from China. Loral CEO Bernard Schwartz has personally donated over $1M to both parties. Boeing also owns McDonnell-Douglas which in 1994 made an agreement with China to open a parts factory in Beijing. Boeing, who sold nearly 70% of the airliners China purchased in the 1993 to 1995 time frame, selected former Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Perry for its board of directors shortly after he left the Pentagon. Hughes Electronics Corporation, a subsidiary of General Motors (GM) and co-developer of satellite systems with Loral, also has dealings with China and worked to maintain MFN for the PRC. Hughes Electronics Chairman Michael Smith also serves as vice Chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association, a long time supporter of MFN status for China.

Imagination, informed by history, led this blog to raise the question on February 6, 2015  "if policy makers today, now that the vast majority of computers used in the United States and the West generally are made in the Peoples Republic of China, who is to say that Communist China will not ... set up the conditions to switch on software, perhaps something hardwired into the computers they manufacture, and cripple the U.S. economy?" 

In August of 2015 this blog explored the consequences of communist China hosting the olympics.
The 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing were a human rights disaster for China with scenes of Tibetan demonstrators gunned down by Chinese soldiers. Despite this the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has chosen China to once again to host the Olympics in 2022 in the midst of an ongoing crackdown on human rights lawyers and defenders in the country.  As was the case in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics friends of a free China need to increase scrutiny on the Chinese regime with an Olympic Watch. The consequences of  the IOC legitimizing such a regime cannot be overstated. The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin and hosted by the Nazi Third Reich with the ceremonies formally opened by Adolph Hitler should serve as a cautionary example. The 1936 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Nazi regime in Germany and led to acceptance of Hitler's criminal regime. The 2008 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Communist regime in China further legitimizing that criminal regime. In 2022 it will add insult to injury by returning to China and making this decision amidst a human rights crackdown where more than 200 lawyers and human rights activists have been detained with some facing 15 year prison sentences.

Olympics legitimized totalitarians in 1936 and 2008

This legitimization, despite a horrible record, is still found in mass media, including in The New York Times, America's paper of record, and this blog called them on it on September 28, 2017.  A  British diplomatic cable declassified in December of 2017 revealed that "at least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989."

History has demonstrated that appeasing tyrants, rather than confront them early on, has terrible and bloody consequences. This isn't a choice but a historical reality. Paying lip service to human rights, while abandoning them in practice, shaped the process of globalization that is leading to an emerging world order that is the stuff of dystopian nightmares.

Cuban human rights defender Frank Calzon physically prevented from providing information at Cuba Summit hosted by The Economist

12 months later and Castro-lite thuggish censorship on display in Washington D.C.

Activist roughed up today at Cuba Summit hosted by The Economist

The Economist, the influential British magazine, does not want people to read this report, which was published by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. The Economist held a conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington on December 3rd. The event’s attendants read like a who’s who of businesses wanting to have the United States lift its trade embargo against the Cuban regime.

Frank Calzon, Executive Director at the Center for a Free Cuba, has distributed similar reports at numerous conferences at universities, think tanks, and hotels. Calzon, a Cuban native is regularly featured in such national newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He has appeared on such television broadcasts as The News Hour on PBS and on several MSNBC, CNN, and FOX programs. He also has testified before congressional committees and been a guest speaker at more than 30 universities in the United States and abroad. In the last 40 years, Frank has been expelled from three events at the request of Cuban diplomats present. In the United States, as long as there is no disruption and one conducts themselves civilly, the distribution of academic reports are usually welcomed.

At the Four Seasons, Frank was first told he would be allowed to make available the report outside the conference room during one of their breaks. Later, he was told they would call the police to arrest him if he did not leave. The police came and did not arrest him.

An Administration official attending the conference offered to make the report available to the participants. Mr. Calzon went home. But The Economist, perhaps trying to accommodate the Cuban government (as a Professor of the University of Havana spoke at the conference), used heavy-handed methods which are most common in Havana.

Frank Calzon is a human rights defender who has spoken before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva Switzerland on several occasions. He was physically assaulted by a Cuban diplomat in 2004 after the Castro regime lost a key human rights vote, in part, thanks to Calzon's advocacy work. Eleven years later he continues to speak out for human rights in Cuba and on October 29, 2015 Frank gave a presentation on the human rights situation in Cuba that is available below.


Anyone interested in calling attention to these heavy handed tactics and/or engaging in a serious debate can contact The Economist at letters@economist.com. Challenge them to open its pages to a discussion of the subject beyond the obvious public relations goals of its Cuba Summit Conference. My own response to this outrage is to boycott The Economist and the Four Seasons Hotel.

The Economist remembers Laura Pollán

Laura Pollán Toledo, teacher and human-rights campaigner, died on October 14th, aged 63

Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition

THE house at 963 Calle Neptuno, in the centre of Havana, was small, but Laura Pollán kept it beautifully. The grey floor-tiles with their snowflake motif were always swept clean, even though her fluffy mongrel terrier shed his long hair everywhere, and though the door was kept open to get some air in from the bike-filled, rowdy, dusty street. In the front living room she had cane chairs with heart-shaped backs, and triangles of lace decorated the shelves. Outside, the tiny back yard was a jungle of pot plants and climbers, with neatly folded washing hung against the ochre walls. And the tower of the Iglesia del Carmen watched over it all.

But her house was also a cell for liberty. The living-room walls were hung with lists of the names of political prisoners, their photos, and a huge chart that showed them bursting from their chains when her group notched up a success. Prisoners’ wives and daughters crowded there for her monthly Literary Teas. She once got 72 women in, under the slowly turning ceiling fan, and put up 25 overnight. They came from all over Cuba: Pinar del Rio, Santa Clara, Las Tunas, Manzanillo (in the east, where she was born), even from the Sierra Maestra, where Fidel Castro had holed up in the mountains to start his revolution. They gathered at her house because she was central, and had a telephone. After 2003 the phone kept ringing, and she would answer it in a whisper, knowing it was tapped; each call would end with “Cuidado”, “Be careful”. A security camera and floodlights appeared outside her front door, supplementing the plain-clothes men who loitered there. Her bookshelf now held a tiny statue of Santa Rita, the saint of the impossible.

What had started all this was the arrest of her husband, Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, for “acting against the territorial integrity of the state”. Seventy-four others were arrested with him in that Black Spring of 2003, and given average prison sentences of 20 years. Ms Pollán knew he had done nothing. The picture of him she wore emblazoned on her T-shirt showed a mild, smiling man, an engineer, who kept his glasses on a cord round his neck. He liked to underline phrases in the newspapers and clip pieces out, organising them under “Politics” or “Environment”. She supposed he was just trying to point out contradictions in the government line. They didn’t discuss it, any more than she took part when his friends from the banned Liberal Democratic Party came round to talk. She would disappear to the kitchen then, making coffee, and leave the men alone.

But they were taken away. Husbands, fathers, brothers, disappeared. Ms Pollán came home from teaching evening class to find 12 state security agents invading her house, carrying away the clippings and two old typewriters. One agent stood by even as she and Héctor tried to say goodbye to each other. Two weeks later she started to bring together the women she kept meeting at the Villa Marista barracks and at various government offices, seeking news of their men. They became the Damas de Blanco, or Ladies in White.

Marching through Miramar

Ms Pollán came brand-new to campaigning. She was a mother (of Laurita), a housewife and a teacher: someone who loved literature and had taught peasants to read in the early years of the revolution. She had never done anything wilder. Short, blonde and stout, she was not cut out to be hauled into a bus by the police. All she wanted was to see Héctor back, and all the others. Her group would meet each Sunday at the church of Santa Rita in Miramar, Havana’s grandest district, say the rosary, hear mass, and then walk ten blocks in silence along Quinta Avenida on the green verges under the palm trees. The women wore white, symbolising pure intentions, and carried gladioli, a single stem each.

Yet politics crept in. At the end of every march the women would chant “Libertad!”—for Cuba as a whole, as much as for their men. They would throw out pencils with Derechos Humanos on one side and Damas en Blanco on the other, hoping that, slowly, people would pick them up. Enemies called them “mercenaries” and “Ladies in Green”, in the pay of the United States, and Ms Pollán had to admit that they did get American dollars and American parcels for their imprisoned men. Shock mobs of other women were especially bused in to attack them, beat them and pull their hair. Ms Pollán could fight back with the best: when a man called her “Puta!” once, she threw her gladioli in his face. In one battle in September she was crushed against a wall, which may have set off the breathing troubles that killed her.

By then, the 75 prisoners they were campaigning for had been released; most by the intervention of the Catholic Church and the government of Spain, but around 20 by their own efforts. Héctor, gaunt and thin, came out only last February. The numbers of Ladies dwindled, to 15 or so, as their work seemed to be done. But for Ms Pollán it was not done. Her Ladies had to go on marching as long as the laws remained that could fill the prisons again. As long as Cuba was not free, she would go on sitting at her computer with her little dog stretched out on the tiles beside her, alert for the telephone, with her front door open and Santa Rita at the ready, and the ceiling fan turning slowly in the smothering air.

from the print edition | Obituary