Human rights and business as usual.

• Position: US prioritizes business over human rights in relations with China

President Clinton is good at saying the right thing. He used his platform well in China when he spoke out about human rights. But doing the right thing is another matter.

Why should the Chinese government take Clinton seriously? His Administration has shown it is willing and eager to do business, no matter how Chinese leaders repress religious expression and free speech, round up protesters, jail human-rights workers who have the temerity to document the dead at Tiananmen Square, persecute labor organizers, force women to have abortions against their will, torture Prisoners behind bars, subjugate Tibet--the list goes on and on.

Clinton made it clear, rhetorically at least, that the United States opposes such crude behavior. He scolded the Chinese leaders for the 1989 massacre of peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen and for rounding up protesters during his visit.

All this was to the good. But the main purpose of Clinton's trip was clear: promote U.S. business. Last year, U.S. companies did $75 billion worth of trade with China. They now have $20 billion invested in the country--eight times as much as they had in 1989, before Tiananmen Square. China is our second biggest trading partner in Asia, after Japan. It is highly convenient for U.S. companies to argue that expanding business is good for human rights. This is the line Clinton took when he told an audience of Chinese students that "freedom is indivisible"--that economic liberalization and individual political freedom go hand in hand. In fact, however, just the opposite is true in China, where Stalinism meets capitalism, combining the worst of both worlds. Businesses that rely on prison labor and a brutally repressed work force hold hands with an all-powerful police state. And no matter how repressive the regime gets, business with the United States is booming. In the name of free trade, the United States has shown it is willing to put up with almost any grotesquery.

But what leverage does the United States have? As Andrew Nathan of Human Rights Watch-Asia suggests, "We're no longer in a position of forcing them to make changes because they're afraid they'll lose trade privileges."

By separating trade from human rights when it reaffirmed Most Favored Nation trading status for China in 1994, the United States gave up all its chips. "The Most Favored Nation threat has fallen through because it was a bluff all along, and business interest in it is so great we can't afford to...